The Marketing Executives Group International

By : Christine Durkin - http://www.linkedin.com/in/flashvideo

In its March 2009 newsletter, ClickZ surveyed its readership on how the economic downturn is affecting response rates and other measurable benefits typically associated with business e-mail marketing.

Staff is being trimmed nearly everywhere and at every level. This includes not only marketing, but sales staff as well. Those remaining are being asked to grow their customer base, and cross-sell more services to existing customers despite having less support resources.

Statistics from the ClickZ survey also indicate that e-mail, with its lower cost, is being used in place of print-and-mail campaigns to enable marketers to continue communicating with target audiences despite budget reductions. Chris: Any statistical data to support this?

Meanwhile, another recent study of e-mail B2B marketing by Econsultancy and R.O.E.Y.E. finds that 51% of marketers believe e-mail to be very cost effective, leading the way to other profitable channels such as paid search, landing pages and web video.

Meanwhile, another study by Epsilon and ROI Research found that among those who know about or already do business with a company 57% of respondents said receiving an e-mail left them with a more positive impression of the sending company.

The importance of developing and delivering content that is customer-centric and consultative has been a central theme of MarketScope over the years. While email can be an extremely affordable client loyalty and brand enhancing tool, it won’t be effective unless the content is perceived by recipients as having high value and it delivers actionable data tracking for your sales and marketing teams. The importance of solutions-oriented is likely even more critical now, when business clients are looking for “news they can use” to keep their heads above water in a tough economy.

Following are some tips for getting the most out of your e-mail marketing investment during difficult times.

In a white paper, Benchmark Your Email Organization
http://www.responsys.com/downloads/white_papers/Forrester_BenchmarkYourE..., Forrester Research outlined some key e-mail strategies that can stretch your marketing dollars and measurably lift response rates. Forrester surveyed 260 e-mail marketers, from companies both large and small and of varying industry sectors. While the findings revealed substantial room for improvement, they also found that when companies take full advantage of best practice strategies and technological advances and when measurement and follow-through were consistently employed, marketers reaped up to a 700% return on investment.

Given the general belt-tightening being required today from marketing departments, Forrester suggests that remaining staff fully exploit outsource e-mail providers. “Email service providers offer a range of email services beyond deployment and delivery. Their tools are specially designed to facilitate testing and segmentation,” the report adds. Small marketing teams or those with rapidly growing programs can turn to outsource suppliers to help with email strategy and analytics, typically resulting in “increase order value, revenue, and ROI,” the Forrester report concludes.

Also of interest to financial services marketers is another finding in the Forrester study. In 2008, the financial sector ranked fifth of seven industry sectors surveyed re use of e-mail best practices, up from dead last in 2007. While the improvement is somewhat encouraging, surely there is still much room for improvement.

Despite these improvements, the financial services industry as a whole lags far behind other industries in adopting e-mail as a marketing channel. In an earlier study by Forrester, published in their white paper The Digital Transformation, business customers expressed a desire to receive relevant, electronic communications from their financial services providers and other suppliers and business partners at a rate far greater than what they were actually receiving.

Today we hear more and more about rich media, or web 2.0, which is a more highly interactive, multi-media form of marketing. Despite the glitz and appeal of web 2.0, e-mail remains, by far, the most widely used delivery channel to get these interactive messages delivered to their relevant recipients, to track the response rates and to close more sales.

One way to get more mileage from your e-newsletters and other online content is to post them on a relevant group message board within LinkedIn.com, suggests Karen Gedney, award-winning creative director and copywriter. The first week she posted an article, a prospect called about working with her on an issue related to the article.

A no-cost, high-value means of increasing the readership for and the shelf-life of your e-newsletter is to include in each edition a link to previous editions. The link might be titled something like “What you missed in the previous editions.” Our experience has been that over time the number of click- throughs to past issues often matches the number of hits recorded when the newsletter is first published.

No one typically hits the ground running with a perfect, well-oiled email marketing machine. While you may not yet be ready to employ all of these e-mail marketing practices, you can start with one or more. Even with a database of just few hundred e-mail addresses, by delivering compelling, relevant, solutions-based content, you can immediately begin reaping e-mail’s marketing benefits. Your relationship managers alone, likely have access to enough client emails to get started. And with the ease of forwarding, the ‘viral’ benefit, or reaching your ‘hidden market’ can be surprising.

FPS once helped a client build an initial e-mail address list of just a few hundred names. Over several years an aggressive internal e-mail address gathering campaign combined with a solutions-oriented e-newsletter program resulted in this institutions database growing to more than 14,000 e-mail addresses.

These days are just as difficult for your business client as they are for your financial institution. Now, when they looking for the important answers they need to survive as a business, is the perfect time to reach out to them. Offer advice, guidance, and consistent communications that let them know you’re there for them in times of need. The reward? According to a study conducted by Harvard University, just a 5% improvement in customer retention can translate into 25% to 85% increase in your company’s profitability.