The Whitelist

It’s Cyber Monday, the email marketing equivalent of Black Friday, and the perfect day to remind ourselves why email is so cost-effective, especially in a tougher economic climate like we’re experiencing right now. Off the top of my head, I can think of seven reasons our clients appreciate email marketing:

1. Email marketing costs less than direct mail. You create one email message and design and send it to as few or as many people as appropriate, only incrementally increasing your costs. (The price you pay to your email service provider is literally pennies compared to what you’d pay for printing and postage of a direct mail piece!)
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If you’re wondering about your email marketing spend, you might want to take a look at MarketingSherpa’s new chart, “Attitudes toward email at budget time.” It shows only 38% of companies recognize the ROI value of email marketing and increase their spending on it every year accordingly.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, 10% don’t invest at all, and more than half (52%) don’t increase their spending but keep it the same.

Chances are good, based on countless email marketing studies I’ve seen (as an email marketing vendor, it’s part of my job to keep up with them all), that the companies that invest more in email marketing yield better email marketing ROI. These are the companies that hire dedicated and experienced staff, make sure they’re working with the best email service provider (ESP) for the highest deliverability, integrate their email marketing platforms with their CRM systems, test and test and test, segment and segment and segment, and more.

In other words, they are the email marketers that will win in the overcrowded inbox because they are investing the time and money to do so.

Are you? Might be time for another look.

See the chart at: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/1news/chartofweek-08-12-08-lp.htm.