by John Duff

Email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool – when done correctly, email marketing can achieve a higher ROI than any other direct marketing method.

In this article we look at four mistakes to avoid.

1. Bad Subject Line

Subject line is the first thing that is noticed by your audience. More than 69% of the times, your email will be deleted just because of your poor subject line. Try to limit your subject line within 5-6 words, avoid using marketing speak or sales speak, avoid the words “free” or “sale” or “save money”, those words will send your email to the spam folder.

You have to make sure that your email “from” line displays your company name or brand name and not some of an employee. The recipient might not know the name of that employee and hits the delete button. So don’t make this easily fixable mistake.

2. Too Many Offers

Send a one concept email, do not list all the opportunities you have available in the one mail message. If it shows that you are using the scattergun approach and are hoping the one of your concepts will entice your readers, then it might go other way.

The person who opens your email does not want to see a whole range of hyperlinks to all your opportunities. In most cases the reader is looking for a specific solution. If your email puts them off because of all hyperlinks and the length of the email they may never open another email from you.

3. Linking to Your Homepage

One of the biggest reasons for poorly performing emails marketing campaign is the lack of linking to the landing pages. For example, if an email is asking the reader to take action (e.g. save up to 30% off on a purchase of technological mailing lists) with a link to the homepage instead of that particular landing page. If you are running a promotion on technological lists, then link to a landing page that contains only the information regarding offers on technological lists. Don’t expect that your readers will dig around your website for the offer.

4. Image Based Emails

If you have the perception that an image based email may attract more attention, then you are wrong. Text only mails have a 40% higher click through rate than those picture emails. There are multiple reasons that this may be, the first of which is that emails are often checked through smart phones and webmail, neither of which displays images as well as desktop client.

If you do use lot of images with a lot of text in them, be sure that you repeat everything in simple text, so that users that are unable or unwilling to see images don’t miss important content.

by Nielsen Catalina

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands can experience a return of almost three dollars in incremental sales for every dollar spent in online advertising that has been precisely delivered using purchase-based information, according to research from Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS), a leader in measuring and improving advertising performance using purchaser-based analytics.

These findings, based on what NCS believes to be the most in-depth study on the correlation between online advertising and offline purchase, indicate a turning point for the digital medium as marketers seek to better leverage their advertising budgets across multiple channels.

“Not only can we prove that online advertising drives sales, but the returns on ad spends are significant when purchaser-based data is used to optimize the media buy,” said Mike Nazzaro, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions. “The marketer’s ability to precisely reach the desired consumer segment in the right media enabled by shopper-based analytics is changing the way advertisers plan and buy media,” Nazzaro said.

Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Nielsen completed more than 800 studies over the past seven years, collaborating with more than 300 CPG brands and 80 companies to measure the correlation between online advertising and offline consumer purchases.

Sales Return on Advertising Ranges from Three to Five Times Investment
A key metric for measuring campaign success is the ratio of the sales generated compared with the cost of the advertising, typically expressed as a cost per thousand or “CPM.” The incremental sales revenue per thousand households or “RPM” is compared with the advertising CPM to determine the return, or payback. According to Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ research, the average payback for all CPG categories was 2.79, ranging from 2.36 for food items to 5.29 for the pet category.

“These findings reveal an opportunity for advertisers to increase sales by leveraging purchaser data to improve media planning and buying. CPG marketers spent over $22 billion in total advertising in 2011, including $2 billion to $3 billion in the online medium,” Nazzaro said.

by MC Marketing Charts

There are 19 million affluent men on the internet, and they are researching, shopping and spending at rates higher than ever before, according to a survey by iProspect.  Its just-released report “The Affluent Male: What His Online Behavior Can Teach Luxury Brand Marketers” details the preferences, behaviors and attitudes of affluent males toward online advertising. iProspect defined an affluent male as being 18 years or older, with a household income of at least $100,000.

Forty percent of respondents are shopping online at least twice a week and those who shop multiple times spend more than $30,000 annually. Luxury menswear leads as a category, growing at a rate of about 14% per year. This shift in luxury spending means more opportunities for advertisers to target this growing segment, and across all devices.

by MC Marketing Charts

US online retail (non-travel) spending reached $44.3 billion during Q1 2012, representing a 17% increase from $38 billion in Q1 2011, according to estimates from comScore. This marks the 10th consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and 6th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates. The 17% year-over-year growth rate is also the largest for any quarter since Q4 2007.

According to the comScore data, the top-performing online product categories in Q1 were: digital content and subscriptions; computer software; consumer electronics; jewelry and watches; and event tickets.

by Chantal Tode

Email opens on smartphones and tablets grew by 82.4 percent in the past year and such mobile devices are on track to become the dominant email platform by the end of the year, according to a new report from Return Path.

As mobile penetration continues to grow, more consumers are using smartphones and tablets to access email and moving away from PCs and desktop. While mobile readership accounted for only 10 percent of email views just a few years ago, it now accounts for nearly 30 percent of all opens, according to the report.

“The big news is that mobile will surpass both Web mail and email desktop clients as the platform of choice to view emails — and we think this will happen as early as the end of this June, definitely by end of 2012,” said Tom Sather, senior director of email research at Return Path, New York. “For email marketers the implications are huge.

“Many marketers still are not tracking how many emails are read on mobile devices, and have yet to implement a mobile strategy,” he said. “For those that are not tracking which device their subscribers are reading their emails on, or if they are not optimizing their emails or Web sites for mobile devices, they are already missing out on opportunities.

“A poor user experience translates into no response, no action, or no ROI.”

Missed opportunities
Despite the significant growth in mobile readership of email, 48 percent of marketers still do not know how many mobile subscribers they have, according to the report, Email in Motion: Mobile is Leading the Email Revolution .

The implications of the findings are significant for email marketers, with those who are not optimizing their emails or Web sites for mobile devices standing to lose out. Mobile users who have a poor experience reading a marketer’s email on a mobile device may end up not responding.

The report found that 63 percent of Americans and 41 percent of Europeans would close or delete an email not optimized for mobile. Additionally, 41 percent of Europeans would delete or forget about the email.

iPad grows quickly
Other key findings include that Apple devices dominate mobile email opens, accounting for 85 percent of email readership.

Additionally, the iPad is quickly becoming a popular device for reading email, with iPad email opens increasing 53.6 percent year over year.

While both the iPhone and iPad are growing quickly, the report found that iPad readership grew by 5 percent in the past six months while iPhone readership shrank by the same amount.

The report also found that the time of day influences which device people read emails on, with mobile being more popular during the weekend while desktop email is the most popular during the weekday.

“Marketers should first figure out the numbers for their program,” Mr. Sather said. “They should know if their customers/subscribers are reading on mobile before diving head first.

“But the overwhelming data shows that mobile is the way the world is headed, so moving now to get that data and start strategizing is smart,” he said.