Here's a report that succeeds in being both shocking and unsurprising at the same time. It's shocking to those management consultants and accountants who believe that every item of marketing expenditure should be nailed to the desk and measured, cross-measured and re-measured until it shrieks for mercy. Yet the revelation is numbingly familiar to decrepit old observers like me who have been tracing the evolution of marketing since the end of the Boer War, almost.
In a sense, it's like the unending debate about public relations. There are plenty of managers who treat PR like an item of religious faith. When they think about it at all, they say that they can't prove that it works, but of course they believe in it. This is fine until the crunch comes, and they have to decide which budgets are cuttable.
Others will argue that PR effectiveness can be tracked as readily as any other item of marketing expenditure. At the most basic level, you can measure the number of press cuttings or, increasingly, the total number of TV minutes achieved by the campaign, and calculate what the coverage would have cost as advertising.
A more sophisticated approach would be to use market research to measure the extent to which public opinion moves in the desired direction. But then, suddenly, you get into questions like, is it worth investing £100,000 on research to confirm that the £200,000 PR budget has been well spent?
And so to email marketing. Yes, it is very good to know that a campaign using this comparatively new medium can generate a return on investment of 300 to 500 per cent. Good in the sense that when budgets are reviewed, the information is there to defend this particular purse. Good, also, because knowledge can be an incentive to do better - if you are achieving a 300 per cent return but others are getting 500 per cent, you might want to ask yourself what you need to do to catch up.
The truth is, it's probably much easier to measure the return on this investment in this sector than it is in public relations. And, as electronic marketing specialists point out, you need this kind of information to get your hands on a bigger share of the marketing budget.
For most companies, however, email as a marketing medium is a minor concern, and will remain that way for some time to come. It doesn't follow that, because it seems to work so well, email budgets should be doubled or tripled. There is an optimum number of times you can email a customer before irritation sets in and they become an ex-customer.
- Ken Gofton is a freelance journalist who has covered the marketing industry for over two decades.
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