Remember Debbie Mayo-Smith? She was super popular here a few years back (and still is), telling businesses the power of email marketing. It was all simple and cheap. Anyone could do it. And she was right…

How times have changed. Now there’s multiple delivery issues, poor open rates, filtering and strict anti-spam legislation to contend with. Even website advertising is struggling, with rapidly reducing returns and effectiveness.

eMail - The good and the bad news

But email marketing remains attractive. No business should be without it. It just takes a lot more planning and care than it did when Debbie started out. Of course you still need a good database of readers, which again takes time and money to build.

Then there’s the problem of poor delivery and open rates rates. That is, of the emails that are sent, how many are either trashed by filters, or just plain ignored because of bad subject, offer or content.

The average email open rates email providers data is a miserly 20-40% and a much lower 13% average by e-Marketer who indicate that this open rate is steadily falling every year! Regardless, it’s all a fraction of what’s delivered by the Postie to your letterbox. We also need to factor in the costs.

Certainly if you’re send out 10,000 emails at a cost of around 5c each (for a professional html, tracked variety) vs 50c for direct mail, then email on the surface makes financial sense if you’re focusing on costs alone, not response rates, sales or ROI. (The problem most companies have is not owning a good client email list, which is another topic)

Good Subject and Copy Helps

Hiring an expert copywriter who is also familiar with all the internet spam issues can help, plus sending out all emails in text-only mode, certainly improves things delivery-wise, although is less attractive and enticing to readers.

No media works well in isolation

Open rates can also be helped by changing your software, service provider or using authenticated domains. But any hard-fought technical fix today, could break tomorrow, requiring ongoing investment.

Experts say an open rate of 80-90% is technically possible, but these solutions don’t come cheap and take an immense amount of planning. But as the cost climbs and to save money Marketers may consider reverting to established alternatives like radio, print ads or direct mail…

There’s simply no ‘Quick Fixes’ to all this within the internet community, as confirmed by a Forrester Research report.

Making eMail work better – Integration with other media

Unfortunately those within the internet community are only considering solutions from within – Unable to see the forest, for the trees. Sometimes, the solution is right in front of us, if we look ‘outside the box’…

Today no media can work well in isolation. Not print, TV, Radio or the net. As case studies have shown, email can be dramatically enhanced by other media, especially direct mail to a targeted, local audience. What’s more, this simple cross-media strategy is self-funding, giving a real return on investment.

P.S. Looking at the average 10% open rates for eCommerce storefronts, it’s easy to see why old fashioned direct mail provided such a huge boost in sales for online shop Bare Necessities featured earlier.