When your business budget is dangerously tight, changing email marketing software may appear challenging. However, using the best bulk email tools improves deliverability and open rates. Can you really afford to risk hurting your marketing strategy?
Bulk Email Campaigns Still Succeed at Low Cost
The recent deep recession challenged marketing budgets of all businesses, large and small. Many that focused on using the highest tech methods reconsidered bulk email campaigns.
One of the first features of a growing Internet, email has long been a cost-effective marketing strategy component. The down economy removed much of the glitz and sparkle from many expensive, high tech marketing campaigns.
Enter the marketer’s long standing, reliable friend: Email. Using the right email marketing tool, you can still adopt a bulk email solution that succeeds without blowing up your budget.
Value of Open Rates and Their Measurement
One of the first metrics used to analyze the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, open rates continue to give valuable information to businesses. This belief is not universal, however.
Many contemporary marketers reject open rates as an inviolate measurement. Two primary considerations fuel this lack of support.
1. Web beacons—single pixel images—can only be used with HTML emails. Many subscribers prefer to receive text emails for security and speed reasons. Using web beacons to track open rates cannot consider all messages sent, making recorded open rates unreliable.
2. Most webmail, email clients and many ISPs automatically block incoming messages with their spam filters without requiring action by recipients. Numerous subscribers may wish to receive your messages, but never get to see them as built-in spam filters often assign unknown emails to the junk folder. If your subscribers do not manually override these auto-systems, their junk folders may become home to your bulk emails.
If you support either or both of these positions, your open rate data is still useful. Tracking your open rates and bounces may not be perfect measurement vehicles, but low opens indicate a problem as do unacceptable volumes of bounced messages.
Since most respected email marketing software offers some tracking ability, consider using a combination of web beacons, read receipts, return receipts, open rates, and responses to achieve your measurement objectives. This multi-front “measurement attack plan” should give you the data you need to evaluate the true value of your marketing strategy.