Phil Lauterjung

Everyone knows that email marketing is the least expensive and most effective form of online marketing available – right?  It’s been proven to be helpful regardless of the size of your business.  Yet, according to an Epsilon and ROI Research study, 55% of e-mail subscribers in the U.S. and Canada unsubscribe occasionally and 14% do so frequently.  Sometimes it can be a tough road.  So what gives?  Why are there such high rates of unsubscribers?

Fortunately, the same study asked the reasons that internet users unsubscribe from permission-based emails.  Here’s what they found:

As you can see, the biggest reasons are irrelevant content and sending too frequently – not a good combination.  So what can you do for your email marketing campaigns?  You need to implement some rather simple best practices.  Here are some good suggestions courtesy of SalesNexus, a contact management software provider.

DON’T

• Send out last year’s corporate brochure
• Go on and on for several pages
• Talk about your company or yourself
• Expect to get a response or close a deal in a single email message
• Send out too frequently (see above chart if in doubt)

DO

• Keep it short and too the point – link to your web site for longer articles
• Talk about your customer & their challenges/objectives – RELEVANT CONTENT for them!
• Include a “call-to-action” – give them a reason to click-thru to your web site
• Make your privacy policy very clear & easy to find

A few short years ago some of these best practices didn’t matter as much as now.  Some companies were able to launch reasonably effective campaigns; but, the gap between using and not using best practices has widened significantly.  MarketingSherpa has been tracking this since 2001 and here’s one more chart to demonstrate what they have found.

A couple of things worth noting in this chart.

In 2004 the two groups begin to really diverge. At this point it’s no longer a walk in the park to get new subscribers; marketers are finding that they have to provide value, think about relevance and pay attention to their email programs to see continued increase in its impact.

Every year the gap grows, as those who fit MarketingSherpa’s  ‘best practices’ model (a definition which evolved over the years based on tracked metrics) report stable or improving impact for email, while those still batching and blasting see diminishing returns.

It becomes quite clear that good, solid practices will net you much better results.  If you are getting those good results please share some of your best practices in the comments.  If you think I’ve left out anything please feel free to comment as well.

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