As an email marketer, you are constantly striving to meet your objectives.  But of course, those objectives vary from organization to organization and even from team to team. Marketing Sherpa recently published this chart showing their survey results for which email marketing objectives are most important. (See full-size chart and article)

Not surprisingly, customer retention tops the list. It’s always easier (and cheaper) to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one. A newsletter lets you keep in regular contact with them – and keep your brand and offerings top of mind.

Marketing Sherpa points out that mid-sized organizations are the driving force behind objective #2 – generating new sales leads. Unlike their larger, slower-moving competitors, they see the recession as an opportunity to gain market share.

Interestingly, the third-ranked objective is to increase web traffic.  We feel that increasing traffic should be a means to meeting another objective, not an objective in and of itself.  If web traffic is your top objective, ask yourself these questions:

Why do you want readers to come to your website? The answer will reveal your underlying objective, such as educating prospects about your brand and products.

What do you want people to do once they’ve gotten to your website? If you’ve answered, “buy something”, then increasing sales is your true objective.

Finally, we thought it interesting that respondents were really divided on whether driving offline or online sales is the key priority. More respondents said it was “very important” to drive offline sales vs. those focusing on online sales. But that doesn’t mean they’re ignoring online sales – only 17% said that driving online sales was “not important”. How do we interpret this?  It shows that email is not just about driving to a website to make a sale. Business segments with offline sales objectives need to ensure that their email messaging is strong enough to stand alone and that their calls to action provide information on how to complete an offline sale.

View the executive summary of MarketingSherpa 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report here.

What are YOUR top email marketing objectives? OpenMoves can help you achieve them. Contact us today!