Email marketing is a method of advertising and promotion that uses email to communicate directly with prospects and customers. An email marketing piece is designed to elicit a response to its offer by stating what desired consumer action should be taken and why. This action could lead to a revenue-producing sale, or a step toward in that direction, such as a request for further information, an upsell, or an application submission.
Direct marketing is the largest advertising medium, accountinf total national advertising expenditures in 2005, and the Internet is its fastest growing medium. In recg for nearly half oent years, mass media advertising has been declining in relative terms while direct advertising has been growing.
Advantages of direct over mass advertising include the following:
- It is narrowcast, that is, it is sent only to targeted recipients
- It is easily tested by sending it to small samples of the intended population
- The results of a campaign can be precisely measured in terms of the response rate, cost-per-order, cost-per-response, and ROI.
There are many advantages of email marketing over traditional direct marketing, yet there are problematic aspects of email in particular that do not even exist in print, but the benefits in speed, trackability, safety, and security are compelling. However, the most important advantage is economic. The marginal cost of an email is measured in pennies. Combined with an average response rate for lead generation email of 3.2%, about triple that for print, the ROI for email campaigns is quite attractive. LeapLab leverages these economics on behalf of our clients, delivering to them the efficiency of the Internet over traditional media.
The marketing skills that apply to traditional direct marketing also apply to e-marketing, but the disparity between the technologies has brought about a new field of expertise in which LeapLab, as a specialist, excels. Our clients, fully engaged in their core businesses, find it difficult to be proficient at both e-marketing techniques and their own fields of expertise.
An advantage of email marketing is that it can be pre-tested with samples. Results can then be used to improve the piece and the list. LeapLab focuses on the four essential parts of an advertisement in conducting emailings for our clients.
- List: We know that the consumers on our house list have opted in to be contacted, so they are qualified prospects. We also have valuable information on consumers that exceeds what is normally available.
- Copy: The effectiveness of the copy, its draw as an advertisement, is critical. For our clients, we create emails and test them, modifying the key components as warranted by test results.
- Offer: The offer must be stated clearly. In direct marketing, an offer is often sweetened with an inducement such as a discount, a giveaway item, or bonus loyalty points. We help clients identify inducements that cause new sales and do not simply make affected sales less profitable.
- Call to Action: We will make sure that the call to action is as simple and unambiguous as it should be.
The first emailings for our clients will be tests, sufficiently large to permit valid conclusions small enough to prevent tainting the prospect pool. Each emailing will link to at least one unique URL for tracking purposes. Multiple URLs will be used in a test that compares results when the same email is sent to several segments. Distinct data will also be retained when test emails are sent to the same segment for comparison.
Emails will be vetted by spam-detector software. An opt-out link will be included at the end of all emails. For all emailings, we will provide the following services and metrics:
- Transmission: Emails sent
- Undeliverables: Even though we will make 10 attempts to deliver an email, many will remain undeliverable. We will make our best effort to determine reasons for undeliverability, such as spam filters, ISP problems, account closure, or invitation-only routines
- Opens: Commercial emails are not opened unless they have instant appeal and appear to be proper, so Sender and Subject fields are critical. To discourage unsolicited emails, many people do not open them even if they are initially interested. Instead, they view them by enlarging the preview pane and scrolling down. To us, this equates to an Open because of the indication of interest. We will embed a 1-pixel tag to detect scroll-down and report these to our clients
- Clickthroughs: Recipients who open emails and click where indicated to go to a landing website
- Forwards: Indication that an email was opened by someone other than the initial recipient.
We will record metrics until the tracking role is complete. There are many metrics that we make available to clients, the most useful including acquisitions, conversions, and unsubscribes (new opt-outs).
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