Email marketing, you say? Isn’t that so 1999? I mean, seriously… there are blogs, interactive multimedia, RSS advertising, PPC marketing, SEM, SMM, search engine optimization and so much more, and you want to talk about email marketing? By the way, Nerdwerx does all of the above. Hint hint.

First, though, let me clear up a misconception or two. By email marketing, I do not mean SPAM. In fact, i mean the opposite of SPAM. Rather than send email about things they don’t want to people who do not want to be emailed, we will talk about sending email to people who asked to get email from us. This is called opt-in email, and properly used, it is extremely powerful. Savvy marketers have seen the value in building a list of opt-in subscribers who have raised their hand and said “market to me”.

Imagine how much easier your life as a marketer would be if instead of marketing to the Internet at large you had a list of 5000 people who knew you, liked you and wanted to buy what you sell. Impossible, you say? Not at all.

If you did nothing more but put a form on your web site to collect the addresses of those who came by and asked to be on your mailing list, you would be ahead of the game. Email marketing is push based marketing, as opposed to more trendy pull based options. With pull marketing, you post content on a blog, you build a widget, people come by and see it and talk about it. With email, you are sending them the marketing message, when you want them to see it, in a format you control.

Over the past ten years email marketing has been an effective way of delivering a message directly to a selected audience. Over time however other seemingly more measurable channels have become available.

Reports of low conversations and poor open rates have tainted that once effective direct marketing tool.

Apart from conversions, how do you measure an effective email campaign?

Delivery Rate
How many emails were sent out to the list?

Open Rate
How many emails were read?

Click Through Rate (CTR)
How many readers then clicked through from the email message to a landing page?

These metrics can be skewed however. Open rates are often measured by the amount of times a tracking image is loaded, however most email clients by default don’t load images. Some subscribers also choose to receive text emails, this again makes it difficult to measure as it’s not possible to embedded an image into a text-only email.

Recent studies by eMarketer and Epsilon shows that email marketing is still viable. Top level figures report that with a correct creative and a clean targeted list you can achieve very good results from a email marketing campaign.

“Q1 2009 Email Trends and Benchmarks”

1. Delivery Rate 94.1%
2. Open Rate 22.1%
3. Click Through Rate 6.1%

Whatever your business, there is no doubt that adding email marketing to your marketing mix can help you achieve your business goals faster. Savvy marketers have been doing it for years. The question is, will you get on the bus, or are you going to be left at the station?