Like many of you, I recently received an email from the DMA entitled “Find out what you’re worth”. I opened the email immediately hoping for some long awaited confirmation that I am in fact worth my weight in gold or perhaps to discover that I am being hopelessly underpaid for my job but instead I was confronted with some unexpected results from a recent DMA study relating to the value of direct marketing. The study revealed that the direct marketing industry in the UK is now responsible for 23% of all UK Sales.

Forget what I’m worth – ‘23% of all UK sales’ is a phenomenal amount! For the Travel and Retail industries the figures are higher still, where 30%+ of sales are driven by direct marketing. This reminded me of a recent comment made by the Head of Email Marketing at a major UK travel company who explained to me the enormous battle he had fought within his organisation just to get an email sign-up form included on their website homepage. With rates of success from Direct Marketing so high, it seems strange that a vital tool, such as a homepage email sign-up form would be such a struggle to implement.

You’ll be relieved to hear that the sign up form is now in pride of place on this particular company’s homepage. However, with the kind of results that the recent DMA study has highlighted, it is disappointing to hear how these types of discussions and internal hindrance still take place. As a business, your email database is one of your most valuable assets. It astonishes me that many businesses still don’t understand the value of their database and in fact the individual value of every person on that database. This brings us back to the DMA’s compelling ‘Find out what you’re worth’ subject line that caught my eye.

Earlier this year I tried the ‘What am I worth’ app, which helps consumers to calculate how much they are worth to businesses based on their online behaviour and consumer preferences. It’s a fun idea, but actually the basic idea that a single ‘consumer’ can be given this type of potential value is critical, and every business should focus on being able to attribute a specific value for their business in adding a customer to their database. (According to the app I am “worth” £525 if you are interested!)

It is really only when you know the value of your database that you can set meaningful targets for database growth and measure return on your efforts/spend to grow it. And of course it’s also helpful if you are trying to persuade your bosses to help you grow it, and to communicate that an email sign-up on the homepage of your website is a key asset not a wasted space.

As well as your website, here are some other suggestions on other ways that you can grow your email database:

Your company employees each send out around 15,000 normal outlook emails a year to customers and potential customers in the course of their normal work. Adding a newsletter sign-up button to your email signatures will encourage the clients interacting with you to subscribe to your database. Don’t underestimate how much this can contribute- we’ve seen conversion rates of up to 40% with some of our clients.

Have you integrated your newsletter sign-up with your Facebook page? Are you promoting your sign-ups on Twitter? Also are you using the tools within your email marketing tool to distribute your newsletters via twitter and Facebook directly to your followers and fans. We recommend taking an integrated approach across all your channels.

It was also interesting to see, at the end of last year, that Google started testing a new form of Google Adwords with Honda. I believe this is still in testing but the new format included a direct email subscription option, which allows companies to capture an email address opt-in via search, without the new subscriber having to visit the corporate website (and, by the way, the sign-up is pre-populated for logged in gmail users). This type of ‘search and sign-up’ technique will ultimately allow companies to grow ‘targeted’ quality databases through their paid for adverts.

In conclusion, it is great news that so much value has been attributed to the role of direct marketing in driving sales across all industries, but for Email Marketers the challenge is often convincing the rest of the business of their true worth. It’s clear that we still have some way to go in joining the dots between the value of the sales and the value of the database that drove those sales. Because we Email Marketers know we’re worth it!