This morning, MediaPost’s Marketing Daily posted an article on the decline of email marketing effectiveness. JupiterResearch recently completed some research on permission-based email marketing. While email continues to be a heavily used means of communication, users have become increasingly skeptical about promotional email.

Turned Off Users

The JupiterResearch document claims that email users’ likelihood to make an on-line or off-line purchase as a result of promotional emails has declined 7% over the last year. While an increase in popularity of other communication mediums such as text messaging and social networking certainly have an impact on these numbers, email marketing success is still within arms reach. The top reason for email users to unsubscribe continues to be a lack of relevance, followed closely by excessive emailing.

Here are a few tips to increase the success of your email marketing:

1. Test Different Layouts – A/B and Multivariate testing have been important methods used to determine the layout that will most likely lead to a conversion.
2. Tune into your users – The content of your email must relate to your users, quickly. Promote content that users will find most relevant, but not too frequently.
3. Foster Product and Content Discovery – Whether you are sending event-triggered emails like invoices or promotional emails like new product lines, provide popular or complimentary products that allow your users to discover new products and content that could lead a conversion.

For Information about how Baynote enhances email marketing, click here.