Using Email Marketing to drive better ROI

While social media, messaging apps and search engines gobble up a growing share of advertising dollars, email marketing is still an incredibly effective way to interact with customers.

In the past year the contribution of email marketing to company revenues grew to a record high of 20%, up from 18% in 2016. The study conducted by The Relevancy Group and Onespot found that marketer’s using “deep personalisation” can gain 17% more revenue from email campaigns, than those who don’t. They also found that those who personalise their emails had an even better ROI, and that overall click-through rates rose from 14% to 16%.

Comparing Email to other marketing channels

The return on investment for email has been the strongest among marketing channels for more than 10 years, with on average every $1 spent generating $38 in ROI. This puts it far ahead of other techniques like paid search, display, social, radio and TV.

However building a list of responsive, interested customers in your niche, can still be a challenge, which is where other platforms come into their own and hold their value. Companies like Facebook and search giant Google are massive collectors of data on their users, enabling them to organise mass audiences into niche target groups. This in turn, allows for targeted advertising that can be highly specific to individuals.

Whilst there are some email platforms that do this, and they are getting better at it all the time, it’s not quite at the same level as yet, and neither are the marketers using email. Email marketers need to adopt those data-driven technologies to tailor messaging and strategy to fit targeted groups’ unique behaviours and preferences to make their campaigns more effective.

Using personalised email marketing

More than half of the companies that were surveyed weren’t making personalised product recommendations in their email messages, nor were they using a recommendation engine to serve personalised content to newsletter subscribers, which is a major area of opportunity ahead.

Even using the most common method of personalisation of using the first name of a user in messages, can attract a better ROI, but only 78% of companies were doing this. Further methods of personalisation can include using different colours and advertising different products to males and females, and offering content based on what users have purchased previously.

As email remains one of the cheapest marketing platforms, it is definitely worth the effort of getting the most out of this valuable resource.

If you would like more information on how email marketing can boost your bottom line, give us a call or drop us an email and we will be happy to help.