Smarter Email Marketing in 2009
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
December 17, 2008
Email marketing works. Need proof? Even in the midst of an economic downturn comScore reported an increase in online sales for the first week of the 2008 holiday shopping season. According to comScore, Cyber Monday 2008 showed a 15 percent increase over 2007 and the first week of December remained strong with a seven percent increase over last year. 33.4 percent of these e-commerce sales were generated from referral traffic with direct email campaigns accounting for 16.1 percent of the business, up from last year's 11 percent.
While companies are cutting back their advertising spends in print media, television, and radio, email and Internet marketing budgets are on the rise. The DMA forecasts that email will see a 20.7 percent increase in 2009, which is the highest percentage of spending growth across marketing channels. And email's reign will continue to grow as marketers rely more heavily upon the segmenting capabilities email provides.
Unlike other marketing channels, email gives marketers the power and flexibility to target specific groups, or even individual users, with exclusive offers that meet their exact needs. If you are still sending bulk messages to your entire list now is the time to quit that bad habit and adopt better sending procedures. Your subscribers are watching every dollar they spend and the only way to convince them to buy your products and services is to present them with relevant offers.
Listrak, an innovator in the email marketing industry and the email service partner to companies like Waterford Wedgwood USA, The Islands of the Bahamas, Hitachi, and Motorola, has put together the following white paper discussing how you can use your data to target customers with relevant messages that meet their needs. This paper focuses on quick and easy resolutions you can make in the New Year that will greatly increase your response rates and ROI. Targeted messages don't have to be labor-intensive to work; and, with Listrak, there are steps you can put in place so the benefits are realized immediately.