If an uncertain economy has had one major effect on the face of marketing, it has been to change the way that budgets are spent. In the early days of marketing up swell, a marketing department was largely unaccountable for its expenses. For companies that could afford it, huge budgets were devoted strictly to advertising, with very little time or strategy devoted to the measurement of effectiveness of these efforts. Marketing was considered a necessary expense, with often intangible results.

Today, the standard has moved away from pumping massive budgets blindly into marketing and hoping that sales figures rise to cover expenses, and towards justifiable spending with measurable return on investment. The new motto is “do more with less.” More and more, marketing is seen not as a supplement to direct sales, but an alternative to it.

And why not? While salary budgets for sales departments are being cut back, a single marketing campaign can reach infinitely more prospects than traditional cold calling. Assuming that your prospect pool is substantially larger than your sales team has traditionally been able to reach, the law of averages is on your side – if you cast your web wide enough, you are bound to see some return on your marketing investment. Marketing can also be more efficient than sales – an uninterested prospect can waste valuable phone time for a salesperson, but a deleted email doesn’t. Additionally, opt-in marketing (like direct mail) allows a prospect to qualify themselves, leading to more targeted, more purposeful follow-up sales calls.

Email – the New Marketing

Of the suite of direct marketing options, email communications are becoming more and more prevalent as the preferred method of delivery. Email campaigns are timely; they can be developed and deployed in a mere few days, and can reference current events and “hot” hooks before they cool. Once a campaign has been developed, emails can be sent out to as many, or as few, names as desired with very little change in overhead. The entire campaign is relatively inexpensive to launch – no expensive shipping or materials costs, and no expensive mistakes.

Email also makes it easier for your prospects to respond. With just a few clicks of a button, they can choose to accept your offer, at their convenience, without dealing with pushy sales people. This makes response times much quicker than traditional postal mail campaigns, with most traffic from an email mailing coming within one to three weeks of launch. As email use increases, prospects become more comfortable with it as a method of response. Studies have shown that permission-based email is preferred, over postal mail and telemarketing, by 75% of consumers (DoubleClick).

Measuring the effectiveness of an email campaign is also much simpler than other forms of marketing. Email delivery programs can measure statistics on how many emails actually reached your prospects’ inboxes, how many were opened, how many were clicked. Traditional marketing methods will never be able to easily measure how many people looked up at an advertisement or how many opened a letter. Email campaigns have the ultimate flexibility – they can be quantified, tested, and adjusted to ensure the best possible return rate from your target audience.

Success of an email direct marketing campaigns is measured by the following metrics:

Open rates: How many recipients open the email you’ve sent, as opposed to deleting it without reading it (applies to HTML emails only)

Click through: How many recipients click on the links contained in your message

Response: How many recipients complete the action requested in the message, from downloading a white paper to signing up for a seminar/webinar

Conversion: How many leads generated from the campaign turn into actual sales

So what are the secrets of good metrics and a successful email campaign?