Are you getting the most ROI from your email?
Tough economic times are forcing Pharma companies to tighten their budgets and reduce marketing spending. Rather than cut spending on email marketing, Physicians Interactive® has recommendations on how to increase email effectiveness and increase ROI on your email campaigns.
E-mail is a highly effective marketing tool, and its ROI blows other non-e-mail related online marketing out of the water: according to Direct Marketing Association’s “Power of Direct” study, commercial e-mail’s ROI was $45.06 for every $1 spent, as compared to the ROI for non-e-mail-related online marketing of $19.94.1
Here are several tips to ensuring you are getting killer ROI on your email marketing:
- Segment, Segment, Segment! Not all your readers are alike; segmenting your list will enable you to provide more personalized, relevant content to the reader. The more relevant the content is to your reader, the higher your ability to influence their actions or outcome. Segmented emails have higher open and click rates than larger email sends to non-segmented groups.2
- Not all days are equal: Test sending your e-mail on non-business days or outside regular business hours. Studies show that more people are opening their e-mail on Sunday than on any other day of the week.3
- Keep subject lines short to increase open rates. A study conducted by MailerMailer3 shows that as subject lines increase open rates decrease. On average subject lines with less than 35 characters performed 5% better (average open rate was 19.64%) than emails with more than 35 characters (average open rate was 14.83%.
- Personalize both the subject line and the message to increase open and CTR. Personalizing only the subject shows a decrease in open and click rates – but personalizing both subject line and the email message shows an increase in opens and a significant increase in clicks3.
- Limit the number of calls to action to increase click rates. Keep your message and calls to action clear for readers and they will be more likely to click-through your email. A study conducted by NextStage Evolution4 found that email click-through rates (CTR) decrease drastically as the number of actions increase: CTR decreased by 57% when three actions were included on the email (as compared to one action).
- Monitor and Analyze results! Continuously track the performance of your e-mail and compare it to your goals. In addition the metrics directly associated with your email send (deliverability rate, open rate, CTR, unsubscribe rate) there are several important metrics that are necessary to determine whether the desired result was actually achieved. These include: conversion rate, revenue and ROI.
For more email marketing tips, or to learn how Physicians Interactive can work with you to create a highly effective email campaign, please contact Physicians Interactive at 800-794-6757 or info@physiciansinteractive.com.
1 Direct Marketing Association, “Power of Direct” study, October 2008.
2 Physicians Interactive, March 2009 Email Analysis.
3MailerMailer, “Email Marketing Metrics Report,” November 2008.
4 NextStage Evolution, February 2008.
