eROI Days Email Agency

At eROI, we try hard to be a resource to folks in the email marketing industry, and one of the ways that we’ve done that over the past 5 years is to do a quarterly study (based on a survey or aggregate data from our email marketing platform) and present those results to everyone in the industry.  It always amazes us that there is a HUGE difference between what email marketers know to do as best practices for their campaigns versus what is actually done in the real world (where time, money, process, and other factors get in the way of best practices).

In this Q3′08 eROI study called “The Elements of Email“, there is a shocking difference of best practices vs. real world practices.  For example, only a quarter of marketers test their subject lines.  Fifty-five percent of online marketers don’t know how they authenticate emails (to ensure that more of their emails reach their email subscriber’s inbox.  Lastly, only 10 percent of us create mobile versions of our email campaigns.

People are talking about the study, so make sure you check out what they are saying.  And, if you’d like to draw your own conclusions, click here to see the full study >>

Articles on this study:
http://directmag.com/magill/0819-email-markers-slopping/ 
http://www.marketingvox.com/email-marketers-missing-opportunities-040449/
http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/email-marketers-missing-opportunities-5665/

Please comment below to let me know your take.  Also don’t forget to subscribe to this blog.  Now that I’m refreshed from vacation, I promise to post blog entries more frequently.

2. Email mantra: list segmentation + relevant content = improved results. eROI published an email study earlier this year showing a direct correlation between smaller, more relevant lists and higher open and click through rates. Instead of sending all emails to a Main List of all of their contacts, marketers are starting to segment their lists into product categories, service categories, press lists, webinar lists, etc. Marketers who fail to take the extra hour or two to do this list segmentation every 3-6 months will see continued email list fatigue and a resulting drop in performance. Emailers will learn that content needs to focus less on selling a product and talking at recipients, and more on talking with recipients. Updating email content and starting a conversation will be more important than ever as people move toward seeing their inboxes as sacred places that they don’t want violated by one-way advertising messages.

Chad White over at RetailEmail.BlogSpot.com put together a phenomenal study on the top 101 retail emailers and the entire process of subscribing to their email communications. This is worth a read for sure. Not only is this study great, but he also comments on the campaigns that come in daily and weekly from these subscriptions.

He also wraps up a his daily posts with the Subsjectivity Scanner. Which hightlight the subject lines daily.

Here is an example:
SUBJECTIVITY SCANNER:
Staples, 8/22, 4 pm — Staples Easy Mobile Tech is here to help with a $10 coupon!
Polo, 8/22, 5 pm — Introducing New Multicolor Big Pony Styles
Saks Fifth Avenue, 8/22, 1 pm — Just in: SAKS.COM FALL CATALOG + New Fashion Incubator
Bass Pro Shops, 8/22, 3 pm — RedHead Sale and Sweepstakes at Bass Pro!
Harry & David, 8/22, 4 pm — Going fast: The world’s biggest, sweetest Peaches – order now!
L.L. Bean, 8/22, 4 pm — Fall Favorites under $30 + Lower Prices on Polos
Office Depot, 8/22, 12 pm — Toshiba Week Savings

Get the Study

Home and work users have different preferences.

For e-mail marketers looking to make the biggest impact, it makes sense to pay attention to whether users are receiving their e-mail at home or at work.

According to a Q2 2006 study of e-mail marketing preferences by eROI Inc., 79% of people who subscribe to business-to-business e-mail marketing messages receive them at a business e-mail address. Just 19% of people who receive consumer-oriented e-mail marketing messages subscribe with their business e-mail address.

Those who receive consumer-oriented messages were also much more likely to use an e-mail address created specifically for e-mail marketing: 24% did, vs. 6% of those who received B2B messages.

Read and Download the Study

In an effort to expand our latest study we are currently working on, we would like to invite you to participate in this survey. This survey will help us to combine some key data points we analyze over our emailROI network and provide you with the combined results in August.

Take the short survey

Sign Up for our Study Release and download past studies.

The quick summary of the study below made me think of how mainstream email has become. Do you respond to all of your email? You may listen to all of your voicemails, but do you respond to every single one? I find that if I don’t respond to email within a few hours, it gets buried in my inbox. Please add a comment to this entry after reading the blurb below.

Small-to-midsize companies are not responding to customer email as they should – even less so than enterprise-level firms – according to a study cited by Internet Retailer. The study determined that 51 percent of SMBs don’t respond to customer emails at all, versus 41 percent of larger enterprises surveyed last year. Moreover, 70 percent of the smaller companies failed to respond to emails within 24 hours, compared with 61 percent of enterprises.