A poorly executed email program can reflect negatively on your brand and hurt your reputation and sales.
Email marketing has always been easy to do, but tough to do well. That's especially true today because email marketing requires more expertise and resources than most companies are allocating.
But this is not because email doesn't work. And it's not because marketers have lost their faith.
According to a Direct Marketing Association report, email marketing produces an ROI of $57.25 for every dollar spent. That's 150 percent more ROI than non-email online marketing.
A November MarketingSherpa study found that the overwhelming majority still believe that email is effective and growing in impact.
But many people are missing the point.
Email marketing has become more challenging because there is a resource-to-ROI imbalance. Most marketing organizations haven't changed their email skill sets or mindsets since the days when getting a chain letter still seemed fun.
Needless to say, a lot has changed since then.
The org chart does not reflect email ROI
CEOs know that email is indispensable, but they don't always quantify its value in cold, hard cash.
Part of the problem is that email has never played a single, well-defined role in business. It has been the marketing equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife, an all-in-one tool used for customer acquisition, brand building, notifications, news dissemination, ecommerce, life-cycle messaging, confirmations, and so on.
The other part of the problem is that email has always been seen as something anyone could do. In the old days of "load a list, send a plain-text message," your IT department automated the email and an entry level marketing person could run the show.
HTML and fancy designs made email marketing harder, but it was still not considered difficult. Many companies share creative resources with the website design team, so it was easy to apply those resources to email programs as an afterthought.
This "few skills required" mindset is no longer justified. A poorly designed and executed email program can reflect negatively on your brand and hurt your reputation and sales directly, both online and offline.
Deliverability, rendering and segmentation are logistical challenges that now require higher-level expertise. It takes skill to devise a forward-thinking marketing strategy that integrates email with SEM and other marketing imperatives. It takes even more skill to measure email ROI and communicate it clearly to executives.
How many email marketing "experts" does your organization have? I don't mean the majority, whose job descriptions lump email marketing together with 15 other duties.
I mean dedicated gurus who eat email for breakfast, who understand the challenges, apply best practices and focus strategically on how to use email to drive business results. People like a director of email, a delivery analyst, designers, copywriters and marketing managers with a specific email-marketing focus.
How many experts was that? None? Part of one? I thought so. That's what I mean by a resource-to-ROI imbalance.