Marketing: Success Depends on the Details

How often are you reminding your clients that you are still alive? That you still want their business? As the playing field continues to evolve, reminding clients that you are still out there, working hard, and looking forward to working for them, is important.

Many people who find themselves a bit slow, are (hopefully) finding the time to do some much needed marketing. And for those who are still busy? You should be marketing when you're busy - in fact, you shouldn't stop marketing at all. The key, is to be thoughtul about your promotional campaign.

So, what details will help you be the most effective? How frequently? When? How?

(Continued after the Jump)

We've done a fair amount of research on the subject, and here are some significant statistics that have born themselves out to be true from multiple sources. You can find more stats at EmailStatCenter.

Monthly emails and content and frequency options positively impacted a company's reputation. - Habeas (2008)

Wednesday was the best day of the week in the third quarter of 2007 to send email in terms of click (3.9%) and open rates (25.4%). - eROI (2007)

Most marketers send email to their customers once a week. - Shop.org, State of Retailing Online 2007 report (Sept. 2007)

45% of small businesses execs want to receive the (email) newsletter weekly, 34% said monthly. - Bredin Business Information (2007)

63.8% of retailers conduct up to three email campaigns each month. - Internet Retailer (Aug 2006)

79% of the respondents said they hit the "report spam" button when they don't know who the sender is. - Email Sender and Provider Coalition (2007)

21% of the emails reviewed appeared completely blank when images were turned off, or stripped inside a variety of email clients. - Email Experience Council (2007)

44% of email users said email inspired at least one online purchase and 41% said it prompted at least one offline purchase. - JupiterResearch's The Social and Portable Inbox (2008)

66% of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through email. - ExactTarget, "2008 Channel Preference Survey" (2008)

For advertising-oriented lists, 57% of marketers surveyed said that "emailing unique content by segment" produced routinely justifiable results. - MarketingSherpa "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008" (2008)

69% of at-work email users usually view emails in their preview panes. - MarketingSherpa (2007)

80% of at-work users in the US rely on Outlook, which offers preview panes. - MarketingSherpa (2007)

Most common screen resoltion is 1024 X 768. - OneStat.com (April 2007)

64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices, according to new data. - MarketingSherpa, in partnership with SurveySampling (2007)

64% of online merchants keep key points of content high up in the body of the message. - Internet Retailer (2007)

Utilizing a professional company and/or their tools to test your image rendering across multiple email clients often helps to increase response up to as much as 87%. - Email Experience Council - Email Rendering Report (2007)

A typical landing page visitor spends only 5 seconds on the page. - Marketing Experiments

Seven in 10 US Internet users said they judged these "from" and "subject" lines when deciding whether to report an email as spam. - E-Mail Sender and Provider Coalition and Ipsos (December 2006)

64% of small businesses execs said they decide whether or not to open the (email) newsletter based on who it's from. - Bredin Business Information (2007)

40% of marketers restrict their personalization efforts to the salutation. - Responsys Survey: The State of Personalization (2006)

While there is a lot more insightful information at EmailStatCenter, these are several of the items that are applicable to what we do. Keep in mind while reading items, that there's a difference between B2B and B2C, and you need to know which of these markets you are reaching out to, and segmenting and designing your outreach specific to them. Also take note - some of the above details are about retail marketing, so consider how that might be different from your efforts, if it is.

While it may seem obvious to many, for example, that sending a B2B e-mail at 10pm on a Friday night is a bad idea, knowing how to fine-tune your delivery time and day is important. Knowing as many details as possible helps increase the efficacy (and thus ROI) on your marketing campaign.

As to the "How?" There are several photo-centric services. Adbase, which we've mentioned and reviewed before, as well as AgencyAccess. Read their FAQ's, their white papers, their help pages, their how-to's. Getting it right in your outreach to new and old clients is critical. Put your best foot forward, and do things right, it's your future we're talking about.

---

Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.