Eighteen times more profit from targeted emails

According to a report just published, using Web analytics to target email campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and eighteen times the profits of broadcast mailings.

The report, The ROI of Email Relevance: Improving Campaign Results Through Targeting, from JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation, quantifies the top and bottom line impact that targeted marketing tactics can have on email campaign performance.

According to David Daniels, research director at JupiterResearch, "Spam and the cluttered inbox have not killed the email medium for marketers. With a clear messaging strategy that is built off of a lifecycle relationship driven approach, there is still tremendous value that can be derived from email."

To date, however, few marketers are sending highly contextually-targeted email campaigns; most are using broadcast and basic personalisation tactics that do little to make these marketing messages highly relevant. According to Daniels, "The failure of CRM systems to centralise all customer insights haunts email marketing and, in many respects, relegates it to a second class medium. Because the lack of integrated customer data is the top challenge for large marketers, these data deficiencies bind many of them to relatively simplistic targeting tactics."

Some findings

• The right time: When asked about promotional email's influence on their purchasing decisions, 60% of consumers who made immediate purchases from email did so because the email contained products they were already considering, underscoring the need to catch the customer at the right time with the correct offer.
• Repeatable campaigns: Adopting a lifecycle approach requires additional up-front work and ongoing creative development, but these repeatable campaigns can be set up once and then largely leveraged with little or no impact on staffing.
• Realistic goals:Marketers must be realistic in setting performance goals because many targeted campaigns (e.g., life cycle, clickstream) require not only data integration, but also the appropriate amount of data for a meaningful segment of customers.
• Tools will drive analytics: The proliferation of integrated email marketing and Web analytics tools will drive Web analytics growth and fuel ESP (Email Service Provider) consolidation.

The complete findings of this report are immediately available to JupiterResearch clients online. For additional information on the report visit JupiterResearch's web site or contact Kieran Kelly.