Consider retention. Email marketing isn’t the best way to acquire customers, but it rocks at customer retention when done right. Think about it: Customers are spending less because of the economy, right? But if you retain them, by keeping your relationship with them strong even when they’re not buying, where will they spend their money when the economy improves? With you, of course!

It’s also cheaper to retain a customer: According to a report by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company*, acquiring a new customer can cost 6 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer. The report demonstrates that marketers who increased their customer retention rates by as little as 5% saw increases in their email marketing ROI, with profits ranging from a still significant 5% to a massive 95%.

How do you retain customers using email marketing? Think about whatever can continue and even strengthen your relationship with them:

·    Email newsletters with useful information
·    Special discounts for being a subscriber
·    Discounts from partners
·    And always, being respectful by being relevant and not over-messaging

Think of the customer as an asset you want to maintain, not a resource you want to deplete, and you’ll be on the right track.

Also, as an email marketing company, we don’t want to completely dismiss email as a customer acquisition tool. Email marketing can work for customer acquisition just as well. It’s just a bit harder because it’s already difficult to get into the email inbox in the first place, and to get opened in the second place. For helpful tips on the latter, see our whitepaper.

*Note that we searched the Internet for the actual report, but all we could find were multiple sources quoting it. As an email marketing company committed to educating you, the email marketer, via our blog and newsletter, we feel strongly about verifying sources and apologize that in this case we weren’t able to. But based on the number of credible Web sites and blogs we found that cited it, we feel confident including the numbers here in our email marketing blog.

As an email marketing company with 10 years experience in what works, and what doesn’t, we’ve pulled together some surprisingly simple tips you can follow to help people feel more comfortable about giving you data.

Follow these tips and you’ll help people overcome both the friction they face and the anxiety they feel.

See the latest email marketing newsletter from ClickMail by clicking here.

But there’s always a bright side, even in the email marketing world. And it’s our job as an email marketing company to help you think outside the inbox and take advantage of the current economic state of affairs.

That’s why we were delighted to see that Chad White recently pulled together great examples of recession-driven messaging by email marketers who are paying attention to their customer’s state of mind and adjusting their email marketing messages accordingly. Examples of some of the recession-driven messaging include:

·    Save now instead of buy now
·    Repairing instead of replacing
·    Do it yourself instead of paying someone else to
·    Spending money on homes and stay-cations instead of trips
·    Buying refurbished
·    Renting instead of buying
·    Delayed payment

And here’s a big one: Don’t just go for the money. A change in messaging short term could result in better email marketing ROI long term with a different approach. Chad includes examples of email marketers providing useful information like recipes and fashion tips, and email marketing best practices. He also points out that some retailers are seizing the opportunity to ask for more demographic information, rather than more sales. When the economy improves, they’ll be better positioned to take advantage of that data for more targeted, relevant messaging in their email marketing campaigns!

Recession or opportunity? It’s your email marketing budget. You decide. But first be sure to look at what these creative companies are doing to capitalize on the economy and the consumer’s state of mind.

And if you come up with your own recession-driven messaging or email marketing campaign, definitely tell us about it! Email blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

See Chad’s examples at by clicking here.

And as part of our ongoing role as an email marketing company keeping you up-to-speed on the latest email marketing best practices, we’re spreading the word.

On Monday, join Austin Bliss, President and Co-Founder of FreshAddress, and Kevin Senne, Director of Deliverability at Premiere Global Services, as they help you learn more about managing your email subscribers. During this email marketing webinar, you’ll learn:

• Acquisition and subscription strategies

• The importance of retention in a recession

• Healthy housefiles: Address hygiene and audit, append, ECOA

• Proactive deliverability: Focus on reputation and complaints

• Engaging your Universe with 1-to-1 loyalty and lifecycle strategies

Find out more about the email marketing webinar by clicking here.

ClickMail is also proud to be a Premiere Global Services partner and reseller. See a complete list of our ESP and other email marketing offerings.

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.

What’s a conscientious email marketer to do? Just pay attention.

Everything you need to know about relevance, etc., is available to you. Your customers and email subscribers are constantly telling you what works and what doesn’t. You just have to listen. Listen and you’ll know what type of content is most relevant, how often they want to hear from you, which subject lines get the most opens, what type of calls to action get the most click throughs…and more. Look at unsubscribes, forward to a friends, click throughs, responses, conversions, and any other data for insight.

If you’re using any kind of decent email marketing company or email service provider (ESP), you should have more than enough data to sift through and learn from. Every email marketing campaign you send out should be analyzed after the fact, lessons gleaned, and adjustments made for the next one.

Don’t stop reading the case studies, email marketing blogs like this one and definitive resources like MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments. You must always learn and improve and you can only do that by keeping up with all the moving parts that are email marketing. But look first and foremost to your own audience for the real, most applicable knowledge. Because in the end, they are the ones who will spend their money with you, or not. They are the ones who matter most. And they’ll tell you what you need to know if you just listen.

If your email marketing company or ESP is falling short, and failing to deliver the types of data you need to adjust and improve your email marketing ROI, then it’s definitely time to download our latest whitepaper and evaluate your current ESP…or choose another.

Video email is one of those new technologies that might or might not make sense for your email marketing initiatives. Video has become easier to do and easier to disseminate. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

We turned to our own email design guru to ask what email marketers should consider when exploring video email. Cameron gave us the following points to consider:

Video email makes sense if you have a complicated product. It also makes sense if you can tailor your video to the person watching it, as opposed to doing batch and blast, which is sadly still a rampant email marketing practice. Yes, there are ways to segment even your video email content! When personalized, video email response rates increase.

Similar to including alt text to make up for blocked images, use text to describe your video, including a call to action to get people to click through and watch it. Write it as a mini sales pitch, not just a description. It doesn’t work to put any rich media inside the email, including video. Your recipients will have to open the email and click through to watch it. Encourage them to do so.

Video email might involve follow up to make it work. Cameron calls it high tech followed by high touch: You have a mechanism to alert you when someone has viewed the video, then that person gets a follow up email or phone call from your sales team.

Make sure it works seamlessly, because unless you’re offering “can’t miss” content, your customers won’t wait for a slow video to load, or sit through a clunky one that’s painful to watch.

As with all email marketing campaigns, make sure your video email is relevant to the target audience. And, as always, test, test, test to make sure it’s worth your effort and your customer’s time to include the video in the first place!

P.S. Email Marketing Reports just posted some new information about video email, and the pros and cons of different ways of putting video into email. It’s definitely worth a look.

If you need some help exploring video email, feel free to contact us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

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!)

2. Email marketing tools are reusable. For example, you design an email template, then you can use it over and over.

3. Email marketing is cheaper to test than direct mail. With direct mail, the cost of printing a smaller quantity makes testing a financial challenge.

4. Email marketing can react within a day. A direct mail campaign can take weeks or even months to get from concept to finished and mailed piece. Reacting right away can have a huge impact on your marketing ROI.

5. Email marketing can be one-on-one yet still less expensive than telemarketing.

6. Email marketing is easier to track than any other marketing medium, allowing you to adjust and increase your response rates, and therefore email marketing ROI.

7. Email marketing is easier to defend. Reporting gives you hard facts to present to your boss.

Here’s wishing you a profitable Cyber Monday and holiday season!

On November 19, Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, will present “Individualized Relationship Marketing…Championing the Power of Precision Promotion” at the northern California chapter of the DMA. Donovan will be talking about one of our favorite email marketing topics: relevance!

Although relevance is certainly core to the topic, Donovan will also present on Individualized Relationship Marketing (IRM). According to the Chief Marketing Officer Council survey on Routes to Revenue in 2008, becoming more personalized, relevant and precise in customer communication is now how companies will realize revenue growth and profitability from their existing customers.

As ClickMail, an email marketing company, would preach, personalization strategies such as segmentation, profiling and targeting are key ways to reach and engage your core audiences. Donovan will cover these topics as he shares results from the CMO global think tank’s research activities and best practice studies in the area of IRM. He’ll address tools now available to marketers, especially email marketers, including sophisticated customer data integration systems, profiling and analytics services, and personalization technologies.

ClickMail Marketing is proud to sponsor the event, as part of our mission to drive email ROI by educating email marketers. Learn more about this direct marketing event at http://www.dmanc.org/event_november_08.html.