eDM Marketing: Definition, Mistakes to Avoid and 3 Indicators You Need to Watch

First, we define eDM, then give useful advice regarding legal requirements. We give a step by step introduction to each important stage of an email’s journey: from clicking “send” to its final destination, a conversion. We will also discuss some important statistics of KPIs using Signup.to’s research.

Let’s begin! What are we going to talk about?

In today’s digital age, there’s nothing extraordinary in receiving daily promotional emails.

You must be familiar with this situation so you know exactly what it’s like to be on the receiver’s end.

What is eDM?

Electronic Direct Marketing: is basically sending marketing, advertising or business information materials to a group of people using email.

In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.

In legal terms, generally the following applies:

An advertisement could be anything containing the company’s name, logo, or activity that incites people to buy their products or services, or aims to gain more popularity. Emails, e-brochures, presentation materials, images, information about promotions, sales, sweepstakes, games, gifts, discounts, coupons, new products or services all qualify as eDM.

eDM materials can only be sent if the receiver has voluntarily agreed in advance.

It is important to note that in case there’s no identifiable person behind the email address (e.g. info@aquariushand.com) it is allowed to send promotional messages without prior consent.

What to pay attention to when sending an eDM and how to avoid being blacklisted?

Now that we know what eDM means, we can talk about sending it correctly.

There are conditions you must take into account carefully.

First and foremost: always ask for permission before sending an eDM (e.g. from newsletter subscribers). If you skip this step, you can be fined or even be sentenced to jail.

Let’s take a look at a few situations where we (as senders) don’t play by the rules:

How an eDM gets to the user?

Let’s think of an email as if it is a train. If, for any reason, it fails to get to the next station, reaching the remaining stages will be impossible. Let’s consider this in the case of emails:

The next section will look into these stages in detail.

We present the statistics of each station (with the help of KPIs) and based our statements on Signup.to’s findings, who sent more than a billion emails during their research. This is a big enough number to draw relevant conclusions from with regards to emails.

Delivering the email

Not every email reaches its destination.

According to the research, 98.26% get to the addressee’s mailbox, the rest miss it for some reason. There can be different reasons in the background:

In these cases, we get an error message from our email sending software so that we can identify the reason the email was rejected. We call these phenomena bounces. Let’s take a look at them:

Opening the email

According to the research, only 24.88% of the addressees open the email.

KPI in this case: open rate.

What to pay attention to?

According to the research, personalized emails achieve better results.

Two things to underline this:

You’ve noticed a significant difference, right?

In order to remain competitive, you have to forget non-personalized emails!

You should pay attention to sending emails with different content to people on different levels of the sales funnel (depending on the extent of their interest/commitment).

Example: A bulk email is enough for those who subscribed for blog post notifications (low level of commitment). However, for those who are about to make purchases, personalized messages are more effective.

Clicking on a CTA button and/or link

Each email sent during the survey contained a link. Clicking on it took users to landing pages. Let’s look at the data!

Of the more than a billion recipients, 3.42% clicked on the link.

The KPI in this case was the click through rate.

The dropout rate is huge here too. Of the users who opened the email, 10.88% clicked on the link. Here, the KPI is the unique click through rate.

At this stage, the user gets a step closer to making a conversion. How can we formulate these steps to make as many users proceed on the sales funnel as possible?

Unsubscribing from the email

Our KPI here is the unsubscribe rate.

During the survey, the unsubscribe rate was the following: of all the people receiving the email, 0.52% unsubscribed. Of the people opening the email, 2.72% ended up unsubscribing.

Change is constant.

So the preference system of subscribed users also changes.

It can happen that something really grabs the user’s attention but it can also become completely irrelevant soon. If you detect an unsubscription, try to find the reason behind it and it can help improving the content and the structure of the newsletter. It might be worth looking at when the users subscribed or when they last received an email from you.

To succeed, it is crucial to have a responsive landing page, optimized for different mobile devices ‒ e.g. tablet, smartphone. It should be noted that in 2011, 27% of people opened emails on a mobile device. Now that number is 54.59% and further increase is predicted, so it’s time to prepare.

You’ve already made the necessary steps, right?