The new means and value of marketing has been around us for some time now. From YouTube subscribers to Twitter followers, and back again to Facebook-likers, businesses invest a lot of time and money gathering as many customers as possible via various social platforms. But do fans and followers really become customers? Does social-marketing really pay off?
Newsletter marketing pays
A recent study from an E-Commerce Analyst from Custora has the answer: The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). A customer panel was gathered together via a variety of online channels: search engine marketing, mail campaigns, affiliate marketing, banners, Facebook, and Twitter. The value of each customer was based on their 'willingness to buy' and measured over a period of four years. The results are astounding!
The results show, that customers who stumble upon a company via Twitter have a 23% lower average CLV than all other customers. The highest CLV value belongs to customers who happen upon a company while searching organically. Search engine marketing obviously pays off, followed by AdWord campaigns. When comparing many of the most common means of online marketing, email campaigns had an above average CLV value (+12%), banners (+1%), Facebook (+1%), and then Twitter (-23%).
Customers buy on the go!
A further trend, in regards to monetization, is the increase in mobile purchasing. According to the „IBM Black Friday Report 2012“ , every 6th Dollar was spent using a mobile device. Around 10% of all E-commerce turnover will be made using the iPad, followed by 8.7% with an iPhone.
Once we lay the results next to each other , another question arises: Where is the largest marketing potential? How can this be most effectively tapped? The advertising branches discovered “mobile marketing” long ago. In general, that means, creating websites that are optimized for iPhones and co. But how do you get customers to these sites in the first place? After all, people just don’t have the same attention span when using a mobile device as they do on their desktop. Mobile e-mail marketing has the answer...
Success with e-mail marketing
One of the most well known mobile success stories is Lufthansa, who create successful newsletters with a responsive design. The Lufthansa newsletters automatically adapt to the viewer’s screen size for optimal readability. But the German airline is an exception to the rule. Our own study of 10,000 sales newsletters shows that only around 11% were optimized for viewing on a mobile device.
Create newsletters with a responsive design
You don’t need a six-figure budget to create your own responsive Mail Designs. With Mail Designer Pro, every freelancer, artist, or small business owner, can create incredible, mobile optimized newsletters on their Mac. Mail Designer offers a live preview, displaying your design exactly as it will appear on a Blackberry, iPhone, or Android Galaxy smartphone. It’s quite surprising that not even Apple or Google optimize their campaigns for smartphones.
Even Apple’s latest “Back-to-school” campaign ,targeted to high-school and college students, is not optimized for viewing on an iPhone.
Generation Smartphone
Students have become even more interesting for marketers. According to a study from Ball State University in Indiana, more than 3/4 of all students own a Smartphone (as of February 2013). Remember the last back-to-school campaign of the big Silicon Valley giants? Neither Apple nor Google send out their email blasts in a mobile friendly design.