E-Mail Marketing Still Works

E-Mail marketing still works...but consumer standards of relevance are high. First, the good news: permission-based e-mail is great at getting consumers to buy. Half of US adult e-mail users surveyed in April 2008 for Merkle's "View from the Inbox" study, conducted with Harris Interactive, said they had made an online purchase in the previous year as a result of permission-based marketing. In addition, e-mail was second only to customer reviews on Web sites for influencing online purchases...and e-mail was roughly equal to search results in terms of influencing online purchases. >>Full Story

Thoughts// Sometimes a little reinforcement is a good thing. This new Harris Interactive study is really no surprise. In fact, we've written about e-mail's adaptability and our addition to it before. Despite the proliferation of social networking, IM and texting, e-mail remains an integral part of our daily communication routine and doesn't appear to be a dying breed. In fact, feeds via e-mail (and not direct to reader) happens to be how the majority of you subscribe to this blog! But consumers expect some respect from marketers. Consider: Some noteworthy insights from the study:

• About one-third of respondents in the study said they "had stopped doing business with at least one company" as a result of poor e-mail marketing practices

• 53% of e-mail users said that they were only willing to get marketing or promotional messages e-mails if the offers were relevant to them

Another noteworthy story from this survey is the fact that online ads (atleast sales related ones) perform poorly —almost universally—across all age groups. It will certainly be interesting to see how these trends transform over time as the "MySpace Generation" starts to mature.