Category: Online Selling

How Effective is Your Email Marketing?

A question of effectiveness

If you are a business owner who utilizes email marketing campaigns to promote your products or services and advertise your brand, the question of how effective your email marketing is might occupy a prominent place in your mind. In fact, questions regarding the effectiveness of any type of marketing effort should be entertained as frequently as deemed practical in order to ensure that such marketing efforts are producing desired results. Asking these questions on a regular basis and continually evaluating the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns will help to determine their effectiveness on an ongoing basis, especially in those instances when changes are made to the marketing strategy.

In view of the above, this article will discuss the importance of frequently evaluating email marketing strategies, while also providing a few tips which we hope will be helpful to you in evaluating your email marketing strategy.

First and foremost

First and foremost, it is important to evaluate your email marketing strategy on a regular basis because failure to do so might very well result in a complete waste of your time, money and efforts; and although email marketing may be a cost effective way to advertise your business the activity doesn’t get done without input from you, the business owner/advertiser. There is still some time, money and energy involved in planning and executing email marketing campaigns. In other words, if an email marketing campaign is ineffective and nothing is done to attempt make more effective your business is wasting resources by continuing to invest in this type of marketing strategy when it is not generating profit for the business or even creating interest in your products or services.

Second, and perhaps just as important, is the frequency with which a business owner or marketer evaluates the effectiveness of his/her email marketing strategy without setting goals before s/he begins the evaluation process. The importance of goal-setting is highlighted here because failure to do so might help to undermine the email marketing efforts of any business or marketer.

This is due to the fact that without goals it can be difficult to determine whether or not such email marketing efforts are effective. If, for example, you set a goal to increase the number of sales you make per month, then it will be rather simple to determine the results based on the number of monthly sales generated and therefore just as simple to evaluate the effectiveness of that particular email marketing campaign.

Deciding on method

Once you have determined how you intend to evaluate you progress you should be able to easily determine the effectiveness of your current email marketing strategy as long as this is the only marketing you are currently doing. Of course, if you have more than one marketing strategy in use simultaneously you cannot be sure which strategy is driving customers to make purchases, or attract visitors to your website.




When you decide to evaluate your email marketing strategy according to specific goals you should take care to ensure you are not currently running other types of marketing in conjunction with your email marketing campaign(s). This will help to prevent confusion about which type of marketing is producing the desired results. It will also help to prevent business owners from mistakenly believing email marketing is producing a positive results when, in fact, it is another marketing strategy that is actually generating all the positive sales and traffic activity.

Customer surveys

While on the subject of evaluating effectiveness, one strategy that comes to mind is the use of customer surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Asking customers how they heard about your products or services have proven to be an excellent way to determine whether or not customers are making purchasing decisions based on one marketing strategy or another; so this strategy can also be utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Additionally, these surveys can be used to obtain more detailed information about email recipients’ reaction to a particular email marketing campaign. Customers can, and often does, provide valuable feedback about topics such as the layout and appearance of email and the ease and readability of content included in the email. This feedback and other customer-generated information can help a business owner determine how to design future emails designed to achieve the most positive results in a campaign. Armed with such information the business owner can design subsequent emails that might incorporate many of the qualities previous customers found to be useful, and avoid qualities that were viewed to be useless.

Benefits of Email Marketing to Your Business

Added benefits

Even if you are already running a successful business, you may be surprised to learn that your business can benefit greatly by launching an effective email marketing strategy which consists of targeted campaigns, digital newsletters and discount coupons along with other specialized (or niche-based) offers associated with such a strategy. Email marketing campaigns provide several advantages including, the ability to reach a worldwide audience, a variety of promotional options, and the ability to do a great deal of marketing with very little investment dollars.

In this article we will take a look at the various features and procedures your business can utilize in an effort to give you some insight into how email marketing can benefit your business.

For many business owners one of the most prominent advantages of email marketing is the ability to reach worldwide audiences with minimal effort and expense; and while traditional marketing methods (TV & radio ads, print media ads) are typically targeted to a rather small geographic area, email marketing can reach worldwide audiences.

It is possible to reach an audience of this magnitude with other marketing methods as well, but it would be much more complicated to do and would likely involve launching advertising campaigns in several countries which would require an intense coordination effort, at least a few staff members to assist you in the effort and, of course, an enormous budget.

Immediacy is a plus

On the other hand, an email marketing strategy would give you the ability to instantly reach targeted audiences with just a few simple mouse clicks after you have composed the message you’d like to transmit; even though creating the marketing materials for your campaigns can be significantly more involved. The simple fact is your business (you) stand to derive substantially more benefits via an email marketing strategy at a mere percentage of the cost to derive the same benefits utilizing other means.

Another advantage of email marketing is the multiple advertising options available to those who wish to utilize this marketing strategy, keeping in mind that the most commonly used method of email marketing is to send out group emails with product information and other promotional materials. Such product information could consist of any format or medium you choose, including a digital newsletter that you could publish and distribute to interested consumers, targeted audiences or both groups, depending on the type of promotion being conducted.

Added value

Additionally there may be some graphics, advertising and links included in the layout of such a newsletter that could enhance the message and or product being promoted. In fact, some marketers have successfully used email marketing campaigns to create and implement email correspondence courses which are typically focused on a specific niche subject and feature a few installments that provide detailed information on a specific aspect of the niche subject.

Finally email marketing can benefit your business because it is an extremely cost effective method of advertising in the sense that when you elect to launch an email marketing campaign you will likely invest money in hiring professionals such as writers and graphic designers to assist you in creating content as well as an appealing layout for your promotional emails. it is important to point out here, however, that this is typically not more than you would invest in hiring the same type of personnel for an offline marketing campaign. Unlike offline marketing methods there is not a great deal of expenses associated with implementing your email marketing campaign.

By comparison

For example, consider the creation of a television commercial where you will have to pay fees and purchase advertising space to allow your advertising to reach the public. By comparison, when you transmit your advertising via email, there is virtually no cost associated with this transmission, except the costs associated with maintaining an Internet connection and retaining employees to send these emails but these costs are minimal and can be considered part of normal operating costs which are often mere percentage points of achieving similar goals via traditional methods.