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Does Email Marketing Increase Sales?

Email marketing provides businesses with a cost-effective way to stay connected to their customers. In addition, companies can easily launch a program to meet many different objectives. Learn the best ways to increase sales with email marketing.

Email marketing programs

There are many different ways to use email marketing to connect to customers. Companies can launch campaigns with the objective of being promotional, informative, or to provide a company specific announcement. The type of campaign and frequency of emails will typically depend on the customer, company, and industry. For instance, a business targeting a previous retail customer may send promotional emails based on historical purchases and the time of day the open-rates perform best.

Important email marketing metrics

The open-rate measures the number of recipients that opened the email as ratio of the total email send list. Most marketers should expect an open-rate of 25% to 30% according to the recent 2013 industry statistics provided by marketing firm Epsilon. In addition, to open rates, marketers will want to pay attention to click through and bounce rates. Click through rates are typically shown as the number of links in the email that were clicked in relation to the total number of recipients that opened the email.

Click to open rates may range from 10% to 40% depending on the industry. Typically, consumer services such as telecom have the lowest click to open rates. In comparison, consumer product goods, retail apparel and financial services have the highest click to open rates. Bounce rates are important in measuring the number of emails that aren’t delivered to the recipient either because of an non-existent email address or other related issue. Marketers should try to keep their bounce rate as low as possible by removing stale email addresses. This ensures the sender’s email address stays in good-standing with the various mainstream mail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, & Outlook.

Improve your email marketing campaign

Right after you start your email marketing campaign, you should already be thinking about ways to optimize your emails. For the first few emails, marketers must rely heavily on their own intuition and assumptions. As more statistics accumulate, marketers can optimize their campaigns to better meet their objectives by running tests. For instance, the subject line of the email is one of the most critical factors impacting open rates. You may want to run a test by sending an email with different sets of subject lines to two small groups within your email list. The results of the small test should dictate which subject line will perform better for the group as a whole. For instance, one subject line title may have a 15% open rate and another title could have a higher rate or 27%. It’s clear that the marketer should use the subject line with the highest open rate for the group email as a whole.

Email marketing innovation

There’s no question that email marketing can help a company improve their sales and branding. However, marketers need to stay on top of the latest trends to maintain customer attention. The more personalized that the emails are to the recipient, the greater the likelihood that they will connect with the content and become a purchaser. In addition, many recipients are relying heavily on their mobile phones to access email content. Marketers need to be obsessive about providing the very best emails for the most mainstream mobile platforms. For instance, the emails should have full functionality when viewing on a mobile phone.

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