If you could go into your boss' office and say, "I can show an additional 15%-20% on the bottom line next quarter from our email marketing" wouldn't that be a good thing?
The fact is that many of us can make that promise–and deliver on it. Simply by doing all the things that we online marketers love to do: Delight our subscribers and make it easy for them to buy and engage.


Here's how you do it. Optimize your inbox placement. No kidding! On average, 20% of your messages never reach the inbox. That's for marketers with good brands and permission, just like you and me. Last week, Return Path released a new study on this, which you can download here. Bottom line: Lots of your mail goes missing. If you don't reach the inbox, you won't earn a response.
How does this help you earn more revenue? Reverse the trend for your own program and you gain the revenue. Say you send email marketing messages to a file of 200,000 people. Consider that if you earn even 10 cents per subscriber per campaign, then the lost 20% is 10,000 people lost per campaign, or $1,000 per campaign. If you mail twice a week, then you lose $8,000 a month. And $24,000 a quarter. It adds up pretty fast. Do the math on your own program with this handy calculator.
The Return Path study outlines what marketers need to do to earn back that 15%-20% in lost revenue - real revenue that is lost every time you mail. Basically, subscribers need to want to receive your messages - and you need to respect their interests when it comes to frequency and message type. You also need to keep your list clean, have a solid infrastructure, manage your bounces and complaints, and authenticate your messages.
These are all things that we want to do anyway. We want to please our subscribers. We want to make it easy for them to buy, share and interact with our emails and our web properties. (If you don't want to do this, then please stay out of email marketing!)
Sometimes email is too inexpensive and easy for our own good. Yet, there is a penalty for abuse–low deliverability which comes in large part from too many subscribers clicking that "report spam" button. Those spam complaints will get all your messages blocked by the ISPs like Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail, as well as corporate systems. Even average deliverability (about 80% according to the Return Path study) has a big upside.
Don't settle for average. Improve your email deliverability and put that 20% of lost revenue back in your company's pocket. Where it belongs.