Aptus Consultants

Email has been around for nearly 30 years, and its mass uptake has grown pretty well hand in glove with the growth of business and domestic internet access. Indeed it could be argued that in the early days of the home internet when dial up was the norm, email was a rather more beneficial service than the ‘World Wide Wait’ experience of accessing websites.

In many ways Email is an ideal communication tool because it is:

• Personal, so can be precisely targeted to the exact individual you want to contact.
• Auditable, so you can track how effective it is in terms of whether the recipient opens it, responds to it or even rejects it.
• High impact, because it can incorporate rich media such as images or video links. Interactive, allowing the recipient to respond immediately or provide comment on the content.
• Widely used, with an estimated 72% of UK individuals having a personal email account, rising to 85% amongst the AB social groups.
• Low cost, with the investment in producing the email normally being limited to the time taken to produce the associated content.

Email can be used for a wide variety of business purposes above and beyond administration, including promotion, relationship building and client retention. As to its effectiveness, here are a few interesting stats.

• The UK Email Marketing Benchmark Survey 2010 showed that over 19% of consumers who received a finance or insurance related email opened it, and that 2.3% of recipients positively responded to it.
• The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in Feb/March 2009 revealed that small business email and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO
• Seven out of ten UK marketers surveyed by the UK Direct Marketing Association in 2009 expected expenditure on email marketing to increase over the next 12 months
• According to research conducted by the US Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generates a return on investment of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009.

So why aren’t more IFA’s and financial planners using email for marketing and ongoing client communications? One of the main inhibitors used to be a perceived technology barrier. Well the good news is that there are now a wide variety of tools available such as Mail Chimp, which can help organisations to run their own email campaigns by:

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  Enabling their clients to simply sign up for receipt of regular newsletters.
• Generating newsletters based on the content published on the business’s site, thus providing the recipient with current and engaging information.
• Making it easy to design professional, high impact emails which incorporate images, videos, site links etc.
• Managing the business’s email lists, including deduplication, segmentation, unsubscribing etc.
• Scheduling email campaign delivery times and dates, and managing their distribution.
• Monitoring campaign performance (emails received, opened, clicked through etc).

So while it is entirely right to investigate the newer technologies such as Twitter, and to work them in to your communications mix, please do not forget the humble email. It might just still be the most effective marketing weapon that you've got!