Yet despite that seemingly good news, it appears that email marketing is finding it harder and harder to compete with other marketing channels such as mobile and social media for example, and some email marketers are reporting that their ROI is actually declining.

Some industry experts believe this is due to many email marketers missing opportunities to fully engage subscribers and increase their open rates because they are not personalising their emails enough, but others put it down to perhaps a more serious issue; that of email marketers failing to implement strategies to deal with shopping cart abandonment.

According to a survey carried out in October 2011 by Listrak, an “estimated $18 billion in revenue on the table every year because nearly 85% of the top e-tailers are doing nothing to recover lost sales due to shopping cart abandonment.

Whether you look at this figure in US Dollars or British Pounds, it is a staggering amount of money that is being left just lying around, most of which is there for the taking if email marketers took a more proactive approach to tackle the problem.

There is no doubt that email marketing remains a powerful marketing channel and could continue to be so for some considerable time to come despite reports of declining returns on investment but only if email marketers make more effort to recover a potentially huge share of revenue lost through shopping cart abandonment.

“According to Econsultancy’s 2012 Email Marketing Platforms Buyer’s Guide, the UK email marketing industry grew by an estimated 15.5% last year to a value of £388 million by the end of 2011”.

Consumers are by now very familiar and comfortable with email and probably loathe to losing it altogether despite their preferences for mobile. This hardly seems to indicate that email is suffering any detrimental effects from other marketing methods but rather complementing them and indeed growing because of them and so remaining a vital component in the marketing mix.

The only real problem faced by email marketers is if they fail to adapt their email campaigns for mobile users as to remain competitive and successful they will need to follow consumers wherever they go because it certainly won’t happen the other way around.

Tim Watson of email consultancy, Zettasphere, says:
“Mobile email has meant email is the first channel read in the morning and the last at night. The smartphone will for the first time connect some people to the online world who have until now been offline”.

The world of mobile communication isn’t standing still in terms of growing numbers or developing technology and so far most email marketers are managing to keep abreast of those developments and optimising their campaigns accordingly.

However, it’s expected that 2012 will see an even bigger demand for greater relevance and more effective targeting in email marketing campaigns and the need to optimise those campaigns for multiple platforms so email marketers still have a challenge on their hands in order to remain competitive and stand out from the crowd.

The continuing versatility and effectiveness of email marketing, its comparatively inexpensive operation and ROI potential has made it one of the most if not the preferred marketing methods in the world.

According to a recent global survey of over 900 marketing executives, 60 percent have stated their intention to increase their email marketing budgets in 2012. Helen Leggatt from Bizreport.com wrote:
“Most marketing executives, 92% to be exact, plan to increase or maintain current levels of marketing spend next year.
Out of the 939 executives surveyed 60% said they expect to raise their email marketing budgets in 2012, the top channel for increased spend. The top email marketing initiative for 2012 for 48% will be increasing subscriber engagement followed by improving segmentation and targeting (44%) and growing opt-in email lists (32%)”.
Businesses must also take into account that an ever growing number of consumers are now accessing the majority of their emails via mobile and so should also be optimising email campaigns for those devices or risk losing out on what is potentially a very lucrative market despite the ongoing recession.

In addition to mobile-optimised campaigns, social media is also expected to play an even greater part in next year’s marketing strategies with 54 percent of those surveyed saying they will invest more in social media marketing in 2012.

Although for the moment there’s no immediate end in sight for the current recession, it’s encouraging to know that despite financial restrictions and uncertainty, there are still some businesses confident enough to increase investments on their email marketing campaigns.

Writing for Econsultancy, Tim Roe claimed that a company’s activity in the weeks and months before the holiday is just as important as what they do when the event arrives.

He explained that it is possible to gauge a person’s engagement with a brand by monitoring open rates and looking at how many times they have visited a website.

In his view, this can be vital psychologically in the mind of the recipient, but – perhaps more importantly – such metrics can also affect the way people’s inbox deals with messages, giving emails greater or lesser importance and potentially treating them as spam.

Mr Roe pointed out that Christmas is a very popular time for email marketing campaigns, so brands should be looking at doing all they can to be a priority sender.

“Christmas is a big time for many businesses, and email marketing is playing an increasingly important role in the success of a marketing strategy. Because of this it is becoming vitally important to consider the longer-term value of your email subscribers,” he remarked.

The quest to boost email marketing ROI should see companies exploring every avenue, with Marketing Sherpa reminding advertisers that it is possible to compound email campaigns with word-of-mouth efforts.

Senior reporter Adam T Sutton noted how one email infrastructure provider prompted a huge increase in interest by harnessing this combination, offering incentives for customer referrals.

• Be everything to everybody.
• Get an old click.
• Ask for lots of time.
• Make a sale.

The only purpose of your leading nurturing email is getting the prospect taking an action which will reveal their interest in the matter of your content offered. There is merely shortage of time for anything else.

One of the most significant issues regarding gaining attention is being unique. The Web has been made saturated with redundancy by the ease of publishing content at quality levels greatly varying. As an email marketer, how many articles had you witnessed on the value of leading and nurturing? Similar is the case regarding your prospects. You are made to face a challenge on proving how much different you are from others by using similar messages.

Moreover, short is always preferred. You must be able to design an email in 150 words in such an active way that it does its job as efficiently as before. Rather you should aim for 100. Make it easier to scan. Check how it looks on a mobile device and how easy they are to read.

Dump HTML and use text only. Don’t download graphics and put them into use unless it is required. Neither you nor your customers have so much time to interpret them. They will overlook that and most probably, delete it.

You might feel pride while using those colorful and gorgeous graphics, but what worth are they if they are harassing your fame as an email marketer? Now let us go back again to the field of leading nurturing email.

At the end of the day, the metrics which will be worth measuring from an email are limited to click through rates, opening up links and bouncing one over the other. But after you have made them visit your webpage, your responsibilities as well as possibilities increase. You get to know and share about fields of interest, leisure hours, where they have to go next, if they are going to share their experience with someone else, and in what stage they are buying in.

And, when your email marketing campaign is restricted to a single focus, you’re challenged to create it in an even more meaningful and relevant way so that you could be relied upon throwing in the kitchen sink to try and merely get any old click.

• Maintain friendship with the social team in your organization: Just as you get to work with search engine marketing team in order to understand the process of integrating search terms in your mails, you must be aware of what customers are saying before deciding that they need you. The social team has been developing to expertise in social listening tools recently. Instead of developing same skills, try to tap their knowledge and keep focusing on utilizing the data rather than interpreting it. Those trigger phases may possibly trigger a much larger email marketing campaign.
• Identifying a partner for tests in the beginning: Once customers declare before the social media friends that they are interested in what your company has been providing, it’s quite difficult to process that unstructured data and transform that into actionable flags in the database. Have a look on your company’s vendors. Keep everything in track such as, focus on analytics, customer data and warehousing of data, and enquire if they are working having any initiative in order to parse social data. If they are, ask them the process of partnering with them on a few early tests. You will learn about some great things from these tests and it will also be easier to get more funds for accomplishing your programs in the forthcoming budget cycle.
• Privacy must be made a priority: It is dependent on the customer’s trust how far you can take advantage over your customers’ sayings in the public place. Your customers must have the trust on your company that all information provided by them will be kept private. As an email marketer, you must be concerned about privacy which may derail email marketing campaign. Have all the details about the privacy advocates in your company and support them fully. In exchange, you will be able to get the required information without spending a lot of time in the issue.

Last but not the least, it must be said that you should start developing your strategy regarding social media. Time has now arrived to move beyond just the “like” button and start pondering over the dat. You will just fall in love with social media once you realize what it does for your email marketing program.

Jonathan Treiber, Co-Founder and CEO of RevTrax, a leading provider of cross-channel and coupon program analytics had discussed important factors and challenges for email marketing coupons and covered precise examples of successful coupon programs in the recent webinar, “Key Techniques for Maximizing Results from Email-Based Coupons.”

Best Practices for Email Coupons:

• Use personalized coupons: “This makes a coupon specific to an individual, with their name, the nearest location and other details. Personalization has two effects: It typically drives higher user engagement and redemption because it’s more relevant. And, because the coupon is personalized to the individual, it can deter that individual from any type of fraudulent behavior, such as Photoshopping it or reposting it.”
• Don’t deliver the coupon via a downloadable PDF: “We always recommend against that because it’s not secure, promotes uncontrolled virility, and makes it very difficult to track and measure redemption,” Jonathan said. PDFs can be altered, uploaded and shared without authorization.
• Deliver the coupon on a landing page rather than in the email itself to avoid fraud: “It’s really best not to show the entire coupon in the email,” he said. “Show the coupon only when the user prints it. Also, limit the number of times a coupon can be printed.”
• Test coupon values: “This affords marketers with a way to constantly refine different strategies,” Jonathan said. “They can identify whether a 20-percent discount offer is necessary to drive business goals, or is 10 per cent off enough?”
• Measure and track the right coupon activities: “If a consumer prints a coupon, only 20 percent are likely to redeem it,” Jonathan said. “A lot of merchants think that if someone prints a coupon, they’ll automatically redeem it, but half of the time, they lost it or forget about it, or it sits on a counter and expires.”

Many merchants don’t track any coupon activity, he said. “They can’t do it, or they don’t have the time or resources. We encourage our clients to measure as often and as much as they can, because it’s a key benefit. It provides a level of measurement not available or possible without a coupon.”

What to measure? “Look at the number of redemptions, but also measure back to the particular marketing tactic. If you had 100 coupons redeemed, did these 100 coupons get redeemed from a marketing program on Facebook or from your email marketing activities, more specifically, from specific subscribers to your email rewards list?”

“Did redemptions come from a Google search on a particular keyword? What was the rate of redemption for each promotion?” Clients want those types of insights but have never been able to get them through email marketing historically.

According to the true form of relevance you must be relevant to all your subscribers, and that’s a long process. With 5000 to 500000 names in your mailing list, it will never be possible for you to be relevant to all of them simultaneously.

Now apply a bit of brain in this. Tap the data sources required or collect them. By making that relevant, you can shape up your communication with each and every subscriber, and for accomplishing this type of database infrastructure i.e. a relational database or data mart is required.

Relational databases are very important for maintaining one-to-many type relationships which is the need of every email marketer. Relational database is extremely useful in segmenting and targeting required relevance. Utilize your relational database by searching and selecting on date ranges and value ranges, thus making it possible for you to send the right message to a right person at right time.

Relational database enables you to have a table where each person has a record of their own, and then it is tied to another table consisting of the actions. Had it not been there, you would have to merge the data and each instance was to have a unique record. If you had already realised or decided that relational database is the only way to go, ensure that ESP is a part of your conversation from the very beginning. There are certain which you would require to take from them to make your plan a grand success. You must ask them if they like relational databases or if they can help you in creating data mart or offer integration to the solution regarding a data mart.

Ask them about subscriber keys also. How to find out that the person in database A is same as a person in database B? So, one field is required for that very person that keeps it united. A subscriber key is a field that contains a unique value which lets it identify each subscriber in your database. It is this ‘key’ only which makes all relational databases work and email marketing a convenient process of transaction.

Relevance continues to be successful in e-marketing and becoming more and more important as emails deal with social media, spamming and growing inbox clutter.

First comes the planning of your email marketing campaign

An achievable plan is quite similar to your achievable target. Planning involves deciding upon steps that will lead you to taste the rare fruit of success. Advanced planning helps the marketer to complete all the initialized procedures prior to sending the targeted information to the enlisted clients. If required one should consider rechecking every step and rethink every moment to narrow down mishaps.

Determining target audience to assure the success of email marketing

Making the promotional email relevant is the need of the hour. After identifying the target audience belonging to particular niche community, the next task lined up will include determining their specific needs and requirements. A creative mail allows the reader to read more, coaxes them to click on the links and show the required interest to visit the official page. Determining several target audience is better. It gives the confidence to rely on your service. At the same time different niche groups will have different demands. Enlisting all the demands categorically is mandatory to reach out in an effective manner.

Setting objectives for email marketing is must

Recognizing the major aim of launching the email marketing campaign will give each online business conductor a greater picture of the ambience he is dreaming of. Spreading awareness about a new product or a user friendly service will improve creating message with salient features of the product to ensure information retention on behalf of the reader.

Budget the email marketing program

Decide upon a budget for the ongoing or forthcoming email marketing. It is always a good idea to have an estimate of the kind of investment to be involved. Escalating costs can draw a hole in your pocket and leave investors frustrated if results are slow to show up. The bulk email sender will allow marketers to connect with the customer, but then it is the message inside that should create miracles in the long run. Luck favors to those who apply their soft skills at the right moment.