As businesses continue to tighten their belts, we are more frequently asked to justify e-marketing projects and expenditures upfront. One of the questions I heard this month was, “Where is the ROI in email marketing?”

Well, for starters, email marketing is about relationship building…

Forget the idea of buying an email list. That is so “web 1.0” where companies bought untargeted lists and blasted their message out to the masses. (Not to mention that this does not comply with the CAN-SPAM laws.)

The best use of email marketing is to maintain and to build an ongoing relationship with prospects and customers that you already know. It helps you position an educational message in front of people on a regular basis. By doing this, you are building your creditability as a knowledgeable vendor who can help educate and solve problems in a particular area.

The ROI in email marketing can be measured in many ways. First you must build an email message that has a clear action(s) you want the person to take. For example, do you want the person to…

• Read more about an educational article
• Review a promotional product
• Order something at a promotional price
• Complete a survey about your service or their needs

All of these actions can be used to calculate ROI or marketing impact on an email. These actions enable you to measure total emails sent by total actions taken.

Secondly, email marketing offers tremendous marketing insight into individual subscribers. If you have a list where you know most people or companies in the list personally, look at the individual actions that people took related to your message. Were there a few people who opened the message over and over again? Did a few people click every link in the message? This generates ROI in the way of sales intelligence. You can use this information to place strategic follow up calls.

In closing, the biggest mistake companies make related to the ROI of email marketing is that they just “blast it” out there and hope for the best. To get ROI, you need to be using the marketing data that is generated from each campaign and making decisions about how to move forward.

Other useful email links:

• Shopping for Emails
• Words to avoid in your marketing emails
• Email services we offer