Email has become an integrated part of nearly everyone’s lives, with millions of emails being sent around the world daily. Chances are, if you have a computer with internet access available to you, you have used email quite recently. Email came into existence in the early 1990’s and while it was useful for any number of things, marketers quickly discovered its usefulness in terms of marketing. This was due to it being very cheap to send emails and allowed marketers to reach a vast audience. By 1995, the number of email advertisements sent outnumbered regular email.
As the years passed, email marketing dropped considerably in its effectiveness due to user backlash because of spam and privacy concerns. To circumvent these issues, marketers turned to opt-in email which means a user actively agrees to be the recipient of specific email. This allows marketers to only send email to people who are interested in a certain product or service. However, there are a number of things that marketers can do to improve on this. For example, it may be prudent to decrease you mailing list size to increase performance. It’s important to weed out E-mail addresses on your mailing list that are not performing, which means they haven’t responded to any emails in a few months. Perhaps there is a better marketing method that could be employed to reach these non-responders.
Asides from verifying the mailing list, it can also be important to take a hard look at the emails you’ve been sending out. Do the designs of the email and message still fit and are the content elements still relevant? Are there enough calls to action within the email? All of these are good questions to ask and if any are ever in question then an email redesign may be necessary.
