Email Marketing, Part 1: Alive or Dead? - Blog: CRM Solutions & Industry News | AspenTech CRM - Screen_Shot_2018-11-02_at_2

Email Marketing, Part 1: Alive or Dead?

As we approach the holiday season, we wanted to share with you a series of insights into the current status of email marketing. Many companies see email as the cornerstone of their marketing efforts, but make sure your campaigns are changing to take full advantage of new technology – and to keep up with the expectations of your customers and clients.

Cost Effective

Yet over the last decade, with the increasing prevalence of social media marketing, many people seem to believe that email marketing is dead or dying. The facts point very much to the contrary.

Email continues to be one of the most inexpensive and efficient ways to communicate with prospects and stay in touch with customers. According to a 2018 DMA (Direct Marketing Association) study, for every $1 spent on emarketing, $44 is made in return – a 16% increase since 2015. This means email marketing likely has the highest ROI of all your marketing efforts. And most companies still struggle to turn social media channels into effective money-makers.

Potential Pitfalls

Email has become more complicated, especially with the advent of GDPR and other privacy rules. While some countries have outlawed certain practices, the reality is that “spam” is simply not socially acceptable. The awareness of questionable marketing tactics, along with concern about privacy and security, means your email marketing is under ever-increasing scrutiny by consumers, who expect to only receive mail they’ve requested – and an easy way to opt-out when they change their mind.

There are now also easy ways for people to automatically “rope off” promotional emails into special folders they look at occasionally or ignore completely. And recent privacy scandals and data-loss incidents make people even more reluctant to give out their contact information. This means the onus is on you to build trust with prospects and keep the trust of your customers if you want to continue to talk to them about your products.

Good Return

But the rewards for companies who build that trust are great. Average open rates for email campaigns are around 25% and click-throughs are around 4%. For those of us who remember the good old days of multi-million-piece direct mail campaigns, you may recall that the purchase rate was typically around 1% - with physical costs for one mailing exponentially higher than a multiple-effort email campaign.

Your CRM is a key ingredient in using email marketing to improve your brand’s value and build trust with your audience. Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at what to do – and not to do – in your campaigns. If your CRM is not email-friendly, you’re missing out on a key way to communicate with your customers. Give AspenTech CRM a call (866) 880-4228 or jump onto our Principal, Marshall Knapp’s schedule for a CRM discovery session and learn how to improve your email marketing effectiveness.

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