Since email began in the early 90’s, there’s been a total revolution in the inbox. First it was all about being a cool new way to almost instantly communicate with anyone and everyone who happened to have an email address! Some emails, those with that real wow factor, even included pictures!
Over the years, best practices, industry norms and trends have evolved. Today, email marketing is a tangled web of permissions, HTML coding and design, ISPs open rates, subject lines etc. Because of this, it’s important for email marketers to educate themselves on the latest best practices. It’s also one of the reasons “cardcommunications”:http://www.cardcommunications.com (my company) has published its first-ever quarterly trends report.
What the “cardcommunications Q1 2006 Trends Report (PDF)”:http://www.cardcommunications.com/expresso/Q1_06_trends_card.pdf discovered might shock some high-level executives with ROI on the brain. Turns out, bigger is not better. As an email marketing firm we are often approached by clients who are dying to grow their list, get more people to sign up, even wanting to rent or buy a list to get more names. However, where the list is concerned, it boils down to one thing: quality over quantity.
Yes, you can have a big list, with tens of thousands of names, but the key to seeing good results is segmentation. Break down the list by interests, demographics, lifestyle choices, shoe sizes or anything that gives you the ability to communicate timely, meaningful and relevant information to the exact people who want to hear it.
Also found in the report, is the bigger the list, the lower the deliverability. Having a high bounce rate will not only hurt your results, but also hurt your relationship with ISPs(Internet Service Providers). Sending out email campaigns that continually bounce back addresses from that ISP can set off the red flags, and you can be blacklisted. Then guess what happens – more bounces. It’s a vicious cycle.
The Q1 2006 Trends Report from cardcommunications provides a look at current trends, specifically results based on list size, from Canadian-based email marketers. Subsequent reports will be published on a quarterly basis with each report exploring new types of email marketing data.