Email ROI - How Good Results Today Can Mask Big Problems Tomorrow

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

Email works. In fact, email is the highest ROI channel by far. Email marketing returns $57.25 for every dollar spent, more than 150 percent greater than the ROI for non-e-mail online marketing (Source: DMA, 2007).

But perhaps email works too well for our own darn good. The revenue that we generate every time we send out a generic, non-segmented blast mailing masks a lot of missed opportunities. For too many marketers, email revenue per subscriber is not growing and more and more subscribers are simply ignoring our messages.

That is because most email marketing today is pretty terrible. It's irrelevant, poorly timed, creatively uninteresting and completely generic. The vast majority of us still follow a batch and blast broadcast approach that will never make our email messages relevant to most of our subscribers most of the time. The opposite is true. ...

Categories: Response

The Importance of Minor Body Parts

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

Having recently experienced some health issues that caused a variety of challenges in my daily life, I've come to abruptly realize the importance of minor body parts. For example, when your entire foot is numb, attempting to wear a shoe with a heel strap is more challenging than you would imagine. Since you cannot feel whether or not the strap is secure around your heel, you are left feeling terribly insecure and checking to be sure your shoe is still on your foot rather frequently. This unfortunate (although sometimes amusing) experience lead me to think of the important, often neglected, minor parts of an email. Naturally, we marketers focus on optimizing subject lines, headlines, creative design, and content - - these areas typically return the most for our investment. However, there are some rather "important minor body parts" that we should examine more regularly ...

Categories: Response

It's Client Appreciation Week at Return Path!

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

We have something big to say...

THANK YOU CLIENTS!

This week is about you! All this week everyone at Return Path is making an extra effort to recognize our clients, who are valued members of the email community.

Thank you for your positive contributions to the email universe. Thank you for your efforts to provide effective, relevant email to your customers. Thank you most of all for your partnership and willingness to allow us to show you the "path" to inbox nirvana.

Categories: News

Retiring the Open Rate: Your Thoughts

By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services

A few weeks ago I wrote a posting titled, "Is It Time to Retire the Open Rate" and asked you to respond with your comments and feedback on this often debated and somewhat controversial topic. I included a few specific questions to get you inspired, such as whether or not you track open rates, what makes a "good" open rate and what metrics are most important to you. I received a number of interesting and insightful comments.

A handful of readers felt that the open rate continues to serve an important function in tracking program success. Trevor Hunter wrote that the open rate was the easiest metric to use when gauging the overall effectiveness of a list over time, while Karl Kleinbach still found the open rate useful for testing subject lines and commented that "accuracy is less important than relative performance," especially in the context of A/B split testing results.

Speaking of accuracy, our own Neil Schwartzman, director of standards and security for Sender Score Certified, questioned whether or not the factors that can skew email open rates (e.g., the preview pane, email clients defaulting to "images off" for message viewing) are as prevalent as marketers suspect ...

Categories: Response