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/
David Kanter, President and CEO of AccuList, is a list brokerage and direct marketing expert. For more than 30 years, he has helped companies and nonprofit organizations achieve their marketing goals. With David's Direct Marketing Forum, he shares, and invites others to share, helpful direct-marketing industry news, trends, analyses, resources, and tips for success. Please read our Comment Policy.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)