Email marketing consistently generates the highest return on
investment (ROI) among all online marketing channels. However, studies
show that 30% to 50% of companies do not, or cannot, determine their email
marketing return on investment (ROI).
New survey data from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA)
shows that more than one-third (34%) of businesses are unable to calculate the
revenue earned from email marketing. AsDavid Moth of Econsultancy reports,
this jibes with data from the new Econsultancy/Responsys Marketing Budgets
2013 Report, which found that only 52% of businesses rate their ability to
measure ROI from email marketing as ”good.”
As Moth notes, a key indicator of the value of email
marketing is its share of business revenue, with a majority of businesses (62%)
producing more than one-third of their digital business revenue through email,
and another one-third (34%) generating 50% or more of their digital revenue
from email marketing.
With email marketing such a key revenue generator, and with
ROI so closely tied to performance (how many prospects reached, engaged and
converted), it is important to ensure your email marketing operation is
performing at its optimum level.
Why Can Email Campaigns Underperform?
Email campaigns can underperform for a number of
reasons—including too many bad addresses or inactive subscribers,
content that misses the mark on relevance, missing data that prevents targeting
and segmenting, and failure to take advantage of tactics such as triggered
email, mobile marketing, social media integration, big data mining and
cross-channel marketing.
If your data is poor or degraded, you risk undermining your
deliverability and reputation, which ultimately will impact your marketing
success and bottom line. And indeed, Return Path surveys show that sender
reputation was the cause of 77% of email delivery problems.
Excellent Data Hygiene and Data Appending Can Help
This is why, as SilverPop relates, the success of top
email marketing performers is most likely due to their being “more vigilant
about verifying email addresses before adding them to the database and about
doing list hygiene to remove undeliverable addresses.”
Likewise, Aberdeen Group reports that solving
problems associated with “inconsistent or inadequate” customer data is crucial
to online marketing success.
The importance of data hygiene and appending have risen
along with the use of triggered email. As Epsilon’s latest Email Trends
and Benchmarks study shows, the use of triggered messaging is up 73% year
over year, with triggered messages yielding 70.5% higher open rates and 101.8%
higher click rates compared to Business As Usual (BAU) messages.
However, if you are targeting the wrong prospects and your
messaging is off the mark, your results will suffer. Again, data appending can
help solve these problems by supplying the missing data to profile and target
more effectively.
