Email Still Drives Gigantic Conversions

Email marketing is the trustiest tool in the marketer’s toolbox. It’s well-established, effective, and built on an original open protocol (SMTP). With an ROI of up to $38 for every dollar spent on email marketing, it’s no surprise that most companies still consider it essential to drive traffic and conversions to their sites.

Part of the effectiveness of email marketing is the idea that the promotional newsletters users are receiving are opt-in, such as an eCommerce store mailing list and the emails that you don’t opt-in to are usually caught by spam filters. Compare this to Facebook, where interruptive ads appear in your newsfeed whether you like them or not. It’s not surprising, therefore, that your marketing message is 5x more likely to be seen through an email than a Facebook post.

Unfortunately, although an open rate of 20% is better than the majority of the industry, it also translates to 80% of emails remaining unopened. Even with opt-ins, many subscribers dislike the idea of being sent material that is irrelevant to their interests. Whether it’s failing to segment their audience properly or sending from a do-not-reply address, there are numerous ways for any business to improve.

The Importance of Engagement

Humans do not have an infinite attention span, and constantly bombarding someone with irrelevant promotional material will either wear them down or make them hostile to your brand. Unfortunately for email marketers, it is more than often the latter. 59% of all emails sent categorised as spam, the problem is more relevant and persistent than ever.

In 2004, Bill Gates declared that within two years, the spam problem will be solved. 14 years later, spam is still hurting the credibility of legitimate marketers as users receive more content than they’re interested in, with the occurrence of spam watering down the effectiveness genuine emails

It’s not just consumers that suffer the effects of spam, as unwanted emails can affect how a business performs in the future. The percentage of people that open your emails affects your deliverability, which in turn determines whether or not your content is caught immediately by the spam filter. The concept is so serious that Email Service Provider MailChimp recently banned any content selling or advertising cryptocurrency, worried that the increase in such material was lowering their overall deliverability.

So how do you improve engagement and ensure your emails get delivered to inboxes? Simple — tailor it to their preferences. With 59% of shoppers stating that personalization had a noticeable influence on purchasing, increasing personalization almost guarantees better results. But just because an idea is simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy to implement, especially as a small-business owner or a business that sells a variety of products. Tailoring emails requires data, specifically on customer spending habits and engagement.

“But personalized emailing is hard — and I have enough on my plate already!”

20 years ago this excuse might have worked, but not anymore. These days services exist to solve this exact problem, including but not limited to SmartrMail and MailChimp. However, machine learning still isn’t perfect and many barriers to entry exist for smaller retailers as data remains siloed within centralized services like Google and Facebook. But with the blockchain we can introduce another method to align incentives and increase the engagement rate on marketing emails.

The Email Attention Economy

The concept behind the Email Attention Economy is straightforward:

Redistribute the value within email marketing towards subscribers, incentivizing them to engage with emails and incentivizing marketers to send high quality relevant content.

Creating an incentivised attention economy within email can allow two important developments:

Marketers incentivise users by rewarding behaviour that results in greater conversions (e.g. click-throughs, spending a certain amount of time on a website). Users are more likely to open and engage with promotional material, boosting deliverability rates and potential product purchases.

As an example:

Say I’m a marketer, I’m selling my product for $20. I’m new to the concept of Sendy and the quality of my emails suck. I attach $100 of SNDY tokens to incentivise my mailing list of 10,000 people to engage with my email (let’s keep it to simply clicks for now).

Out of those 10,000 people, 500 clicked on the email (5%) and at my average conversion rate on site 5 people end up making a purchase. This gives me a cost-per-click of $0.20, and a cost-per-acquisition of $20. Leaving me at break-even minus any other expenses.

$100 / 5 orders = $20 cost per order

($0 profit per sale minus other expenses).

With the current quality of my emails and my conversion rate, I’m not making any money. So I’m incentivized to improve the quality of my emails and at the same time my subscribers learn they can earn tokens for engaging, boosting the engagement rate with my emails.

With a better quality email, I send it out to my list of 10,000 subscribers with the same $100 in SNDY attached. My email is more engaging and my subscribers are more aware of the rewards I’m offering. My click rate doubles to 10% and now 10 people make a purchase on my site. My new cost-per-click is $0.10 and my cost-per-acquisition is $10.

$100 / 10 orders = $10 cost per order

($10 profit per sale minus other expenses).

I’m sitting pretty and everyone wins.

What The Future Holds

As economies continue to grow and our standards of living increase, the value we place on our time increases and we perceive ourselves to be busier. As a byproduct of this, we tend to ignore things that have little value to us (like an irrelevant marketing email),. By valuing an audience’s time with tokens and therefore increasing the value of promotional email marketing for them, email marketers are able to increase the value proposition of their emails through incentivisation.

While the concept might seem new to marketers, once enough players in a networked market decide to switch to a new way of doing things, everyone else’s motivation to do so becomes stronger. As more subscribers get value back for their time, they will start identifying and engaging with the emails that deliver them the most value, motivating marketers not incentivising their customers to join the network and increase the value of the emails they send.

Just like modern companies with social media profiles, perhaps one day it will seem too much of an opportunity cost to not attach incentives to marketing emails. While it may take an innovative company (or several) to get there, if social media and the dot-com boom have taught us anything, it is that the speed at which society normalises new concepts is only getting faster. We’ve already seen positive signs and a nod towards tokenized attention economies from Coinbase’s recent acquisition of Earn.com. It’s only a matter of time before more buidlers tokenize our attention and the future of email is realised.

Want to learn more about Sendy? We’re the team behind Sendicate and Smartrmail, and last year helped over 7,000 businesses send over 1 billion emails. We’re using SNDY tokens to improve engagement with marketing emails and reward subscribers for their valuable attention. If you’re interested in the project, join our telegram group: https://t.me/sendytoken or check out our site: https://sendy.network/