If you have not already entered our win an iPad competition time is getting short. The closing date for entries is November 5th – so before you think about letting any fireworks off, light marketing’s equivalent of the blue touch paper and open an account with iContact today.
Full details of the completion can be found here.
Email’s Vital Statistics
One of the things I love about email marketing (and online marketing in general) is the speed of reporting. Literally, within minutes of sending a campaign you are able to see if it has been a success or not.
iContact provides most of the reporting tools a small business will need. For larger senders the company recently rolled out an integration to Google Analytics.
On the reporting dashboard you will see, updated in real time, reports on the number of opens, the number of clicks, the number of bounces (i.e. the number of emails that were not delivered) and the number of spam complaints (with an opt-in list this should be VERY low).
The dashboard also displays how your campaign has fared via the social networks (iContact provides a number of tools to socialize you email content free of charge).
It is then possible to drill down into the stats and see exactly who has opened campaigns, how many times they have opened them and perhaps more importantly who has clicked on what links. This data is incredibly important if you want to segment your lists or perhaps want to arm a sales team with some actionable insight.
For a great example of how one iContact client used this data to get to know his clients a little better check out What Kind of Fisherman Are You?
So what makes for a successful email marketing campaign?
A 20% open rate is good. A 30% open rate is even better. But if your campaigns are properly targeted and carefully crafted an open rate in excess of 50% is very achievable. The real beauty of email is the cost. For small business (with lists of 500 or below) the cost of managing your campaigns can be free and therefore the only investment required is the time spent to build your campaigns. At this price the worst that can happen is that your business actually sells more.
We’ll be announcing the winning entry TameBay on November 20th, 2011.
Good luck.
One Response
There’s no doubt that email marketing works BUT in addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind WRAPmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research. WRAPmail is available for free at http://www.wrapmail.com
WRAPmail also helps search for missing children with every email sent by incorporating an optional RSS feed from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children