For some time now I’ve spoken to clients about email marketing and email acquisition campaigns and explained the range of benefits that this method has over traditional direct mail. Not only is it more measurable, allows better targeting, can be implemented quicker, provides an easy response method and allows personalisation, but it actually also gets better results.
Traditionally direct marketing campaigns achieve a response rate of a few percent and online responses range from approx 3% to up to 20% in some of the campaigns I’ve worked on. Given this, I’m not surprised to see the latest figures coming out of the UK in the increased take up of email direct marketing (eDM) over traditional direct mail.
According to research Alterian, 14% of marketers in the UK are planning to increase their spend on direct mail this year, while 90% are planning to increase their spend on online direct marketing. Apparently these figures aren’t quite the same in the US, however I wouldn’t be surprised if Australia is closely following on the UK’s heels in this one.
View DigitalBulletin’s article on this research.
Posted by Louisa 
Effective eCRM
February 12, 2007One of the most important marketing assets of any online business today is it’s consumer and prospect database. Given that, it’s vital that this asset is continually cared for, nurtured and utilised so that it can be accessed to its full potential.
It’s a given that few companies utilise their customer records to their full potential, however I’m still surprised that some companies find it so hard to get the basics right.
I’ve recently been updating my email address with most of my subscriptions and memberships online. And yet today I got an email from a company (a specific airline in fact), to whom I gave my new email address last week. So I clicked on the “update my profile” link again to check if my new details had saved. And yes, when I looked at my profile, it had my new email address in there, yet it had broadcast an email, along with my loyalty points total to my old email address.
For a company of this size, I would expect that their data management to be a little more up to date (dare I say even integrated!) between their website and their email system so that issues like this don’t occur. Web 2.0 may be here, but there is no point trying to utilise new technology if the commutation to the user isn’t current leveraging the technology that’s been available for years.
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