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Today, the ROI of a website is somewhat hard to calculate. While the building of your website may not translate directly into sales or new customers, the lack of a website or having a bad website can greatly damage your credibility as a company. This loss of credibility can have much more far-reaching effects than just losing sales. For instance, prospective employees may be examining your company’s website to determine if they want to work there. The general consensus is that investing in your web presence is rewarding, even if it is difficult to quantify.

Email Marketing is a different game, though no less rewarding. It’s much more similar to running an online advertisement, as you are able to directly track the effects of the email campaign and see exactly how many conversions it leads to. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, conversions can be any particular goal you have for your users. A user buying a particular product, a value based on the dollar amount of their purchase, or simply filling out the contact form on your website can all be called “conversions” – it all depends on the goal.

Unlike websites, not doing an email newsletter will probably not hurt your company’s credibility. However, bad looking or scammy email newsletters probably WILL hurt your company’s credibility – which is why we’re here to help.

$43.62 on the dollar

Just the ability to track ROI is great and all, but obviously it won’t matter if email campaigns aren’t effective in the first place. So, are they? In February/March of 2009, Forbes commissioned an Ad Effectiveness Survey which ranked email and e-newsletter marketing as the second-most effective tool for conversions (source ). Email Marketing Reports has more great statistics on why email marketing is effective, including a report that states that, on average, commercial email returns $43.62 for each dollar spent. The results are pretty conclusive and indicate that Email Marketing should NOT be ignored.

Ultimately it also comes down to your audience – I certainly won’t sit here and tell you email marketing is effective for every customer base or in every situation. However, the unique ability to track ROI and the fairly low cost barrier to entry means that it pretty easy to determine if it’s a worthwhile marketing strategy for your company.

» This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Business, General, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.