CATEGORY: digital-marketing

Email marketing: ROI and immeasurable benefits

No matter how many other innovative digital marketing tactics emerge, email marketing remains one of the best ways to reach and engage your target audience.

Brands that describe their email marketing programs as successful report generating an average email marketing ROI of 42:1, while average email programs report a ROI of 37:1. (Litmus). By most measures, the ROI for email marketing is roughly twice that of other digital channels—if not better—and blows away the returns seen with traditional media channels like TV, radio, and direct mail.

As marketers we focus our attention on click and engagement metrics, but at the end of the day, what really matters is the profit of our e-mail marketing campaigns. Without money coming in, all of the other metrics are pointless! 

Return on investment, or ROI in email marketing is a performance measure used to evaluate the effectiveness of an investment.

So Sales minus Cost of Sale, minus EMail Costs, divided by EMail Cost will give you your return on investment. 

If the idea of getting your calculator out fills you with dread, then this handy tool might be the answer you are looking for. At https://www.emailmarketingroi.com/you can set your calculation to the time period, currency and send volume appropriate and calculate your ROI. As a result, you get a summary which includes expected conversion, total profit, total revenue, number of conversions needed to break even, and the ROI percentage. Unfortunately the benchmarking tool on this site does not appear to work – but the ROI calculator remains a useful addition to your reporting tools.

 

But that isn't the complete picture as there are other returns that your business receives as a result of successful email marketing campaigns which are somewhat harder to quantify;

Velocity or Lead acceleration

This is a measure that demonstrates how long it took to move users from one stage of the buying cycle to another on their way from a cold lead to a customer. To understand whether or not your email affects lead acceleration, compare how fast a nurtured and non-nurtured lead move along the buying cycle.

Engagement

To determine whether or not your email engaged customers or deepened relationships, track opens, clicks, unsubscribers, conversions, and click-to-open rate. And with the handy indicator in the e-shot dashboard, so you can easily monitor this.

A further level of engagement is through using email to drive traffic to your website. Though there are SEO, social media and search advertisements to help you drive traffic to your website, email marketing can also contribute significantly.

Impact on revenue

According to the online marketing institute it takes between 7 to 13+ touches to deliver a qualified sales lead. Although the most commonly quoted number appears to be 8, this is suggested as actual contact i.e. email or call, so when you factor in passive contacts with your website or social media this contact level could indeed be much higher.  Understanding your customer journey and the nuances of creating sales readiness is no easy task – but just because it is difficult or time consuming does not mean it isn’t worthwhile. If you are using a multi-touch attribution model this is an exercise that you need to undertake. This will give you a deeper understanding of the role that email is playing in the conversion of your leads.

Brand Awareness

Whilst brand equity doesn’t have a defined value, its importance cannot be overlooked. Branding is the underpinning of everything a brand does or produces, from the language used in its product descriptions to its packaging to the ads you see on the street. Loyalty and buy-in to a brand, telling your brand story and just remaining in front of your audience to ensure they don’t lose touch with you are key tenants with email marketing can play a decisive roll in. Remaining in conversation with your audience, or simply being present has intrinsic value.  What makes this harder in terms of ROI measurement is that it is actually an engagement metric over time, cumulative interactions – the fact that every individual email doesn’t elicit a response doesn’t mean that it is not having an effect on the recipient.

 

Increasing ROI

There is one sure-fire way to make sure that your email marketing is done as efficiently and effectively as it can be and that’s by automating as much as possible.By harnessing auto-responders, and workflows to nurture your contacts along the conversion funnel you can both develop your relationship and enhance the bottom line.

By using email in parallel with your other communications channels for a cohesive campaign allows you to capitalise on the benefits of each channel and give your customers and prospects a coherent narrative. By using each channel smartly you can boost your results i.e. immediacy of SMS couple with detail and branding of email, reach of social media with personalisation of email and so on.

Our customer success team are on hand to help to maximise the ROI from your email marketing endeavours and are always on hand with best practice hints and advice to help you get more from your campaigns.