E-Mail: Online Marketing's Overlooked Stepchild?

Summary: A good reminder about e-mail's strengths from Clickz's expert Jeanne Jennings. E-mail may not be as trendy as sponsored links, but it has been proven time and again that a carefully monitored emailing campaign can buils serious results. Jeanne gives a refresher course about what to look at.

Source: Clickz

First paragraphs:

Before SEO, before PPC, before SEM, before interstitials, dayparting, and road blocks, there was email. But lately, I've felt email has taken a backseat to search engines, banners, and other types of online marketing. Case in point:

A recent survey delving into how marketers choose online agencies lists "expertise in search engine marketing" front and center, along with a number of other factors. E-mail expertise? Not on the list.

Many large organizations that optimize banners and search to the nth degree seem to consider email an afterthought. Their segmentation, targeting, testing, and analysis are focused on the former. E-mail is sent and reported on, but not scrutinized to the extent of other online marketing efforts.

E-mail has long suffered from an identity crisis. Tell people you do online marketing, and they immediately ask about PPC search. Tell them you do email, and too often the response is "Oh, you do spam."
E-mail is like any other type of marketing. It takes time to perfect your approach. Many marketers seem impatient with email. If they don't hit a homerun out of the park with their initial efforts, they stop trying.

I'm big on industry benchmarks. Though meeting them isn't a requirement for success, they do provide a framework for projections. Yet instead of inspiring marketers to test, benchmarks are often viewed as unattainable ideals. "Those numbers must be inflated" is an all-to-common reaction. I've worked with clients more than once over the years where we took a dog of an email program and turned it around, creating programs that rival or surpass those "inflated" industry benchmarks. It's not rocket science, just marketing fundamentals. Here's a quick refresher:

1. Track. To get where you're going, you have to know where you are. The most effective tracking goes beyond opens and clicks, following readers all through the process. It tracks their activity on the landing page and any other site pages or offline stepping stones that lead to the desired action, be it entering contact information for lead generation, making an on- or offline purchase, or something else.

Read the full article at Clickz