Accountable marketing is essential in a slowing economy because advertisers require ROI for every pound spent.  So how does email marketing offer a solution to limited budgets and the need for accountability?

Marketing is changing. There used to be a perception that marketing was all about spending money. If the directors saw boxes of brochures, advertisements plastered over every printable surface and invitations to lots of boozy functions for them to entertain clients and prospects then they were happy. But that was yesterday. Today it is all about accountability, cost per lead, conversion rates and minimal outlay for maximum return.

These trends were evident way before the banking system went pear shaped - the state of the economy has merely acted as a catalyst for common sense marketing.

So, which marketing channels provide the most accountability?

Email marketing? PPC? Affiliate? SEO?

It is important to note that you can achieve accountability with offline marketing channels, for example using redemption codes and dedicated phone numbers, but in practice these are unreliable and rarely provide the kind of clear cut accountability that is required.

The big winners are PPC and email. And the main reason is that they will provide you with both the good and bad news.

Almost all other forms of marketing will provide you with tracking - but only when they are successful. For example, take my pet peeve - TV advertising.

With TV you hand over enormous sums of money, with barely any targeting available save for geographical areas (sometimes) and stereotypical segmentation based on programming (women like dramas, men like to watch programmes about cars). The end result will be someone walking into your shop or clicking on your website, but what you don't know is how many people were making tea while the ad was on, how many were fast forwarding and how many actually watched but weren't interested.

Compare that to email and you know who you sent it to (you can segment, and therefore target, on almost any criteria), you can see who looked at the email, who clicked and how many of them bought as a result. Furthermore, you can see what they bought and how much they spent.

But you can also see who didn't open, who didn't click through and who clicked through but didn't buy. Who hard bounced, who soft bounced and who was out of office as well as pages of additional report data. 

Retargeting your market

With this information you can then retarget based on what they did and didn't do. So send a follow up email to those who didn't open with a different subject line or at a different time of the day, or send a letter to all those that bounced.  How about a call to all those who clicked but didn't buy?

And at every point that you retarget you will know exactly what it cost you and what you got back as a result - the ultimate in accountability.

Email provides such an abundance of information that if you don't achieve the desired goal straight away you can see exactly where it went wrong. Did they love your offer but hate your website?  At what point did the marketing not stack up? You rarely have ways of knowing this with traditional forms of marketing. It's like when your maths teacher made you show your working - you can gain a lot of value from knowing where you went wrong.

Email is by far the most cost effective method of communicating with your prospects and clients. There are several billing models out there but delivery costs are almost always measured in fractions of pennies. Fractions of pennies!  What other marketing channel will provide a message to your intended targets for such a small outlay? Compare that cost to sending a letter, making a call or booking a print advert.  I struggle to understand why people would spend money on this without first investing in email.

Are you making the most of email?

So email is the most accountable, cost effective form of marketing. It can perfectly complement all your other marketing channels and so everyone is making the most of it - right? 

Unfortunately not, because it is so cheap people don't invest the time and energy that they should. If you were paying £5k to put an advert into a newspaper you would probably have it reviewed by a number of people - you'd pore over the proofs for hours.  Conversely with email you are far more likely to send it to countless thousands of people without thoroughly checking it first.  All too often the landing page is the homepage, the sales teams aren't aware of the latest email offer or some other marketing faux pas.     

Other challenges facing email is a lack of commitment from senior decision makers, who still see it as spam (just show them the ROI figures to change their view), and of course the prevalence of actual spam.

Email marketing is not direct mail with free stamps, but it can and should be the centrepiece of any accountable, cost-effective marketing plan.