People love free shipping emails and other tips!

Marketing Charts recently released a great chart documenting what types of communicates lead to customer purchases. This is extremely helpful if you offer a product. Of course each businesses’s audience is different and will respond to things differently. One restaurant I work with responds well to amazing text deals but email can sometimes be a struggle.

Here is the chart:

Marketing Chart's Research

 

Some interesting notes from this research:

1. Retargeting is at the bottom of the list. I wonder if people artificially lowered this number because it creeps them out. But it is interesting that direct mail ranks higher on the list. I suppose it has a lot to do with the quality of the direct mail list you buy.

2. What is interesting is that the top three items are all emails! I love email marketing.  Email is a great form of permission marketing and its something businesses should always be thinking about, “How do we increase our permission base?”.

3. The Staggering drop off between two and three. Free shipping and discounts reign supreme here. I suspect this tactic will become more and more prominent as we increasingly stop buying things in brick and mortar locations and instead switch to online stores. Free shipping will be the gold standard and is already used by things like Amazon prime to attract consumers.

Effective Emails

Why do people open emails from companies? What makes an effective marketing email? Well these stats from Marketing Charts seem to show that deals are the primary reason that emails effect buying behavior.

But this also covers info regarding other forms of marketing. Email ranks at the top of this list and I think it might have something to do about permission marketing. You have to opt in to receive those emails which means you are already interested in the product. If you are the marketer you have already qualified the prospect. Permission marketing is the way to go!

 

Email works when deals are offered

 

On why Email is better than Facebook for marketing.

A new Marketing Charts came to my email this week.

Stats on Most Effective Digital Marketing Efforts

Facebook has investors. When you have to pay share holders you always need to be generating more revenue. Facebook has become increasingly more commercialized since it’s IPO. Now a company’s Facebook posts will get to 6% or less of their fans! Ridiculous! Organic reach has been significantly dropping (via Tech Crunch):

  • Feb 2012 = 16%
  • Sep 2013 = 12.60%
  • Nov 2013 = 10.15%
  • Dec 2013 = 7.83%
  • Mar 2014 = 6.51%

Why does Organic reach drop? So you can spend money to reach the fans you have worked hard to collect.

But this should be a  warning to all marketers for all social channels. Social Media networks control the flow of information. They will use that control after gaining our dependence for marketing. Twitter just proudly told everyone that 30% of a company’s followers will see their posts. I am predicting this will begin to drop as the need for revenue increases. After all Twitter has only been publicly traded for less than a year. It is conceivable that they will take a similar course as Facebook.

This is why email will become more and more crucial to marketers. Email does not require a channel owned by a interested party. The only thing that keeps your open rate low is the quality of your list and the quality of your content.

It is up to you.

Maybe that is the scary part but it is also the easiest to fix.

Kevin