Are you using email marketing in your business? What results are you getting?

The reason I ask is that I just came across a really interesting new report about email marketing across different sectors that I thought that I’d share with you. Whilst many people argue that social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, MySpace etc are taking over from some of the other, more traditional marketing channels, email and its 1 to 1 nature still is and will remain important.

However, like all marketing, to make sure that you are getting the results that you desire you should be benchmarking and testing the effectiveness of your messages all of the time. The new report I mentioned comes from UK based permission marketing company Sign-Up.to and should prove very useful. The report is short and makes some fascinating reading. A couple of the highlights that the report picked out include:

• Restaurants, when using permission-based email marketing, have benefited over the course of the last year in their open rates (people paying attention to your email) and click throughs (people taking action in response to your email) as they have moved to focusing on offering more vouchers and discounts. By thinking about their customers, listening to them and giving them what they are looking for they have been able to boost engagement significantly.
• Music retail follows a similar path with improvements in opens and click throughs as they lead with free track giveaways, discounts etc to improve engagement.
• Finally, the legal & accounting sector also saw big rises in open rates when they moved towards being advice rather than sales driven as this has helped them build credibility with business customers looking for guidance in the challenging economic times that we find ourselves in.

The table below shows a summary table for all sectors that were surveyed.

Source: www.sign-up.to

You can download a full PDF copy of the report by clicking on the link here: http://www.sign-up.to/email-marketing-benchmark/2010BenchmarkReport.pdf

Which sector are you in? Do your results compare?

Thanks to S Migol for the image.