Your E-mail is Selling More than You Know

Most e-mail managers know it’s probably a safe bet their program drives more sales than it gets credit for.

A recent study by marketing-services provider Epsilon indicates e-mail may be driving more sales than even the channel’s most ardent supporters believe.

According to Epsilon, one third of 1,517 consumers recently surveyed said they usually visit merchants’ Web sites directly rather than click on links in e-mail.

Also, 50% of those surveyed said the mere fact that they receive permission-based e-mail from a company makes them more likely to buy products from the sender in the future regardless of the channel through which the purchase takes place.

Granted, self-reported behavior is notoriously unreliable, but these figures would indicate marketers are not crediting e-mail with a significant percentage of sales the channel drives.

“The vast majority of the clients we work with measure their e-mail based on direct-response measures from the campaigns they send out,” said Kevin Mabley, senior vice president, Epsilon Strategic Services. “That would include clicks and opens and, where they can measure it, the conversions that happen on their Web sites.”

However, he said: “An e-mail program is worth far more than just clicks and conversions measured in direct transactions.”

Mabley added that most marketers are also too conservative in giving e-mail credit for post-click conversions, or sales that take place long after the click.

“Sometimes it’s 24 hours; sometimes it’s 48 hours, but they don’t take credit for conversions for much longer than that,” he said.

Also according to Epsilon, 60% of the women in its survey and 49% of the men said the save e-mail in their inboxes and refer to them later when making purchases.

“In my mind, ‘later’ is beyond the typical 24 to 48 hours that a lot of our clients would credit e-mail with when they’re looking at direct-response measures,” said Mabley.

He added that e-mail managers can implement some fairly straightforward practices to get a better gauge of the sales their programs are driving.

“What I would do is start with the ones you know are direct transactions and then work with the gray matter,” he said. “If someone clicks on something, goes to the Web site, puts something in their shopping cart and makes a transaction, that’s pretty easily attributable to the e-mail channel directly.”

To measure sales driven by e-mail, but completed through other channels, such as in a store or by phone, Mabley recommends implementing common direct-marketing sales-tracking techniques, such as coupon codes or asking customers where they learned of a sale.

One reason most marketers don’t use these common tactics with e-mail may be because the numbers already look so good without them, said Mabley.

“Even with conservative amounts of credit, e-mail is already immensely profitable, so marketers are less inclined to see what they can attribute to e-mail beyond the direct response metrics,” he said.

However, Mabley said, marketers who don’t do the work to give e-mail is proper sales credit are probably also not allocating resources properly.

“If you have a more accurate view of which channels are driving purchases, you can optimize your media spend better,” he said. “If it turns out e-mail should get more credit, you should migrate more of your dollars online.”