Admit it—your email marketing strategy has fallen to the wayside. The glamor of social media has stolen the spotlight with its breakneck-speed evolution and endless buzz.

More of an afterthought in many organizations, email has really lost its thunder in the digital shuffle.

But this is one trusty marketing channel that deserves its fair share of TLC. Here are five reasons it’s time to shake the dust off your outdated email marketing strategy and reinvigorate your campaigns.

1. Email is high-ROI.

Email’s incredible ROI continues to dominate all other forms of digital marketing. For every dollar you spend on email, you stand to make $40, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Talk about bang for your buck!

Now is the time to invest well-honed email strategies. Ensure your campaigns offer value-centric content and clear calls to action to maximize results.

2. Email is more relevant than ever.

Thanks to the advent of the smartphone, an email renaissance is in full swing. Nokia Siemens estimates that there are 494 million mobile broadband subscribers in the entire world today — with 4.5 billion (yep, BILLION) anticipated by 2020. This exploding smartphone use is reaffirming the relevance of email marketing because email now goes everywhere we go.

To capitalize on this trend, be sure your messages render as well on mobile as they do on desktop and web-based email clients. Don’t forget to mobile-optimize landing pages too! And try some tests of unconventional email deployment times—you may be surprised by the results in this era of 24/7 accessibility.

3. Email is trusted.

In a recent survey of internet users, startup entertainment platform Adpropo found that respondents had a more positive perception of email advertising than any other form of digital marketing. CAN-SPAM regulations and savvy spam filters have advanced the cause of legitimate email marketing, building a level of trust between recipients and the brands that successfully land in inboxes.

Test your email thoroughly—and often—to ensure your messages are steering clear of junk boxes. Keep an eye on bounce results, too, for insights on rejected messages.

4. Email is engaging.

People really are reading your email—or at least giving it a good skim. The folks at Litmus, a premium email testing application, say that 77 percent of opened emails are read in the very best campaigns. The last five client messages we’ve tracked here at CUnet show roughly 80% of opens engaging for more than four seconds.

Be sure to include engagement time metrics in your email analyses, and experiment with new approaches when you see results falling short.

5. Email insights are free at CUnet.

For a limited time, CUnet will give your email marketing a complimentary once-over as part of its free digital marketing audit offer. We’ll evaluate your performance metrics against industry baselines, assess your adherence to evolving best practices from code to copy to design, and offers insights on how to lift performance through strategic segmented messaging.

Ready to get started?

Tags: CAN-SPAM, CUnet, email marketing, Ericsson, higher education, Higher education marketing, marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2012 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.