Email marketing is the darling of direct marketing for a reason – it is inexpensive and it works really well.   Maybe too well.   Whenever we send out a blast, we earn revenue.  It costs us little in hard expenses to do so.  Just like letting children loose in the candy store, this can be very addicting!  And so many email marketers send more messages than are relevant to most subscribers, and often many more than promised at the point of sign up.   Alas, eating too many sweets will give you a tummy ache.  There is a cost to over-mailing – both in real missed revenue opportunity as well as deliverability, whether your messages actually reach the inbox.

It’s no secret that subscriber experience matters. Relevancy matters. We all know that creating great subscriber experiences is key to driving even more revenue and higher ROI.  Yet, in order to do that, we need resources.  Those resources are technology and human — and often involve expertise that we don’t have resident in our marketing departments.  How can do the data integration, segmentation strategy, list management, tracking and analysis, deliverability management and compelling creative when we barely have enough resources to get the messages out the door each week?

How?  We have to make a business case for the email channel.  I presented two ways to do this during my keynote presentation at the recent Email Marketing Conference at the London Zoo.  Central to both strategies is speaking the language of our CFOs and executive management.  We need to speak in terms of real costs, real customer satisfaction measures and real revenue upside. 

The first way to make a business case is to show the real costs of sending more messages than are relevant and valuable to subscribers. The short term revenue boost from sending "just one more" email blast this month has a real long term negative effect. 

Your CFO (or CMO or CEO) thinks that sending more messages is simply the cost of broadcasting them – the CPM we pay to our email delivery vendor.  Actually, the real costs include the costs of replacing all those lost via increased unsubscribe requests, complaints (clicks on the This is Spam button) and fatigue.  It also includes the cost of unrealized future revenue from those lost subscribers.  And it includes a "brand slam" factor based on negative brand impression and lower loyalty.  When we do the math on an sample mailing of 100.000 records, we show that a mailing that the CFO thought cost 300 GBP actually cost us 8.000 GBP.  That is real revenue!  And a real missed opportunity for future sales.

We also discussed how deliverability failure — caused primarily by things like overmailing, low relevancy and poor list hygiene  — can have a dramatic effect on the bottom line. Most permission-based email marketers who do not actively manage their Sender Reputation and deliverability can expect that up to 20% of their messages never reach the inbox.  You can hit "send" all you want.  But some of those messages will get blocked by the ISPs and receivers because of a low Sender Reputation.  The good news is that all of the factors that go into a great Sender Reputation (and high inbox deliverability) are the same things that smart email marketers do to drive higher response and revenue.  Like keeping the list clean, honoring permission grants, processing bounces properly, removing complainers (those who click the This is Spam button) from your file and making sure your content is well constructed.  Sender Reputation is all about how your messages are valued. If your messages are welcome by most subscribers most of the time, your Sender Reputation will be good. 

How do you know?  Use this free site to get more info on your own Sender Reputation:  www.senderscore.org  (disclaimer, it’s owned by my company Return Path)

And use this simple calculator to understand the impact of poor deliverability on the ROI of your programme: 
http://www.returnpath.net/senderscore/calculator/

Okay, you may be thinking.  "Focus on the customer."  That sounds reasonable.  Yet, if this is so obvious, why don’t we do it?  Oh yes, we love our subscribers.  But we are so caught up in telling our own stories through email that we forget our subscribers have THEIR own goals.   Sure, they give us permission.  But then they don’t respond.  They don’t unsubscribe, but they ignore our messages.  They click on links to take advantage of offers, and they also click on the This is Spam button and (without knowledge) also tarnish our Sender Reputations and thus lower our chances of reaching the inbox for any of our messages.

We must effectively make the case for more resources and more support, so that we can optimize subscriber experiences and ensure that our email programs continue to deliver for us in the long term.  Feel free to email me for a copy of the presentation, or to discuss in more detail how you can effectively make a case for email marketing resources.

Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst
Return Path, Inc.