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OTTAWA - December 9, 2008 - Campaigner (www.campaigner.com), a leading email marketing solutions provider, announced today that targeting, personalization and deliverability were among the top email marketing trends and challenges small businesses tackled in 2008. Campaigner also announced its 2009 email marketing predictions for small businesses - with email automation, integrated campaigns and back-to-basics list hygiene expected to be the top focal points for small businesses in the coming year.
2008 Trends - Small Businesses Move from Blast Emails to 1to1 Marketing
Small businesses challenged themselves in 2008 to improve email marketing relevance by moving away from email blasts to more targeted communications. The following trends and challenges played a role in this shift:
Targeting
Email list segmentation moved from being a marketing buzzword to a best practice among many small businesses. Increased segmentation helped improve the relevance and targeting of small business email marketing campaigns. Many small businesses made a more conscious effort to use basic and advanced list-building features and technologies offered by the top email marketing services, allowing them to create multiple, highly customized lists based on specific audience attributes.
A number of studies touting the benefits of list segmentation for improving email marketing targeting may have played a role in persuading small business owners to follow the email practices used by larger big box stores and online retailers. For example:
- According to Shop.org's State of Retailing Online 2008 study, 58 percent of retailers surveyed said they segment their lists based on preferences and purchasing data
- 67 percent surveyed reported that segmentation improves the effectiveness of their email campaigns.
Personalization
Like segmentation, small businesses have long understood the value of personalizing their email marketing communications, but have lagged behind larger organizations with more sophisticated and advanced marketing technologies. In 2008, more small businesses took the simple, but important step of not only using mail merge functions to ensure that each email salutation is addressed to the individual, but also using list attribute features that allow them to personalize messages according to stored personal attributes such as demographics and buying behavior.
This trend aligns with the Aberdeen Group's 2008 study, Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your Customers.
- Aberdeen's research found that 96 percent of organizations surveyed believe that personalization can improve email marketing performance, but the majority also said that personalizing email content remained a challenge
- Organizations that said they currently use email personalization reported a 57 percent increase in average order values.
Deliverability
Despite a plethora of industry studies confirming email marketing's effectiveness and unbeatable ROI, deliverability concerns persist among businesses of all sizes. According to JupiterResearch's Email Marketing Buyer's Guide, 2008, 70 percent of survey respondents cited email deliverability services as more important than cost (69 percent) when selecting an email marketing service.
Not just for large enterprise organizations anymore, leading email service providers offer small businesses an array of deliverability services, including automated CAN SPAM compliance, dedicated deliverability personnel and relationships with third-party deliverability services such as Return Path.
In addition to the important role email marketing services continue to play in supporting and advancing email marketing best practices, 2008 also was the year of renewed personal responsibility as marketers took a more active role to improve their deliverability rates by maintaining clean lists and improving email relevance with better targeting and personalization tactics.
The industry trend calling for marketers to take email marketing best practices into their own hands is reflected in the following article published in 2008:
Top Firms Fumble Opt Outs: Return Path
(http://directmag.com/email/news/1118-return-path-study/index.html)
The Email Deliverability Blame Game: Marketers need to look in the mirror
(http://www.dmnews.com/The-e-mail-deliverability-blame-game-Marketers-need-to-look-in-the-mirror/article/109512/)
For examples of small business email marketing success stories using segmentation, personalization and other techniques to improve email marketing performance and deliverability, please visit http://www.campaigner.com/campaigner-success.php
2009 Predictions - Recession Spurs Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses Take Email Relevance to the Next Level
Email marketing's effectiveness and ROI have been proven, but in the current recession economy small businesses will rely on email marketing more than ever before to stay in touch with their customers. Layoffs from large enterprises also will spur entrepreneurship as corporate professionals start their own businesses as freelancers and consultants. Email marketing will be the cornerstone of Web and marketing strategies for many of these new enterprises.
In 2009, small businesses will continue to focus on improving the targeting and relevance of their campaigns. This will mean smaller, more precise email lists and a continuation of the 2008 trends to move away from mass emails to 1-to-1 marketing.
Email Automation for Small Businesses
In 2008, new technologies came on the market that enabled small businesses to design, create and conduct automated trigger email campaigns. With 2008 trends moving small businesses toward fewer, more targeted email communications, 2009 will be the year when small businesses embrace email automation, which also will enable them to improve the timing for delivering their campaigns.
Simple-to-use automation features increasingly being adopted by small businesses allow them to create email trigger campaigns that send highly relevant messages to the right individual at exactly the right moment based on a specified time, date, event or action.
Small Businesses Step Up Integrated Campaigns
Small businesses have long embraced SEO and SEM tactics. The rising popularity of social media and social networking has taken online marketing and optimization to a new level. In 2009, more small businesses will integrate email marketing campaigns with SEO, SEM and social media tactics.
Growing small business adoption of more advanced personalization and email automation tactics also will mean closer integration between email marketing, CRM and lead generation systems. This cross-pollination of data enabled by technologies currently available to small businesses will greatly improve upon email marketing's already impressive and unbeatable ROI - $45+ for every dollar invested (Direct Marketing Association, 2008).
Back-to-Basics List Hygiene
Lingering concerns from 2008 about deliverability will spur many small businesses to scrub their email lists and subscriber data in 2009. Economic pressures for improving performance across all marketing channels also will contribute to this trend, in addition to the need for clean data when integrating email marketing with CRM and lead generation systems. The result for the bottom line? Businesses that take the time to practice basic list hygiene in 2009 and integrate email marketing with CRM and lead generation systems stand to gain a great deal, including reduced sales cycles, better leads and significant time and cost savings.
"Despite the economy, 2009 promises to be an exciting year for small businesses," said Luc Vezina, head of marketing for Campaigner. "Boom time or bust, small businesses have more agility and flexibility than larger organizations and email marketing is the perfect fit, especially with today's technology allowing small businesses to market like the bigger players. We expect to see smaller email lists in 2009 that yield better results for small businesses. Better targeting also means happier customers who will get more relevant email messages."
To learn more about improving your email marketing campaigns, or to get started with email marketing, please visit Campaigner's Email Marketing Education Center at http://www.campaigner.com/education.php
About Campaigner
Campaigner's software-as-a-service email marketing solutions enable organizations to have highly personalized one-to-one email dialogues with their customers, measure how they respond, and analyze those responses to interact in a more intelligent, automated way - resulting in more profitable relationships. It is part of a total Software as a Service (SaaS) business communications offered by Protus that also includes MyFax, the fastest-growing Internet fax service used by individuals, small, medium and large business, and the my1voice feature-rich virtual PBX service. Additional information is available at www.campaigner.com.
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