Email marketing wins sales awards, not Loeries

The above notwithstanding, we should also add a third point. What is really evident about this game is how few people actually know what email marketing is.

Just unforgiveable

It is perhaps forgivable for the person in the street to believe that email marketing amounts to nothing more that the spam emails flogging Viagra. But for a professional marketer or advertising person to be blissfully unaware of a tool that routinely provides a 48X ROI is just unforgiveable.

Perhaps the reason has something to do with the fact that at least some creative people within the advertising fraternity view themselves as artists in need of recognition and you don't win Loeries for email marketing campaigns. Well, not currently but that will change.

We've seen increasing numbers of advertising agencies and marketing firms recommending email marketing campaigns to their clients because of the impressive results delivered. As more commercial email campaigns designed to immediately sell a product or service, identify a lead, generate a retail purchase or solicit contributions are developed, increasingly creative executions will follow.

Already, the evolution of access technologies such as mobile email via 3G, more powerful end-user computers and so on mean that the recipient of email marketing messages is able to receive ever more compelling, entertaining and creatively pleasing commercial email content.

Managed moment

Specific media aside, good advertising is like a managed moment with the consumer. Unlike television, where you will never know who is interested in your product or service, email marketing's standout feature is that you can draw the consumer into an experience by leveraging a plethora of existing technologies

For example, a television viewer may like what he sees in a commercial but most times he is unable to act on that interest and make the transition from interested consumer to paying customer. Perhaps there is a number to call on screen but the interested consumer's cellphone is not charged and he has no landline. Or a physical visit to the company's local neighbourhood store is required to take advantage of a special offer but our interested consumer is disinterested in battling the traffic on this particular day.

Enter email marketing.

The mere fact that a consumer has received a commercial email at a certain point in time means that he is online. This means that an interested consumer can make the speediest of transitions to paying customer at the click of a mouse.

Versatile

Because email marketing is so versatile, that mouse click can be used to sign up a customer in so many ways. It can take the web surfer straight to the company's website; it can download a video file of a sales presentation; and that mouse click could even start dialling the email marketer's call centre straight from the email recipient's desktop.

Because email marketing offers all these different ways of interacting with the consumer, as opposed to the purely passive mediums of television or outdoor advertising, for example, it is an important part of a 360 degrees marketing campaign.

Aside from pure brand building, email marketing is a great way to direct consumers to a particular campaign you may be running at some point and it's also a useful way of providing the consumer with an alternative experience of your brand.

In essence, the consumer can experience the brand from the comfort and safety of his desktop while each interactive email costs the marketer barely a cent. Compare the cost of watching an online sales presentation to the cost of the consumer interacting with an actual sales representative. And chances are the slick online version will do a better job than the dodgy real-life character who presses your doorbell with vacuum cleaner in clammy hand.

Not talking about spam

What I probably haven't made clear above is that the ROI of email marketing is so high because we're not talking about spam. Spam is illegal and is about sending vast amounts of unsolicited commercial emails to unsuspecting recipients. Email marketing is legal because there is a previously-existing commercial relationship between sender and recipient.

So ROI is high because, while email marketing is a new medium, it stays true to the most basic truth of marketing - it is cheaper to retain an existing customer than to go out and solicit new customers.

So email marketing, you could say, is about up-selling existing customers, or persuading previous customers to return to the fold. In addition, the details of targeted leads can be captured via websites or on entry forms and a relationship built up with them over several subsequent communications.

In conclusion, an interesting fact is that two-thirds of email marketing messages worldwide are retention emails. So email marketers are basically exploiting their own channels and the great news is that the cost of doing so has fallen to a mere fraction of a percent.