How effective are email marketing campaigns?
A recent DoubleClick study reports that 69 percent of U.S. e-mail users have made purchases online after receiving permission-based e-mail marketing. According to a joint study recently released by The Direct Marketing Association and the Association of Interactive Marketing, 63 percent of companies surveyed reported that e-mail marketing was their most effective customer-retention tool. As upsetting as this sounds, spam and email sales aren’t going away anytime soon while we still have large scores of people clicking on those annoying ads.
If by email marketing campaign you mean sending out unsolicited emails (i.e. spam), then I would think that they would be very inefficient. I had a couple of years of door-to-door “sales” when I was a much younger man. In the training that I received before I went out, I was told that it was a very inefficient method. Only about 1 in every 600 – 1,000 people (I can’t remember the exact number any more) contacted in this way would ultimately respond in the way we wanted them to. That is not a very good response rate. I would expect that spam campaigns are probably less effective than that. Most people don’t like having their email boxes stuffed with unsolicited e-mail. So, by sending it out you are going to alienate a number of potential customers that might otherwise have been interested in it. So, rather than spending your money on and e-mail campaign, I would recommend spending it on advertising that would include instructions as to how to sign up for your e-mails. That way you would
