While e-mail marketers have begun this holiday season by predictably sending more messages, individual campaigns are going out significantly smaller, according Elaine O’Gorman, vice president of strategy for e-mail service provider Silverpop.
The trend seems to indicate that e-mail marketers are increasingly segmenting their e-mail files and targeting their efforts, she said.
The volume of e-mail Silverpop is sending on behalf of clients has been rising similarly to the rate at which it rose last year, she said. However, the number of campaigns the company is sending out on behalf of clients has been growing faster, O’Gorman added.
Individual campaigns are currently going out 20% to 30% smaller than they were last year, O’Gorman estimated.
The smaller-mailing trend seems to have begun about six months ago and then really kicked in just before this quarter, she added.
“We saw a fairly significant change right at the end of the third quarter going into the fourth quarter,” said O’Gorman.
She added that the trend indicates that more marketers may be taking a longer-view approach to their e-mail programs.
“We’re seeing a lot of studies in the marketplace that tell us that e-mail drives in-store [purchases], and that it drives non-trackable Web traffic and that e-mail drives branding,” she said. “That said, you will never prove to anybody that that they’ll sell more by sending less e-mail.”
Many e-mail marketers have understood conceptually for some time that sending fewer, more highly targeted messages works better over the long haul, but it has taken some time for them to marshal the resources to put that understanding into practice, she said.
“Even though it costs a little more to produce that type of a mailing, in the end it pays off,” she said. “Although it’s difficult to gather empirical evidence to support exactly why the number of mailings is going up faster than the mailing volume, anecdotally, better segmentation and tighter messaging are probably primary drivers.”
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