Email Marketers: Make Me An Offer I Can’t Refuse
As marketers continue to strategize their way through this recession, email marketing is getting extra attention. And it should be. Not only is it cost-effective, it also generates real-time data about your audience and prospects that you can’t get anywhere else. Effective email campaigns can nurture prospects, build brand awareness, and boost sales.
A recent survey conducted by eROI, a leading email marketing and interactive agency, indicated that even though marketers are continuing to use email to reach customers, there is a significant group of us who are not tracking the results of our campaigns… say what? Not tracking the results of our campaigns? Really? This is troubling. If we aren’t tracking results, then we have no real-time data.
Without key statistics, we cannot make solid adjustments to the offer in our email campaigns. Without adjustments, there can be no performance improvement. And unless every email campaign we send exceeds our goals, there is always a way to do better.
Further, the survey revealed that 1/8 of email marketers aren’t sure how to track their email campaigns. That’s right. They simply don’t know what to do. There is a treasure trove of prospect and customer data that 1/8 of us are, well, ignoring. We are ignoring the data points that can help us form more targeted campaigns, adjust our offers, and refine our messaging.
Then it should come as no surprise in the recent Forrester Report, “Marketing Best Practices Adoption,” that 37% of marketers rate their use of best practices as poor or below average. Included in the list of “significant deficiencies” is marketing campaign offer management. It is easy to see why.
If we don’t gather the data, or even if we do, many of us still don’t recognize the importance of campaign metrics. If we did, we would drop everything right now to begin evaluating what worked, what didn’t, and what adjustments we need to make to increase conversion for our next campaign.
So marketers, it’s time to make campaign offer management—especially for email marketing—our focus once again. Make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse.
