Just when I thought I knew everything, now they say maybe what you know isn't true! Nice post today on MediaPost's Email Insider.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear
by David Baker, Monday, November 20, 2006

The moral of this urban legend is, use best practices, studies, and guidance from the experts as a starting point, but don't consider their advice to be absolute. You need to adjust your e-mail for your target audience and for what you want to achieve. Most importantly, test, test, and test some more.

Some notes for retailers...

Ok, now I spend a lot of time talking about best practices, such as having a consistent mailing schedule, personalizing whenever possible, putting your company name in the subject, keeping important information "above the fold," etc. I'm still learning myself every day as I work with my clients and scan the news and blog reports. Today I came across some best practice information including statistics on "send to a friend" (the November 2 post) for online retailers. Although this is a great way to build your email list, many emailers aren't using it yet, and those that are don't always have the process down pat yet. By the way, in case you didn't know it, Email Analyst has shown a direct correlation between email sends and web traffic.

One of the things I hear people say most often is that they don't have enough email addresses for email marketing, aren't happy with the current size of their list, and don't know how to grow their list. Lisbuilding is a hot topic, with many articles available; here's a great article on collecting addresses online that's part of a tutorial on "Internet Based Moms." Another important part of listbuilding strategy is collecting addressed offline. A strategy should be in place for collecting addresses constantly, both online and offline. The holidays is a great season to build lists offline, since you will undoubtedly be running into a lot of potential and existing customers at parties. So if you've been waiting, now is as good a time as ever to get started with your email marketing efforts!

Amazing statistics reported in the DMA's latest research report on direct marketing (available here), in the words of Bill McCloskey, CEO of Email Data Source:

The ROI for e-mail marketing was $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all non-e-mail-related online marketing was $22.52, less than half. And yet marketers only spent around $300 million on e-mail marketing efforts, compared to $12 billion for non-e-mail-related marketing--$12 billion to get a return that is less than half of what can be achieved in e-mail.

We also know that the return on e-mail is much higher for companies that segment their e-mail marketing offers, so the $57.25 is really just a drop in the bucket compared to what the ROI potential is for e-mail.

We also know that, especially for retail, e-mail is considered the largest demand-generating medium for online retailers.

So where is the disconnect: e-mail provides over twice the ROI, but companies now invest only 02.5% of what they put into other Internet marketing channels? Someone is getting taken for a ride.