Email marketing: it’s time to invest!

If you want your email marketing program to succeed, you need to invest in the necessary resources, tools, creativity and time. You remember how, in the old days, we always said that “email marketing was cheap because it required no stamps”?

Well, those were the days that many of us looked at email marketing as the online equivalent of direct marketing. Email often still serves direct marketing purposes, but it has become much more than that. And, yes, email marketing still has a low cost per contact.

But for companies that want to go beyond good old email marketing (and that should be all companies), it’s time to spend that extra bit of time, intelligence, tools and effort.

Integrating email marketing with social media, implementing new metrics, integrating email and web analytics data, connecting email activities with CRM (or customer or business intelligence). There’s much to do. On top of that, you will have to invest more in some areas such as content that’s share-worthy. And I even haven’t talked about deliverability…

As I said, in comparison to many other marketing vehicles, email marketing still has a low cost per contact.

An integrated, recipient-centric, data-driven and holistic email marketing approach

That’s great, isn’t it? Well, the fact that sending email is less expensive should enable you to invest more in professional copy and design, sharable content, the integration of email marketing and social media, deliverability and in professional tools that enable you to personalize your messages, integrate and track the results of your campaigns, right? What’s your excuse not to do it? OK? The cost per contact might increase a bit for a while, taking into account all elements, and the ROI might drop a bit at first (there is an investment).

However, doing all this will rapidly increase the ROI of your email marketing efforts, increase customer satisfaction (remember what Joseph Jaffe says: “retention is the new acquisition”) and enable you to better track the digital footprints of your customers across all channels.

Once you have that integrated, recipient-centric, data-driven and holistic approach it finally comes down to this: relevance, intelligence, dialogue, sharing and as a result a nice impact on your bottom-line.

But the main issue here is value: both for you and the recipients of your emails.

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