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Nov 03, 2009
Article

New Chart: Do Email Tactics That Take More Work Get a Bigger Payoff?

SUMMARY: In today's economy, it is common for marketing departments to be understaffed and overburdened. This problem makes the amount of time and effort required to implement a tactic nearly as important a consideration as the effectiveness of the tactic.
Marketers Balance Effort and Effectiveness to Determine Usage of Email Tactics

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This chart shows the balancing act that marketers must perform to maintain maximum email effectiveness with minimal effort.

"Email to house lists" and "delivering content relevant to a segment" are roughly equal in usage. However, the latter increases campaign complexity and requires a greater level of effort, but it is also much more effective.

As the name implies, "event triggered autoresponder emails" are automated and require some setup time but much less ongoing effort to implement than the tactic of delivering relevant content. It is also about half as effective.

Effectiveness comes with a price. The high cost of too much staff time and effort that some tactics require can more than offset the value of using them. When an ineffective tactic is also high maintenance, the decision to reduce or eliminate it from the program altogether becomes much easier.
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Comments about this Article

Nov 03, 2009 - Dianne Binford of Consultant says:
A few years ago, most retailers thought that the effort to achieve multi-channel seamlessness was too high; now the industry realizes that the necessary effort was inevitable. By definition, positive ROI is always worth any amount of effort; after all, the cost of the effort is already in the ROI equation. But we get stuck in the rut, spinning our wheels, slamming our customers' inboxes with too-frequent, non-relevant emails, so who has time for the effort to think through innovative strategies to keep moving stepwise toward the ultimate goal of relevance and synergy with our customers.



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