E-mails are an effective form of digital marketing, producing approximately twice the Return On Investment of other forms of online marketing such as web banners and online directory adverts. However, how many e-mails do actually get opened? For starters it got to one point where each I would receive around 20-30 e-mails per day and would go as far as marking them as read and that was that.

So what can be done to attract the recipient of your e-mails to actually open it and click through to the website? Personalisation has a key role to play; making the customer feel important. I for one receive a number of e-mails where the first word in the subject line is my name.

But what can be done about the overload of e-mails from many different companies? Well there’s a number of websites which can be used to moderate your emails. One of which I use myself, giving me a single daily e-mail which is a compilation of of company emails, as shown in the image below. It is an excellent little tool to help keep your e-mail inbox tidy and it also means that my phone is no longer buzzing 20 times a day with e-mail notifications.

Upon clicking one of the e-mails received, as displayed above, you are redirected to a webpage whereby you can view the single e-mail. This is where the tool comes into its own, as the email is displayed exactly as it would be if it went directly to your inbox, along with all the same hyperlinks.

However, as with most things it does come with some drawbacks; the main one being the time of receiving the email. Companies will have researched the best time to send e-mails in accordance with their business; for example a fashion retailer may send their emails around 5pm as they may find most purchases occur late afternoon or in the evening or even a flash sale, where they send it out in the morning and say “50% off everything this afternoon only”. Due to the nature of the tool, these e-mails would be compiled and sent the following day in ‘your daily e-mail rollup’. So there is a possibility you will miss out on some of the deals that companies have to offer (but if you’re like me and have a habit of impulse buying when you don’t have the money it can be seen as a benefit).

For the company this can make tracking their e-mails a bit more awkward, as they are coming to consumers through a 3rd party client. But then again you have a really tidy inbox and are not overwhelmed by buzzes originating from your phone!

Ellis-Chadwick, F., & Doherty, N. F. (2012). Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. Journal of Business Research, 65(6), 843-848