The revenue cake: you can't have it and eat it

Can't let 2008 arrive without a curmudgeonly post. Just read an intriguing article by Morgan Stewart at the ExactTarget blog.

Morgan explains how to discover the impact your emails have on your search marketing success. If you're like me, it probably never even occurred to you that the emails you send out might be boosting search traffic. So read Morgan's excellent article.

But this got me thinking. Email marketing evangelists tend to point out all the indirect benefits of email marketing to the wider business.

So you will find folk (including me) patting email on its back for helping boost direct mail sales, driving visitors to stores etc.

Which is fine and a real benefit of email. But how many folk discuss or look at how email responses benefit from the efforts of other channels? Are email open rates improved if you send a campaign out a few days after a direct mail piece? (I'm sure they are.)

If you make the recommended thought leap and treat email as part of a holistic, integrated marketing whole, then your interpretation of your marketing and sales results must also take a broader view.

If you identify revenue earned through other channels which can be attributed to email, then that's important for evaluating the true value of email. But you also have to re-attribute some of email's revenues back to other channels, too.

The bigger aim, perhaps, should be to find even better ways of integrating email and other marketing vehicles to grow the total revenue cake.

P.S. As a lowly writer, writing from outside, there seems more to "integration" than meets the eye. I always find Kevin Hillstrom's blog does a pretty good job of explaining the challenges.

Tags: email marketing, multichannel marketing

Permalink | January 03, 2008 | 0 comment(s)
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