Email Success: Quantity or Quality?

Should Marketers pick quantity or quality in measuring Email Return-on-Investment?That is the million dollar question.

For a lead-generation email campaign to be a success, business owners must understand that Return-on-Investment (ROI) is the most important metric.

Marketers must first decide if the campaign will be sent to a large list of opt-in email addresses, or a smaller, more targeted list based on previous purchase or request for specific information.

Dealing with larger quantities of email addresses can create challenges because it is difficult to test the campaign on a large list. Every campaign I ever executed started with testing, as I believe testing is integral to success.

If the campaign must be sent to a large list, the subject line and text copy must appeal to a large audience. This isn't so easy to accomplish and still have a strong call to action without sounding promotional and spammy in nature. (Like that? Spammy? I think I just made that up.)

If a marketer can splice and dice the list into a smaller, more targeted email campaign the overall open and click through results will most definitely improve. Another key strategy is to divide the mailing up geographically to test different subject lines based on geographical segmentation.

All that said, I stand behind quality in marketing over quantity any time. As it pertains to ROI, it's all about the goal and the conversion rates of the email that correlate to that goal.