I don't know about you but I hate getting spam. It's annoying ... it sometimes gets in the way of real emails ... it takes time to delete ... and I never asked to get it so why should I have to deal with it? I'm even one of those people who object to getting junk mail in my letter box and you can bet that it's got a 'No Junk Mail' label on it where everyone can see it.

But that's not to say that I'm against email marketing. Good email marketing takes your message direct to those people who actually want to see it and who might actually want to buy what you're selling.

So it's intelligent marketing to use emails to try and sell your products. What's not so intelligent is trying to market your products by sending emails to people who didn't ask to receive them. If those people are like me every spam email they get from you is just one more reason why they're never going to do business with you.

I guess that's just common sense ... you want to encourage people to do business with you and to buy what you're selling so why make them angry and give them one good reason after another for never doing business with you?

Sometimes I wonder about businesses ... both here in adult and over in mainstream ... that don't understand something as basic as that.

Ok so you're thinking of doing some email marketing ... and you're going to do it right. You're going to use a list that contains the email addresses of people who have taken a positive step to join the list and maybe whoever compiled the list went that one step further and had those who opted to join the list actually confirm that they want to be on the list.

You've heard that email marketing can be very very effective and that's not hard to hear because there are plenty of people out there who want to tell you just how effective and worthwhile email marketing can be. Some of them have ulterior motives for telling you how good email marketing is while others have genuine positive experiences of email marketing.

Just last night someone Steve follows on Twitter was rejoicing because an email campaign he had just launched for one of his clients in mainstream was getting well over 33% click-through rate. If some figures Marketing Sherpa released this week are to be believed then that click-through rate really is outstanding.

Actually I was quite surprised by the figures that Marketing Sherpa released because response rates to email campaigns don't seem to be quite as good as I expected. The figures came from a survey of 1500 marketers who were asked to provide information on opening rates, click-through rates and conversion rates for the regular newsletters that they send out to customers/clients.

As you might expect all the rates for email newsletters sent to consumers were slightly higher than all the rates for email newsletters sent to businesses ... but none of the rates were what you might call exciting.

Opening rates for email newsletters sent to consumers was just 25% and 23% for businesses. So 75% or more of the email newsletters you might send out to people who asked to be included on your mailing list don't even get opened ... they just go straight into the trash.

While between 23% and 25% of email newsletters get opened, only 14% of consumers and 11% of businesses actually clicked through from the email to the landing page or website that was associated with the marketing in those emails. And if you think those figures are bad then I have to tell you that it's all down hill from there.

Actual conversions ... those who accepted the offer ... fell to just 4% for consumers and 3% for businesses. So, only four in every 100 consumers and three in every 100 businesses that you email are likely to make a purchase.

Of course you can improve on those figures if you can come up with a killer subject line but with conversion rates like that, if you're a small business with limited staff and/or time to commit to building an email campaign you have to wonder whether email marketing is worth the effort.

Are those final conversion rates any better than what you might expect from building galleries or free sites? Are the associated hassles that come with running an email campaign ... such as complaints about spam from people who have forgotten that they opted into the list you're using ... worth the hassle?

Conversion rates are something you should be thinking about before you jump in to building an email campaign. It may be that your time and money are better spent doing something else.

01/23/2012 - Getting Inside Their Heads

01/17/2012 - Planning to Survive

01/09/2012 - Headlines and Creeping Jobs

01/02/2012 - What Are You Planning for 2012?

12/27/2011 - Thinking About Marketing - Less is More

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