The Benefits of Quality over Quantity in Email Marketing

A Marketing Week study carried out in late 2010 indicated that over 50% of businesses surveyed expected their email marketing spend to increase in the next 12 months. The challenge for marketers is to understand how to maximise the return for this additional spend.

A common ethos amongst advertisers at the recent forefront of email marketing has been to forego the benefits of high price, high quality data for high volume, low cost data; the thought being that the more inboxes hit, the more likely the email is to get into the right ones. This practice is entirely unsustainable though, in that there is no consideration for the preservation of data quality. People who have signed up to such promotional sites often receive multiple emails per week, sometimes per day, diminishing responsiveness and damaging data in the longer term.

All of the apparent benefits of a low cost per thousand are lost when data does not respond to email advertising. Worse still, delivery platforms suffer negatively as a result of complaints (emails being flagged as spam by unwilling recipients), which subsequently leads to even poorer performance. All signs point to the maintainable future of email advertising being found in responsible, disciplined data management.

List owners who strictly limit the number of messages their dataset can receive in a given time period; those who realise that charging a certain cost per thousand to deter time-wasting advertisers; and those who ensure that the correct messages are sent to the correct people with selective client choices and appropriate targeting – these are the data suppliers who will all play a part in ensuring that email marketing can be a sustainable form of advertising long into the future.

Alex Prout, Senior Digital Planner/Buyer