Email Marketing Continues to Bode Well for Online Retailers

Yesterday, I finished reading through The State of Retailing Online 2007 report issued by shop.org and Forrester. The report has a lot of interesting and compelling insights for email marketing.
Here are a few highlights:

• “Paid search is the most effective marketing tactic for customer acquisition … email marketing continued to the most effective for customer retention.”

• Email marketing to house lists the most popular and effective. 91% of online retailers do this. Email marketing to prospecting lists is less common with only 27% of retailers doing this. Makes sense.

• “… retailers find that emails about new products are much more effective than simple transactional or sale messages.”

Great points. I found that the third point to be particularly insightful. At the most recent Shop.org conference, I led an email marketing panel with two of our customers — Trek Bikes and Hancock’s of Panducah.

Both customers explained that their most effective campaigns entailed introducing new bikes or the latest fabrics, respectively. I like to refer to these as “inside the castle” campaigns. They are often very successful because they build trust with the audience by giving them the inside scoop to what’s going on. This success ultimately translates into higher number of conversions with larger orders.