If Email Is the Relationship Medium, How Do You Measure ROI
Here’s a thought: Maybe email marketing is less about measuring the money made as ROI, but the relationship instead? Is the relationship worth more than the sale?
They say email marketing is the relationship medium, and that makes sense. Email is not a great tool for customer acquisition, but it is great for retention and lead nurturing. And retaining and nurturing are about relating. You might not be ready to buy right now, but if I stay in touch with you and keep providing you with useful information over time, you’ll get to know me, warm up to me, and choose me when you are ready to buy. I will have developed a relationship with you that paid off later.
But if we accept email to the relationship medium, what does that mean for email marketing ROI?
ClickMail is an email marketing company. We help our email marketing clients make more money. We are very ROI-driven on behalf of our clients. That’s one reason why we represent several ESPs, not just one: We want to match you up with the ESP that works best for your business and offers the most ROI.
But neither we nor our email marketing clients can lose sight of the long-term value of the email recipient. As an email marketing company, it would be easy for us to push our clients to email more often, to do batch-and-blast emails instead of segmented campaigns, and other tactics that result in short-term gain (sales) but long-term pain (unsubscribes, spam reports).
So maybe there’s a different way to measure email marketing ROI beyond dollars and sense. What might that be? What might that look like? What value would a measurement like that have, for us as an email marketing company and you as an email marketer?
Have ideas on this? Send them to blog@clickmailmarketing.com.
Tags: Email marketing, Email marketing company, Email marketing ROI, ESP