Review: MarketingSherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006

Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006
310 Charts and Eyetracking Heatmaps
MarketingSherpa, October 2005
Softcover, spiral bound, 270 pages
ISBN 9781932353525, $247

If e-mail marketing is the main focus of your position or company, then you'll find this book vital to improving your business. But if you're a small business struggling to stay up-to-date with many Internet marketing disciplines all at the same time, you'll probably view the book as too pricey at $247. Of course, business people know that the price of knowledge that earns them additional money is seldom too high.

This Benchmark Guide collects in one volume a huge amount of research on e-mail marketing, most of it graphed so it can be easily digested. The core of the book is devoted to MarketingSherpa's own readers' survey, but the book also includes dozens of other studies, primarily from major e-mail marketing service providers for both B2B and B2C e-mail campaigns.

I found myself skipping lots of graphs that didn't produce any earth-shattering revelations; a number could have been left out and not missed. The book contains studies on e-mail marketing budgets, the size and growth of the e-mail service industry, mergers and acquisitions, etc. The book helps marketers decide which campaign metrics to track, what variables to test, and how various groups of recipients respond to e-mail. You'll find studies on house list size compared to online sales, permission levels, personalization, whitelisting behavior, attrition by industry, unsubscribing trends, advantages of various methods of gathering opt-in names, rented lists, co-registrations, and list aging.

One of the most interesting and revealing sections was the full-color eyetracking study. It shows just how graphics can enhance or depress e-mail reading patterns -- and click-through rates. I know those insights will affect my e-mail design in the future.

One chapter is devoted to e-mail response metrics -- open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates of various kinds of lists. Another studies deliverability concerns and problems. The final chapter examines alternate permission marketing technologies -- RSS, IM, and Mobile.

The book won't win any prizes for coherence, readability, or keeping you awake. But if you need comprehensive access to actionable research on what other marketers are doing, on what works, what doesn't, and what you need to test further, this book is without peer. Recommended.

You can purchase a copy online: download in PDF format immediately; a hard copy ships within 24 hours. www.wilsonweb.com/afd/sherpa_benchmark.htm