Thursday, January 14, 2016

2015 E-Mail Stats Provide Benchmarks for 2016

E-mail marketers are already launching their 2016 campaigns, but a quick look back at 2015's e-mail triumphs and troubles per marketing research can offer helpful benchmarks for this year. Direct Marketing News magazine recently summarized a slew of 2015 e-mail research data, starting with the tactics most likely to boost click rate response per marketers: Respondents in Ascend2's “Email Marketing Trends” report rated a meaningful call-to-action offer as the most effective tactic for boosting click-throughs (65%), followed by list segmentation for targeting (47%), message personalization (42%), and testing and optimization (35%). The bad news is that the same respondents also rated some of the more effective methods as the most difficult, with 41% citing list segmentation as the most difficult to implement, for example. Another survey found similar agreement on strategies for success: In a 2015 survey by Econsultancy and Adestra, most marketers rely on basic segmentation (76%), optimizing for mobile devices (61%), prompting content sharing on social media (56%), and routine list data cleansing (50%). But they also agreed that their efforts weren't outstandingly successful, with 44% rating e-mail campaign performance as average compared with 41% who saw performance as good to excellent. Nevertheless, e-mail remains a favored marketing channel because of its relatively higher ROI: The Relevancy Group surveyed 300 e-mail marketing executives and 91% rated e-mail somewhat or highly effective in terms of delivering revenue. And the Direct Marketing Association's 2015 "Response Rate Report" found e-mail campaigns provide the highest median ROI of 21%-23%, followed by telephone campaigns (19-20%), social media ads (15%-17%), and direct mail (15%-17%). For more e-mail stats, go to http://www.dmnews.com/email-marketing/email-by-the-numbers/article/462945/

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Mobile's Often Untapped Power: Call Generation

As mobile users soar to 73% of the world population, almost double Internet users, marketers are busy creating mobile-responsive websites and landing pages, mobile-friendly e-mail, mobile-optimized online ads and direct mail with mobile interaction, but their focus can miss mobile's real power. Remember that a mobile device is a phone, and it can generate valuable inbound phone calls, urges a recent MarketingProfs article by Eric Holmen. A 2014 Invoca analysis found that mobile marketing drives about 54% of calls to business, for example. So Holmen advises harnessing inbound call power with the following six steps: 1) Put phone numbers and "call us" CTA on websites and landing pages; 2) optimize your search ads with phone numbers; 3) make dialing easy with click-to-call and dynamic with individually assigned numbers; 4) track and analyze inbound calls by keywords, ad groups, campaigns, landing pages, regions and demographics; 5) track call outcomes, such as lead qualification, quote, sale, or lifetime value, to assess true ROI; 6) and, of course, test, adjust, repeat and optimize. See http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/29012/marketers-youre-doing-mobile-wrong-six-steps-for-doing-it-right