7 Surefire Ways to Boost Your Email ROI

Email continues to be among the most cost-effective marketing methods. According to the Direct Marketing Association’s 2012 Direct Response Rate Report $28.50 in sales was generated for every dollar spent on email marketing. That compares to $7 in sales for every $1 spent for direct mail.

Experian Marketing Services demonstrates another example of the outstanding revenue-generating power of email in their 2013 Q2 Email Benchmark Study, which found that revenue per email for the second quarter of 2013 was 11 cents. This figure is holding fairly steady as it is slightly below 12 cents that was experienced both during the first quarter of 2013 and in 2012.

Marketers Perceive Email as a Strong Producer of ROI

When marketers were asked to estimate their organization’s return on investment (ROI) from email-marketing programs, survey respondents in MarketingSherpa’s 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report overwhelmingly reported that it produced strong ROI. Of the marketers surveyed, 60% said that email marketing is currently producing ROI for their organizations, while 32% believe it will eventually produce ROI.

  • Surveyed marketers reported an average ROI of 119%
  • Business-to-business and/or business-to-government marketers reported the highest ROI at 127%
  • Marketers from organizations that sent fewer than 100,000 emails per month estimated an average 139% ROI, while marketers from organizations that sent more than 100,000 emails per month estimated a lower ROI of 94%.
ROI chart

What Can You Do to Improve Your Email ROI?

What’s your organization’s ROI for email marketing? And what can you do to improve that number? Here we suggest seven surefire ways to help increase your organization’s email ROI.

  1. Set your goals. Check out our easy-to-use ROI Goalsetter® tool that helps you determine how to get more out of your email-marketing dollars.
  2. Proactively grow your email list. Are you doing everything you can to generate leads? In this article, find 14 types of emails that can help boost ROI. Plus, learn how to increase email list growth by transforming your homepage into a lead-generating machine, harnessing the power of the popover, and optimizing your landing-page forms.
  3. Use triggered emails effectively. Abandoned shopping cart email programs and thank-you pages are two examples of triggered emails that can have a big impact on your email ROI.
  4. Segment your list. Email list segmentation is a proven way to dramatically improve email-campaign performance. In a previous NewsLever feature, find tips for how to segment your list.
  5. Focus on deliverability. Are you consistently getting your emails into your recipients’ inboxes? The junk or spam filters of web-based email services — such as Google’s Gmail or Yahoo! — may be catching them.
  6. Optimize for mobile. Since many of your prospects and customers probably are using mobile devices to read your emails, ensuring that your emails are optimized for mobile is an essential step for driving up your ROI.
  7. Track and test email performance results to continually boost ROI. Testing subject lines, calls to action, headlines, offers, design, and so on is the only way to know for sure what works and what doesn’t work for your target audience.

Looking for new and effective ways to boost your email ROI? FulcrumTech can help. Email us or give us a call at 215-489-9336 today.
New Call-to-action

Sign Up for NewsLever

Our free, monthly email newsletter

NewsLever is our free, monthly e-newsletter for B2B and B2C professionals who want to develop and implement powerful email-marketing campaigns that build relationships with prospects and customers.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Privacy Policy|Learn More|Current Issue