International Journal of Sales & Marketing

Management Research and Development (IJSMMRD)

ISSN (P): 2249–6939; ISSN (E): 2249–8044
Vol. 11, Issue 1, Jun 2021, 21- 30
© TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

A STUDY ON EMAIL MARKETING OPTIMIZATION FOR LEAD GENERATION

T RANJANI, SRIRAM S & Dr. BIRAJ AMEET ANIL

II MBA Student, Department of MBA, Nagarjuna College of Engineering & Technology
Bengaluru, India
Asst. Professors, Department of MBA, Nagarjuna College of Engineering & Technology
Bengaluru, India
ABSTRACT

This study is all about doing marketing with the help of email. Email is one of the most common tools for communication
and its existence is everywhere. As long as there is an internet connection, email can play its role. Now here is the
question, ‘how email helps in marketing’? In simple term we can say that the use of email is used to promote the
business, it helps to build the relationship with the potential customers, keep the current customer informed and satisfy
them by updating about the brand, offers, coupons etc., and encourage them for the customer loyalty. Email marketing is
a method of using email to get and to reach the target audience. It is like sending the commercial message to the group of
people using email. Email marketing is one of the tools for generating leads to the company. where they use email as one
of the prominent tools for promoting their product. But there are many reasons that email doesn’t perform well and there

Original Article
are many reasons associated with it like email is being bounced or email metrics is not fully utilised. For any company,
they need to pay attention to their email marketing campaign because email can be bounced or omitted by the readers.

The data was collected through questionnaires. For analysing the email template, the researcher has performed house of
quality; through this, it was suggested to concentrate more on email metrics especially on subject lines and content. Many
follow up action were suggested for an email to avoid going to the promotions section and for reducing the bounce rate of
an email.

So, in conclusion, it was necessary to do the analysis and various test to know the performance of any email campaign
plus, to explore the new ways to enhance the different metrics involved in email.

KEYWORDS: Email, email marketing, email marketing optimization, email metrics, bounce rate, and house of quality.

Received: Sep 28, 2020; Accepted: Oct 18, 2020; Published: May 15, 2021; Paper Id.: IJSMMRDJUN20213

INTRODUCTION OF THE STUDY

Email Marketing is one of the latest trends of technology for marketing the products and services with a quick and
fast reach to the customers which allows to reduce the time when compared to traditional marketing. It is also a
platform where millions of people log into their accounts to socially browse or for their business activity. It is the
current booming and trending digital marketing activity in social media to grow the brand and its products or
services.

Email marketing is a kind of an act of sending commercial mail to similar group, wherein the email is sent
to the potential or current customer. It includes advertisement, request business or asking for donation by emails.
Email marketing is one of the tools for generating leads for the company.

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22 T Ranjani, Sriram S & Dr. Biraj Ameet Anil

It is the latest type of marketing where it has developed to the digital media which allows the marketer to reach the
customers in an easy way and fastest way to reach a message to their respective clients or customers. It has also developed
new software's to market their products and promoting their brand on these social media or websites. It also helps their
companies to build and maintain their customer database in huge amount and collect their information easily with large
capacity of storage in their systems or servers and at the same time gives the leads/prospects which later on becomes the
end customer. Apart from that, email marketing saves a lot of money when it is compared to direct marketing as a result it
reduces the expense of the company.

As a result, this will help the organization/ business to prosper because it will engage more user to one’s brand,
thus more people look for your product and services and, in this way, it generates huge leads for the company. To further
help the organization take measures to increase the conversion rate and to build long-lasting relationship with the
subscribers and this is known as email optimization. Email optimization is the method/ ways wherein an email marketer
can maximize the effectiveness of their campaign. The main goal of the optimization is to save time, money and reaching
the right user with a message to the actual target group. Building the customer base and offers should be done
independently of the activities. An effective optimization method is to come up with a predictive model for each campaign.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Martin Hudak and Rodovan Madlenak (2017) in their study of "importance of email marketing in e-commerce" they
have briefed the importance of the email-marketing and quoted it as an important and effective tool for communication. In
this study, they have used the basic metrics like open-rate, click-through rate, delivery rate of email marketing and called it
necessary for a successful email campaign. They have shown how email marketing can be used to increase the site traffic
and sales support so they have defined it as a targeted sending of commercial and non-commercial message a detailed list
of receivers respectively email addresses. They have measured the result by evaluating after the collection of data after the
number of clicks in the email address and how many have been redirected to the web page. It is very useful for analytics
purpose plus it provides an overview of page views and time spent on the site, bounce rate, the number of conversions and
revenue generated by e-mail campaigns. So, this study covers the maximum aspect of this project as we are going to
analyse the various metrics and find suggestions for that.

(Source: Martin Hudak. and Rodovn Madlenak, “importance of email marketing in e-commerce” published in
year 2017, Procedia Engineering 192 (2017) 342 – 347)

E. Fariborzi and M. Zahedifard(2012) they did the study of "E-mail Marketing: Advantages, Disadvantages and
Improving Techniques" they emphasis on the importance of e-commerce in the business organisation and the contribution
towards nation's economic growth. They have considered email marketing as direct marketing in which they use an
electronic mail as a means of communication for the purpose of commercial or fund-raising message to an audience. In
their study, they have figured out the advantages and disadvantage of doing email marketing and in addition to that they
have given recommendations to Iranian marketing company regarding the improvement e-mail marketing. They have
given suggestions like; classification of e-mail competition based on the audience behaviour; classification of e-mail
competition based on the sale-cycle. They have also had some tactics for improving relevancy, for growing the e-mail list,
for improving e-mail marketing deliverability and for testing emails. This research certainly showed the merits and
demerits of doing email marketing and we can consider the tactics used by them for this project.

Impact Factor (JCC): 8.6084 NAAS Rating: 3.37

A Study on Email Marketing Optimization for Lead Generation 23

(Source: E. Fariborzi and M. Zahedifard, “E-mail Marketing: Advantages, Disadvantages and Improving
Techniques” published in year 2012, 104-106(2012))

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

 To understand the reason behind the bounce of an email.

 To analyse which metrics can be optimized in an email.

LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

 Since my sample of data collection are business customers, the only way was collecting through telephonic
interview.

 The use of telephonic way will affect the relevancy of the data.

 Population size may become a hurdle in the project because calling all the clients is not possible.

 Questionnaires can be biased, the finding, conclusion, suggestions are drawn as per the respondent's responses.

SCOPE OF THE STUDY

As we all know that email is one of the latest mode of doing the business and most effective way to reach people all across
the world to those who showed their interest in product and the service. Leads can be generated; email is being used for the
promotion purpose by the company to promote the product and the service and to attract the customer. Email marketing is
a very personal way of reaching the target customers, it can be personalised and can be tailored according to the needs. So,
email marketing optimization is a very important deal, if a company wants to enhance their email marketing and wants to
increase their conversion rate by optimizing it. In this study the response collected by the respondents on the topic of email
will be used for the analysis, to understand the problem of emails being bounced and the researcher will find the possible
ways to optimize emails by concentrating on email metrics which will be helpful to generate the leads for the company.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

RESEARCH DESIGN: - This paper is purely analytical in nature, which involves critical thinking skills and
evaluation of facts and information relative to the research being conducted.

DATA COLLECTION: -The data is collected from both the source i.e. primary and secondary, wherein for
primary source questionnaire was prepared and circulated to 100 respondents and as for secondary data is concern
the data is collected through various website, journals and research paper.

METHOD OF SAMPLING: - For this study, the researcher has opted for a stratified random sampling method,
wherein the data will be stratified into various group/ strata.

ANALYTICAL TOOLS: - Various techniques are being used in order to find the solution and one of them is
"House of Quality" and flow chart.

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24 T Ranjani, Sriram S & Dr. Biraj Ameet Anil

ANALYSIS

To understand the reason behind the bounce of an email and opened email

CLASSIFICATION OF BOUNCE IN AN EMAIL

HARD BOUNCE SOFT BOUNCE

REASON FOR HARD BOUNCE: - Hard bounce occurs when the message has been permanently rejected either
because:

 The email address is invalid

 The email addresses do not exist.

So, as per the management, the reason for hard bounce is indeed the same.

 They got the wrong database.

 Invalid emails/email id of the future prospects.

REASON FOR SOFT BOUNCE: - In soft bounce, the emails address is valid and the email message reached the
recipient's mail server. But there are common reasons for a bounce back:

 The mailbox is full

 The server is down

 The message is too large for the recipient’s inbox.

So as the respondent’s respons

33% of respondents never clean their mailbox, which lead to soft bounce of any email, whereas 52% of respondents clean
their mailbox, whenever they feel or if there is a necessity to clean the mailbox.

Impact Factor (JCC): 8.6084 NAAS Rating: 3.37

A Study on Email Marketing Optimization for Lead Generation 25

To analyse which metrics can be optimized.

For doing an analyse on email metrics, the information related to the metrics and customer's requirement is collected
through questionnaires. For this purpose, house of quality is being used to determine which metrics need more attention.
So, for any email, there are 9 metrics that play an important role for creating the open rate and click through rate for any
company. House of quality sees the correlation between the customer requirement and 9 metrics. The requirement of the
customer is rated from 1 to 5 and recorded in the horizontal lines and metrics is recorded in the vertical line

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26 T Ranjani, Sriram S & Dr. Biraj Ameet Anil

Wherein ++ shows strong positive correlation

+ shows positive correlation

-- shows negative correlation

-- -- shows strong negative correlation

Whereas

upward triangle and downward triangle shows the direction of movement of the metrics plus dark coloured circle carries 9
point which indicates the strong relationship, normal circle carries 3 point shows medium relationship and triangle carries 1
point for weak relationship.

MAJOR FINDINGS

 It is obvious that we can't control the soft bounce as it influenced by external factors; which is shown in the below
chart.

So, it is entirely depending on the clients or respondents to maintain their email inbox, like make sure that mailbox
is not full, keep up the high server etc.

Impact Factor (JCC): 8.6084 NAAS Rating: 3.37

A Study on Email Marketing Optimization for Lead Generation 27

 But the hard bounce can be minimised. Even the company has stated many reasons for hard bounce as invalid
mail id or wrong database.

 Through house of quality, it is cleared that for any email doing product promotion content and the subject line is
very important, they got the highest rating as 258 and 197 and followed by personalisation. Further in a content,
customer requirement says that there are many things associated with the content like appearance, option for
personalisation and customization, reliability, security and language matter a lot.

 By analysis, we came to know that many people do check the promotional email but doesn't have much impact.
They do not turn into the lead for any company. Due to lack of personalisation in an email.

SUGGESTION

 For more leads from email marketing, it is very important to get more readers to open the emails, which is why, as
an email marketer are all obsessed with increasing the open rate and clickthrough rate. So, the subject line and
content in an email both are very important and will be responsible for increasing the open rate and clickthrough
rate.

 Before sending any email randomly to the readers better go for the STP i.e. segmenting targeting and positioning.
It will help the company to create the boundary over the type of customer you want, then it will easy for the
company to target them and help to place and positioning the product there.

 For attracting the readers, the subject line should be interesting and informative in order to grab the attention of
the reader. So, few courses of words decide the mind of the reader whether to open the email or not. The subject
line should be relevant to the audience and it should be personalized.

 For more click through rate, content should be concise and convincing. The content should be in a position to
conveys what all offers are there and why it is valuable. It should be influential in nature so that it will increase
the click through rate.

 The company shall send the email by the name of the person added designated to make it even more official and
authentic. Rather than forwarding the generalised emails.

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28 T Ranjani, Sriram S & Dr. Biraj Ameet Anil

 In order to avoid the emails going to the promotions, the following steps can be taken:

 Go for fewer images in the email, which includes product pictures or sales graphics.

 Do not use promotional sounding language, especially in the subject line like "offer", "sales" or
"discount" etc.

 Get personal. Just like you are talking to a person – not a business blasting out to customers.

 Choose plain text campaigns, avoid too fancy fonts and heavy template as much as possible.

 Promotional emails often include a lot of links to your website homepage, links to your landing
and product pages. So, having too many links can send the emails to the promotion tabs instead
of personal/ primary tab.

 Try to focus on the value, if a reader requires our product no matter where the message is, they
will eventually open and read it. But what important is to segmenting the list and sending the
specific content to the group of people who find it most relevant.

 There are many software or tools that will help us about where our emails are likely to land.
These tools will help in see how your competitor's emails are doing.

 For reducing the bounce rate, especially the hard bounce we need to get a clear database or valid email id. There
are ways to track down the reason for bounce for example; the time and date the message bounced, the mail server
bounced it and the RFC code. Knowing these reasons will us to avoid the email getting bounce again.

CONCLUSION

Doing this study on emails, sent by the company so far, the researcher got to know that email is a very important marketing
tool, wherein the researcher can reach a large number of audiences that to very fast and economically. Email has become
an integral part of the business world, which help them to get in touch with everybody including co-workers, employees,
business partners, clients and to generate leads for the company. So, it becomes even more important to take the necessary
step to enhance email marketing. the researcher got to know that Email marketing is kind of an act of sending commercial
mail to a similar group, wherein the email is sent to the potential or current customer. It includes advertisement, requests
for business or asking for donation by emails. Email marketing is one of the tools for generating leads for the company. By
doing the house of quality for the emails metrics the researcher come to know that, the subject line and content got more
ratings, and every test and tool proves that each metrics plays a vital role especially subject line and content. All analysis
the researcher did is the part of email analytics as it provides loads of information and on the basis of that, the researcher
can actually improve a lot of things like; level of engagement, common behaviour, loyalty and the strong and weak points
of the content. Further in this study researcher finds the reason bounce of an email and suggested a solution to reduce it.
And how to place the emails in the audience personal section, as a larger proportion of the email was going to the
promotions section, and what is the possible mistake can be done in an email which leads the email to land in the
promotion section.

So, by this study, the researcher gets to know that via email we can do successful product promotions and

Impact Factor (JCC): 8.6084 NAAS Rating: 3.37

A Study on Email Marketing Optimization for Lead Generation 29

advertisement and there are many tools and software which will help to enhance our email marketing campaign in every
way.

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