E-mail marketers tracking ROI

Email marketers still struggle to track ROI- survey

Almost half (47%) of marketers are not tracking how much revenue their email campaigns are making, according to a new survey.

The research, from email services provider Adestra and E-consultancy surveyed over 500 in-house and agency respondents across different industry sectors

The findings suggest that many companies do not know which campaigns are generating sales and which are not, or which ones have increased awareness, for non-transactional campaigns. The email marketing sector is growing fast, with 78% of companies are set to increase their email marketing spend according to DMA, November 2006.

Meanwhile, the email services market is growing at 20% per annum, according to E-consultancy’s Email marketing Platforms Buyer’s Guide. However the growth cannot continue in the longer term without the systems in place for tracking the results back to spend.

Around £178m was spent in the UK on email marketing platforms and services in 2006,according to E-consultancy, therefore a significant £84m is untracked marketing budget which may or may not be working. Which other channel would be able to get away with spending this much without knowing the impact?

Paul Crabtree, marketing director at Adestra, says: “It is critical for future growth, and makes basic business sense, to be able to measure ROI. In fact, it can severely stunt growth if you can’t measure ROI as it will make proving the business case for extra investment almost impossible.

The point is that email marketing is probably the most direct channel to be able to measure ROI – and it is a relatively simple process to enable it.”

In the survey over 80% of respondents say their email marketing could be more effective.

Crabtree explains: “Despite most marketers wanting their email campaigns to be more effective – and who doesn’t - as half can’t measure their ROI they have no basis for improving in future. The first thing they need to do is have a system for accurately tracking deliverability to the inbox, through to actual sales and therefore ROI.”

More than half of company email marketers (55%) say that their ROI from email is three times or more. Almost a third of company respondents (32%) say that their ROI is five times or more.

By way of comparison, 64% of Agency / ESP respondents say that their clients’ ROI is typically 3 times or more, and 28% say the ROI is five times or more.

Adestra has offered a top 5 tips on how to measure ROI, reproduced below:

When sending targeted, personalised campaigns to the designated database, ensure the following steps are taken to help measure ROI:

1. Ask each customer how they found out about you
2. Invest in web analytics to track all orders back to where they began their web session from
3. Use an email marketing provider that can integrate with your web site to track orders
4. Monitor other inbound channels (telephone lines) and use discount codes/ special offers/ unique phone numbers to label enquiries and orders. Database systems like Wyvern Magic make this possible without massive investment
5. Allocate and spend unrushed time analysing the performance of each campaign

Source: Netimperative