Consumers open, click, buy. Email marketing results ‘phenomenal’
- inaugural NZ marketing metrics report from Jericho.co.nz
AUCKLAND, 29 July 2010 – New Zealand’s first email marketing metrics report crunches close to 100 million permission-based commercial emails to show that email drives massive readership and clicks – especially on Mondays.
The Jericho Email Marketing Metrics Report for 2010 analyses key performance factors of email readership, call to action response rates, and the best day to send your email. This vital information is the first of its type in New Zealand and provides much-needed inspiration to marketers with stagnant budgets and hard-to-reach consumers.
“We’d been looking for these facts for a long time, but the information simply wasn’t out there. So we decided if anyone was in a position to produce metrics, it was us.” says Roanne Parker, Director of Business Strategy at Jericho. Jericho is a team of global e-marketing experts, based in New Zealand, and for a decade has been the professional email service provider of choice to NZ’s leading business and Government organisations. Clients include Telecom, Ezibuy, Progressive, Metservice and The Warehouse along with hundreds of SME’s. “We analysed around 100 million emails stratified over 30 different industry types. This is specific information from activity by companies who use our best-practice email design and delivery services, but the results can be used by all marketers” adds Parker.
The ultimate question, and the most often asked is which day should I send my email? Wednesday has the most email traffic - by quite a long shot, while Monday and Friday have the highest readership rate. Saturday showed the most clicks per email. This reflects the online habits of consumers who enjoy retail therapy from their living room at weekends. Overall, Monday was the winner with highest combined readership and click rates.
Parker suspects many advertising budgets still pay little regard to return on investment. “It’s hard to work effectively without an evidence base for your actions, especially with a limited budget. Traditional media suffers from a lack of reporting that makes it hard to directly tie sales to advertising. With email marketing, we teach clients to ask questions. Often they’re not sure if their billboard increased sales, but now they want to know why 4000 people forwarded today’s email rather than 4400 that did last month.”
From Amazon to a local boutique or sports club, it’s normal to request an email address. Consumers have learned to expect relevant information, in an easy to read format, and when their expectations are met, the results can be extraordinary. Personalised and relevant email can effectively identify with and engage each customer. In turn, the consumer is rewarding that effort with their loyalty, leveraging goodwill straight to the bottom line.
“In this age of niche marketing, any organisation that ignores well designed, targeted email campaigns is going to be left behind.” Roanne warns, “So we hope that metrics studies like this will change the thinking and help to get email marketing the recognition and resourcing it clearly deserves.”
You can download the report from www.smartmailpro.com
View the Jericho blog at blog.jericho.co.nz
Sponsors and Suppliers :
