How to create a marketing campaign with 4,300% roi

Looking for a marketing campaign that pays off? Email marketing is your answer, according to Direct Marketing Association statistics reported in MediaPost. The average email marketing campaign generates a stunning 4,300 percent return on investment and made $42.08 for every dollar spent. Business owners report that in 2013, nearly one-fourth of their sales were generated via email marketing.

Want to improve your email marketing to even better heights? Here’s what works best, according to the 2014 Email Marketing Metrics Report.

Earlier in the week is better. Emails sent on Monday have the highest open rates, averaging about 12 percent. Tuesday was the second-best day to send emails, and Friday ranked third. Emails sent on Saturday have the lowest open rates.

While Sunday emails have a fairly low open rate, those that do get opened enjoy a high click-through rate. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Monday emails—even though they’re most likely to be opened—are least likely to get clicked. Chances are, Sunday email readers have more leisure to act, while Monday readers are rushing through the first email barrage of the work week. Your Monday emails may have to work harder to get clicks.

Activity peaks early in the day. Emails are most likely to be opened between 8 AM and 12 PM local time. Although that’s not necessarily when they’re sent (you might be sending out your emails at 3 a.m., for instance), sending emails in the afternoon might be less successful.

Keep it brief. Emails with short subject lines (4 to 15 characters) have the highest average open rate (16.8 percent).

Get personal (but not spammy). Messages with personalized subject lines are less likely to be opened, but if opened, they’re more likely to be clicked than non-personalized emails. The study theorizes that since email spammers used to trick people by personalizing subject lines, many recipients are still leery of this. However, if the personalization is well done and relevant to the recipient, it actually encourages users to open and click. Avoid any subject line wording that could be perceived as spammy, such as capitalization, exclamation points or hyperbolic promises.

How do you know if your email marketing campaign is successful? In general, the report says, a good benchmark is a 2 percent to 12 percent open rate for a B2C email marketing campaign and a 5 percent to 15 percent open rate for a B2B email campaign.

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