Email marketing is considered to be a primary tool with which marketers can target clientele in sizable groups. This basic functionality enables marketers to station their campaigns as being extremely low cost with a high rate of return on generating cold leads. Furthermore, email marketing enables sales representatives with the opportunity to interact with their customer base in real time and generate sales at the convenience of the customer rather than pushing for a marketing campaign. An email is read by the recipient at their own free time making the selection of product or service to be much more powerful than procuring hard sales or forcefully introducing a concept to an unknown customer base. With the low cost of generating large amounts of emails and digital processing fees plummeting on a daily basis email marketing has undoubtedly become one of the most sort after electronic marketing techniques currently ( Hartemo, 2016) .
The Design of Experiment
Generic
Detail
(1) To establish the cause-and-effect relationships in the business processes, a Three-Factor Experiment was conducted since it is mostly considered in various experimental designs that allow the use of many factors. There is either low or high response rate in this design. Three main factors are E-Mail Heading, E-mail Open and E-Mail Body with each having two options, result - eight combinations.
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Text
Html
Text
No
Yes
Yes
No
Text
Html
Text
Html
Html
| Heading | Email Open | Body | Response Rate |
| Generic | No | Text |
46 |
| Detailed | No | Text |
34 |
| Generic | Yes | Text |
56 |
| Detailed | Yes | Text |
68 |
| Generic | No | HTML |
25 |
| Detailed | No | HTML |
22 |
| Generic | Yes | HTML |
21 |
| Detailed | Yes | HTML |
19 |
| Generic | No | Text |
38 |
| Detailed | No | Text |
38 |
| Generic | Yes | Text |
59 |
| Detailed | Yes | Text |
80 |
| Generic | No | HTML |
27 |
| Detailed | No | HTML |
32 |
| Generic | Yes | HTML |
23 |
| Detailed | Yes | HTML |
33 |
(
2)
According to the above tabulated results the average response rate increases to 53.75 when the email message is sent out as a text message only. This attribute drops to 25.25 when email messages are sent out as HTML. The HTML drop is significantly lower than the overall average as well which is 38.81. The headings on the other hand do not impart such significant differences as the average response rate with generic headings is 36.xx while with detailed is 40.xx and the average being 38.xx. According to these results the best possible email that might have the highest response rate could be an email that has a detailed heading which is inquisitive and the body of the email be written in simple text rather than HTML. Our below graphical representation also gives out the same analysis. The results have been tabulated with 95% confidence levels on all the inferences made henceforth.
Calculating Confidence Interval Using Z score
Based on the Z score chart the value of Z for 95% confidence level is 1.96 while the formula for calculating the confidence interval is as below
Where x-bar = mean, z = z-score, n = number of observations and σ is the standard deviation. From our graphical and tabulated results earlier we can determine that the mean (x-bar) for all the values is 38.81 and the standard deviation amounts to 17.64. Plugging such values with n = 16, we procure the following confidence intervals.
|
Upper Bound |
47.45 |
|
Lower Bound |
30.17 |
The main Actions for the Increasing Response Rates
(3) The results of the data that are tabulated via the interaction charts clearly depict that in order to improve the response rate of email marketing, there has to be amendments made to the structure of the email. The primary factor is the content of the email which mainly resides in the body of the email, or the text that is normally written as the message. According to our study it is substantiated that a customer normally only addresses the content of the email for 1 to 3 seconds after which he or she may decide to read further or remove the message to the trash bin of their email client.
From our tabulated data it can be seen that detailed headings lead to customers not willing to open an email and short headings with inquisitive question marks that are interacting with any potential issue that the customer might be facing have more reaction from customers who not only delve into the content of the email but also engage with the support centre of the business in question ( Miller & Charles, 2016) . In addition to the inquisitive, personalized heading, the text leading to whether or not the customer takes any action on the matter should be personalized along with being simplistic and concise. It also should lead the customer to taking action and contacting the business as soon as possible to avail the offer or the promotion that is provided in the email. Since the target market would be existing customer scepticisms on the genuinely of the offer would not be a problem since the client would have engaged with the services earlier as well.
The Overall Strategy for Business Process Improvement
(4) The intrinsic goal of any business is to ensure that they have a robust and loyal customer database. For such a particular characteristic the transactions made by any business should never be based on randomness or on the idea of dissociation, the business should look forth to making a permanent relationship with its customer base and its priority should heavily be based on after sales services. In the current marketing spectrum most businesses only ever concern themselves with attracting new customers and most often than not the existing customer base remains untapped creating a flux that eventually overwhelms when bad reviews due to substandard after sales service. To avoid this impending catastrophe email marketing as explained by Chaffey and Ellis Chadwick in their book Digital Marketing, is one of the most imperative feature through which a marketing campaign can be utilized to target existing customers. It is also extremely pertinent to note that implementing such a marketing strategy would require careful planning and flawless management as email are generically unappealing if they are received regularly with only promotional content. To engage the customer base a marketing directive could be to ask existing customers if they would require any assistance on the product or service currently they might be using and consequently a possible upgrade could be recommended (Chaffey & Chadwick, 2019).
Since the goal of the marketing strategy is to develop a permanent relationship with the existing customer base, the email marketing strategy provide an outlet for any business to maximize the value proposition of any given customer and embark on customer retention which ideally provides a promising outlet for future sales and business. A retained customer would be willing to purchase more products and services than what he or she may have originally brought from the business as marketing based on interactive email correspondence generates a trust with the customer that can essentially be harnessed during promotional season or whenever the customer may be able to embark upon a valid purchase. The techniques for customer retention does not in any way imply that attracting new customers is unfavourable however it puts into perspective on the avenue that is retention of customers and how using email marketing we can develop recurring sales using this technique.
References
Hartemo, M. (2016). Email marketing in the era of the empowered consumer. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing , 10 (3), 212-230.
Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019). Digital marketing . Pearson UK.
Miller, R., & Charles, E. Y. A. (2016, September). A psychological based analysis of marketing email subject lines. In 2016 Sixteenth International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer) (pp. 58-65). IEEE.
Zhang, X., Kumar, V., & Cosguner, K. (2017). Dynamically managing a profitable email marketing program. Journal of Marketing Research , 54 (6), 851-866.
