Sunday, December 11, 2011
By: Al Bredenberg
I've written a lot of direct mail copy, but I find that when I'm working with email I need to do some things differently.
Every piece of written communication has a "sound" or tone. Most direct mail letters are written with a "hard-sell" style -- pound away at the offer, the benefits, the call-to-action. And in direct mail, that style works.
Not so in email marketing. People feel differently about their email boxes than their post office boxes. The email inbox is much, much more a personal space. So the approach in your email marketing communications has to be more personal, friendly, low-key.
As with direct mail, you should focus on the recipient rather than yourself -- use the words "you," "your" and "yours" frequently. But avoid over-use of such words as "free," "save" and "money," -- and stay away completely from such hype-tinged words as "fantastic," "unbelievable," "first-ever," "indispensable" -- you get the picture.
Give your email message a more relaxed feel -- no pressure. This is not the time for the frantic, relentless cadence of hard-sell direct mail.
Whereas long copy works well in direct mail, email communications should be short -- initially, at least. Let your first message be brief -- two or three short paragraphs. Let the recipient request further information via a Web page or a follow-up email message. Use that second stage to do a more in-depth job of selling.
At all costs, avoid the look and feel of spam -- no screaming headlines, message in all capital letters, multiple exclamation points, or deceptive "gotcha" subject lines. Never try to hide your identity by forging or concealing message headers. Provide full contact information. And don't send commercial email to someone who has not given you permission to do so.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
There are many issues to consider when putting graphics in your emails -- here's a brief outline.
If you have ever had occasion to subscribe to an email newsletter, you may have been offered the chance to choose between text and HTML as the format for delivery. For email marketers, the shoe is on the other foot, but the choice is essentially the same: pretty pictures or plain old text. HTML can do many things, but its most obvious asset is that it allows you to use images in your marketing materials.
Should images be part of your message or are good looks overrated?
Pros
- Images make messages more interesting and attractive. HTML adds many layout options, including columns, that text lacks.
- Links that are presented as images are more compelling, leading to higher click-through rates. HTML generates a rate of 11.6 percent, more than double the rate for text.
- Images allow senders to easily track delivery and response rates. Text messages can be tracked, but at the cost of including long tracking links.
- Including images creates branding opportunities that are completely absent from text messages.
Cons
- Images are less secure. This is a disadvantage that reverberates through almost all of the reasons to stay away from images.
- Because of the security risk, images are more likely to trigger spam filters, leading to lower delivery rates.
- Because of the security risk, some email services, including big ones like Gmail, strip HTML from messages before delivery.
- Users are aware of the security risk and turn images off in their email clients. This is a trend that is only getting worse. According to Marketing Sherpa surveys, the proportion of users who allow images as the default configuration was 55 percent in 2006, 41 percent in 2007 and only 33 percent in 2010.
- If recipients have images turned off, the Email Experience Council reported in 2007 that 21 percent of messages with images appeared completely blank in the user’s inbox.
- Beware the preview pane. MarketingSherpa reports that more than 80 percent of business recipients and more than 50 percent of online consumers use the preview pane to view their messages. Images in the preview pane have a different and less predictable look than images displayed in a full message.
- Image-filled HTML messages take more time to format and need more testing in different browsers and clients to ensure proper display.
With such a simple list, it may look like a resounding win for text, but the choice is much more complicated in light of the clear click-through advantage that images provide. Marketers always have the option to test their messages, sending a text version and an HTML version, so that they have some real-world feedback to rely on.
If your greatest concern is that users are in the habit of blocking images, there is a simple answer. Users block images because they have learned to distrust them. As is inevitably the case, give your readers a reason to trust and value what you send and they will respond, even if you fill their inboxes with a museum’s worth of images.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Renting email lists, although often frowned upon, can be the right thing in the right situation.
When it comes to mailing lists, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the best list is the one that grows organically from past dealings with your own happy customers.
If you are not in the enviable position of possessing that kind of organic list, you still have options. Renting a list is one possibility, but it is a strategy that garners a great deal of skepticism from marketing professionals. That skepticism is not always justified.
The negatives are well known. The most obvious problem stems from the fundamental fact that email marketing is permission marketing. In the best organic case, readers have given explicit permission to receive your messages. In the rental case, the reader may have given permission to someone, somewhere long ago, but that permission was not given directly to you, and the reader may have no recollection at all of when, where or why he signed up for future communications. That unexpected email is the kind that is unlikely to be opened.
In the worst case, a reader receiving an out-of-the-blue email from an unknown source will report it as spam, an act that can limit your ability to send messages in the future. Readers will mark your messages as junk mail, ISPs will take note, your messages will not be opened and your bounce rate will escalate. Your reputation is damaged and, if the problem persists, it may ultimately become difficult or impossible to deliver email to your existing customer base.
Despite those daunting negatives, renting a list can be a good choice for the right business and the right list, provided that you bear those qualifications in mind.
The greatest benefit of renting is the most obvious: If your own efforts at organic list-making are not bearing fruit, you get a ready-made list of prequalified leads with valid email addresses.
All lists are not created equal, however, and it pays to do some homework so that you can judge the quality of the list before committing to a broker. The more you can define your own specifications, the better you can communicate your business needs. At the same time, the more you know about the list, the better you can judge its suitability for your goals.
Look for the attributes that matter. A list drawn from trade publications or from newsletter subscribers is generally a better list than one that resulted from responses to a free offer. People who have made purchases can make a good list, but look closer. Did they purchase something similar to your products? Do their demographics match those of your own customers?
In other words, this is not a project for the lowest bidder or an impulse buy. If you take time for a long, hard look at both the list and your own objectives, a rented list can help jump-start a productive email campaign.
Getting people to act once they reach your site is the whole point of your effort. Here are some simple tips to help.
No one needs to remind you of the time and energy that went into getting a visitor to your website, and sometimes your efforts pay off. Your email was read. Your ad worked. You were among the top search results.
If all went according to plan, your visitor has arrived. Regardless of how that visitor found you, whether by search, advertisement or email, the question is the same:
Now what?
How do you get your visitor to take action, whether by making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a form? The specific action is irrelevant. Whatever the next step is, you want your visitor to take it.
The landing page is there to make that next step as painless and easy as possible. Make your landing page do its job by following a few simple guidelines.
- Keep it clear. Make sure that your visitor immediately understands the action that you want him to take. The language you used to induce this fateful visit should match the language that appears on your landing page, so that each visitor understands why he reached this destination. If your landing page incorporates a single call to action, do not clutter the page with distractions. An ambiguous call to action is really a call to take no action at all.
- Keep it short. Now is not the time to demonstrate your creative flair. People tend to skim when reading on the web. Keep your paragraphs short, your sentences simple and pay particular attention to beginnings and ends, the parts of paragraphs that people notice.
- Keep it simple. Rein in your designers. Complicated layouts serve only to distract your potential customers from the task at hand. Site controls should be as simple as possible and, above all, there should be nothing for your visitors to figure out. People will not tolerate any learning curve. If necessary, choose simplicity over artistry. Craigslist, for example, is no beauty, but every user knows just what to do from the moment the page appears.
- Keep out of the way. You may be tempted to take advantage of this visit by collecting information about your visitor. Resist. Even if the entire point of the visit is to gather information, stay away from forms that incorporate every field that comes to mind. Visitors will abandon your page as soon as a visit becomes a burden. This same advice holds true for anything that takes away a visitor’s control of the browser, including pop-ups, pop-unders and, as a general rule, music that automatically assaults your potential customers.
- Keep it professional. A landing page should inspire trust. Grammatical errors and typos undermine that trust. All copy should be checked more than once for errors. Landing pages should be tested in all the major browsers, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer, to make sure that they display correctly, work properly and load quickly.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Your email list is a critical business asset... if it is good. What makes a good list?
For the moment, put aside the question posed by our title. Instead, start with a different question, one that will add some perspective to the strategies, the tricks and the “secrets” of email marketing: Why would people avoid my list?
It only takes two words to answer the question: “spam” and “time.”
With respect to spam, people in your potential audience are acutely aware of the problem. Mailing lists have the unfortunate reputation of being hotbeds of unsolicited, if not positively dangerous, email.
With respect to time, people are busy and have a host of communications competing for their attention. One more mailing list may not be worth the temporal investment.
How do you overcome these very real obstacles?
The answer comes into focus when you turn your attention to the fundamental concepts of all email marketing, the concepts of trust and value.
By now, it should be no secret that email marketing is permission marketing. The ideal mailing list is one that consists of subscribers who have all given explicit permission to receive your messages. They have affirmatively opted-in to your marketing. If you have rented or purchased a list, for example, and you are not operating in this best of all possible worlds, you can still cultivate trust.
Strangely enough, one of the better ways to convey trustworthiness is to make it transparently easy for your recipients to unsubscribe from you mailings. They get the message that you take them seriously enough to respect their wishes. If they have to hunt for a way out, your list starts to feel like a trap. Make it at least as easy to unsubscribe as it was to subscribe.
Start off on the right foot with your readers by doing what you can to avoid the spam folder. Keep a well-maintained list of live addresses. Adjust your content and your subject lines to avoid spam triggers.
The aim is not merely to insure delivery, important as that is. In the user’s mind, someone, or, more likely, some algorithm, has decided that your message is spam. As a result, that message starts life with a black mark against it, and you never get a chance to explain that it was all an automated mistake. Negative impressions can be hard to shake.
If you have tackled the spam problem, give some thought to timing and frequency. Save your ammunition for those times when you really have something to say. Seize those moments by sending messages that are timely and only as frequent as they have to be. If you overdo it, there comes a time when an otherwise contented subscriber starts to have second thoughts. Make sure that you are not abusing your subscribers’ patience with messages that never seem to stop.
A similar caution applies to the more general issue of value. People subscribe simply because they expect you to deliver something of value to them. Value can mean a special offer, a new product announcement or simply some useful information. Be sure that you have something meaningful to say.
All of this can be summed up in a Golden Rule of Email Lists: Give your subscribers the messages that you would like to receive if you were in their shoes. Bear that simple rule in mind and your list will be a happier place.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
1. Blatant Lack of PermissionCompanies still try to get around the permission issues in search for the quick buck. That’s a big mistake.
2. Utterly Deficient Segmentation
Content relevancy is the number one issue for the email marketer. Without segmentation, you have no real relevancy.
Content relevancy is the number one issue for the email marketer. Without segmentation, you have no real relevancy.
3. Lame ‘Welcome’ Messages We still receive far too many lame welcome messages. What a wasted marketing opportunity.
4. Frequency Decisions Made for the Wrong Reason
Marketers are in a constant battle on the matter of frequency.
Marketers are in a constant battle on the matter of frequency.
5. Institution-to-One Messaging
The debate on how to personalize company emails is ongoing. It’s all about testing.
The debate on how to personalize company emails is ongoing. It’s all about testing.
6. No Real Interactivity
Interactivity is not only for social media. Email was once the relationship building medium, and it still can be.
7. Deliverability: Content, Formatting & Lack of Self-Advocacy
If anything, deliverability is even a bigger issue than it was two years ago.
If anything, deliverability is even a bigger issue than it was two years ago.
8. Designing Images That Appear as Red Xs
Getting HTML images to appear for those who have images turned off still requires that they turn the images on. It’s the text vs. HTML debate.
Getting HTML images to appear for those who have images turned off still requires that they turn the images on. It’s the text vs. HTML debate.
9. Disregarding Your BlackBerry and Mobile Readers
The number of mobile readers has exploded since 2008. Thank you Iphone and Android. It’s more important than ever to make your email mobile reader friendly.
The number of mobile readers has exploded since 2008. Thank you Iphone and Android. It’s more important than ever to make your email mobile reader friendly.
10. Repeating Ad Types
Banner blindness in email newsletters is more prevalent than ever.
Banner blindness in email newsletters is more prevalent than ever.
11. Collecting Bad Response Rates
You need good analysis to determine the effectiveness of your email. That’s always been the case.
You need good analysis to determine the effectiveness of your email. That’s always been the case.
12. Relying on Email Only
This last mistake of relying on email only was written during the dawn of the social media revolution. It’s the only one that feels a bit dated, but it’s still worth noting that relying on just one tactic alone is never a good plan.
This last mistake of relying on email only was written during the dawn of the social media revolution. It’s the only one that feels a bit dated, but it’s still worth noting that relying on just one tactic alone is never a good plan.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Segmentation is key to your metrics -- open rates, click-throughs and conversions. You need to know what it is and why it's important.
Segmentation is one of the cornerstones of marketing in almost all contexts. If you are buying TV time, you are buying time on a particular network, for a particular time slot and for particular content. Print ads are placed in specific publications that have their own demographics and their own regional editions. Direct mail goes to specific geographical areas or demographic groups. These are all segments.
Each of these choices is driven by the principle that a campaign will be more successful if it reaches a receptive audience. If you know your audience, your marketing can be targeted more accurately and your message will be more relevant to its recipients.
Email marketing is no different, but segmentation is something that can be overlooked with email, in part because a massive email campaign does not require the deep pockets that are a prerequisite for a large-scale TV campaign. The temptation, then, is to send everything to everyone.
At the other extreme, the ideal campaign would be truly individualized. Each customer or prospect would receive a completely customized message that spoke to his unique interests, preferably with a personal aside asking after little Timmy’s progress on the soccer team.
Between these two extremes lies the kind of list segmentation that is both practical and valuable.
On the practical side of the scale, lists do not have to be segmented according to each distinguishing point that can be extracted from the data. You do not have to analyze every click.
Of course, a mailing list will not segment itself, and you need to do the work to arrive at segments that are meaningful. Simple parameters are best, especially if you can devote some time and energy to testing those parameters against user response.
Segmenting and testing take time and energy, but they do not need to be complicated. In fact, too much complication can be counterproductive. For example, if you test two different subject lines against two segments, you have four variables to study. With four segments, the same test has eight variables, a smaller population per segment and, generally, results that are less statistically reliable.
The best approach is to keep it simple. Start small with the data you have on hand. Prospects versus customers is a good place to start, but you can expand along other parameters like clicks, opens and deferrals.
On the value side of the scale, Lyris, Inc. surveyed marketers in 2010 and found that 39 percent reported increased open rates, 28 percent reported lower unsubscribe rates and 15 percent reported both lower spam complaints and increased customer acquisition.
There are costs associated with email segmentation, but they can be more than offset by gains in many areas that impact your bottom line. If you keep segmentation simple, you can control costs and still achieve meaningful improvements in your marketing.
Writing effective emails is not easy, but some simple guidelines can make a big difference.
You have your mailing list in place, with all those dead addresses gone. You have done everything you can to avoid burial in the spam graveyard. You have sliced and diced your list and you think you may have hit on a good segmentation plan. You have a killer subject line that mere mortals will be unable to resist.
The preliminaries are over and it is time for the main event:How do you make the body of your message do its job?
- Emphasize your call to action. The point of your message is to induce the reader to take some action. Regardless of the specific action you have in mind, make the call stand out. If you have piqued your reader’s interest, capitalize on that interest and make it as easy as possible for the reader to do what you have convinced him to do.
- Do not settle for the all-purpose “click here.” You make your call to action with a specific goal in mind. That goal could be a purchase, a subscription or a visit to your site for any of a thousand reasons. Let your reader know exactly what lies behind each link. “Click here to subscribe.” “Click here to buy now.” “For more information, click here.”
- Align your links with their targets. If you are advertising a specific item, take your customer directly to that item. If you are offering more information, take your reader directly to the relevant page. Links that lead to your home page leave your readers with too much to do once they get to your site. Many will be annoyed. Some will get discouraged. A few will simply give up.
- Avoid images, at least some of the time. A significant number of users block images, and the trend is not friendly to marketers. In 2006, according to a MarketingSherpa survey, 55 percent of respondents were happy to let images arrive in their inboxes. In 2010, that proportion had fallen to 33 percent. This is not to suggest that marketers should resort to pure text. Be careful, though, of using images to communicate important parts of your message, especially your call to action.
- Use snippets and auto-preview to your advantage. Many email programs display the first few words of each message along with its subject line. Reach out and grab your reader with a strong opening. At the same time, many programs offer message previews. Be sure that the visible part of your message is something that speaks to the reader, and take the time to confirm that your message displays correctly in the preview pane.
When your business depends on email marketing, one of the worst fates that your messages can endure is to be relegated to the spam folder. If things get bad, you end up unable to escape from your readers’ junk mail folder and your message never gets opened. If things get worse, your messages are filtered by ISPs before your customers get a chance to see them. If things get indescribably bad, you can be prevented from delivering messages to even your most your loyal customers.
Falling afoul of the rules that regulate spam can cripple your business, but it is not so hard to stay on the right side of the filters and away from the blacklists if you keep five simple suggestions in mind.
- Watch your language. The enormous volume of email means that all screening is automated. As a result, spam filters are sensitive to certain words and certain styles. Avoid sending messages that have subject lines or content that is formatted exclusively in upper case or that is loaded with exclamation marks. Be aware of the words that are associated with spam and stay away from words that trigger the filters. It can be dangerous to guess at the words that cause problems. That means that you have to be aware of those troublesome words, especially because many of them have a place in legitimate email. Words to avoid include discount, bonus, free, guaranty, prize and bonus, but the list is long and ever-changing.
- Keep your lists current. Email providers keep track of messages that are bounced from dead accounts and those undeliverable messages count against you. Keep track of the messages that are not getting through and analyze your list to find recipients who have not responded to you within the past year or six months. Prune that list so that you are sending to real, active addresses only.
- Honor your unsubscribers. One of the fastest routes to the ISP spam bin is generating large numbers of complaints from recipients. A simple click on the “report spam” button is all it takes to give you a black mark. To avoid this, make it easy for your recipients to unsubscribe from your mailings. Provide a clear “unsubscribe” link in every email and take prompt action to remove those unsubscribers from your list.
- Put yourself to the test. Before sending mail to a list, send a few test messages and see what happens. Test the big providers like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, and include a couple of messages that will be received by the Outlook mail client. If there are problems, you will have a chance to make corrections before sending en masse.
- Go slowly. Instead of sending to the whole list at once, break the list into smaller groups and send messages in stages. At the very least, this means that ISPs will not be bombarded with enormous blocks of spam reports simultaneously. This strategy also allows you to make adjustments as you go forward.
Finally, take a good look at your message from the recipient’s perspective. Is the message useful? Does it provide valuable information? If that message found its way into your inbox, would you be happy to see it there? An objective assessment of your own campaign can be your best friend if you want to avoid the spam graveyard.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
By: Mike May
Depending on whose statistics you believe and where your company does business, there are somewhere between 250 million and 1 billion reasons to accelerate your social media strategy.
But the email clients I work with are principally B-to-B, so the sheer tonnage appeal of social media is not as persuasive with them. If a company only needs a dozen new clients to hit its numbers for the quarter, what should it care that 35 million soccer moms are playing "Farmville,"s or that #quikster is trending? Instead, it's easy to point out the ways in which email and social media are different, and how it is possible to conclude that a company that has built its communications program on email should not move resources into social.
I hear the arguments a lot, and will of course concede that the tactics for success in social are very different from those in email. Ambient atmosphere, message frequency, message length, content strategy and conversational expectations can be wildly different between the two channels. But email and social are alike in a very significant way: They are the only two permission-based channels.
I believe marketers whose teeth are sharp from email head into social with a competitive advantage, as they already understand the principals of audience acquisition, respect, empathy and relevance. How you execute on these principles varies between email and social, but for the email marketer, operating within them is already second nature.
That email marketers make excellent social media marketers is one very good reason to supplement communications through social. Still, there are many counter arguments I come across, some less defensible than others. Here are a few of the most frequently cited, each in need of a little mythbusting:
1. I don't really know who my fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter are. With email I know who they are. If you have open subscription for your email list, I would posit that the same is true --you don't know who your subscribers are, either. Sure, you may know their names and companies (unless they use Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo, which is common even in B-to-B), but you also know the names of your Facebook fans, and most Twitter accounts use or reference real names as well. What you don't have in social is the ability to see who exactly is reading or clicking. Instead, you know who is commenting, liking and retweeting. Isn't that just as valuable?
2. Not everybody uses social, but everyone is on email. It's true that only 250 million Americans, out of a population of 307 million, are on Facebook. And it is possible, I suppose, that the 19% of the population who are not on Facebook are highly correlated with your customer base. But statistics aside, is everyone you want to reach already on your email list? And if they are, do you enjoy 100% open rates, consistently? Most of the population on Facebook and Twitter is not a direct hit for B-to-B marketers, but your audience is there -- and your business would benefit from reaching them.
3. Business doesn't get done in social media. It's where people talk about where they went to lunch and look at pictures of high school reunions. "On Facebook / Twitter" and "at their desk, doing work" are not mutually exclusive. Your audience may be doing both at the same time. Even if they are snickering to themselves at the 25 pounds Cliff gained since prom, they're still only a quick shift in attention back to doing their job. And if they are completely immersed in Facebook, you may find it's easier to get their attention there than to try to lure them back to the inbox. It's a water cooler environment. Conversations happen there that you are only privy to if you're present.
4. My brand isn't right for social media. Is Vistaprint's? It has 33,000 Facebook fans and 9,000 Twitter followers. What about The American Society of Mechanical Engineers? Its industry recruiting program on Facebook earned 10,000 "likes" in only a few months. Both of those brands, as well as Omni Hotels & Resorts, Optify, Lexis Nexis, Sybase, Cisco Systems, EMC and others, were all B-to-B Magazine 2011 Social Media Marketing Award Winners. If your brand says something to your customers, then it is absolutely right for social media.
5. I can control my message in email, but in social media it's up to everyone else. I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. Look at it this way: Which would you rather have -- an unqualified email address, or a visit to your website from an in-market prospect referred by one of your customers? Good things can happen when your customers help tell your story, even when you have to give up a little control to let it happen.
6. I like email because of the one-to-one targeting. With social, you're just talking to a sea of nameless, faceless, largely anonymous people. Let's be honest here. Do you really do any one-to-one targeting with email? I mean, besides inserting your subscriber's first name after "Dear" and maybe segmenting by geography or some other fairly wide attribute? Truer one-to-one conversations happen in social media, owing largely to the expectations that customers have about their questions being answered. Whole Foods reports that fully 80% of the company's tweets are part of individual conversations with customers. And one of the reasons Vistaprint has been so successful in social (see above) was a company policy to respond to every Twitter mention directly, whether it was positive, negative or neutral. As a result, its Twitter followers more than doubled and its NetPromoter score (a scoring of customers who would recommend the company to others) also increased.
In order to succeed, every email marketing campaign relies on passing one crucial test: People must open your mail.
The point may seem simple to the point of absurdity, but it can be forgotten when you are putting all your effort into the content of a message that no one ever reads. Before people can even begin to act on your message, your subject line has to be good enough to merit an initial click.
Here are five tips for managing the part of your mail that gets your customers to listen.
- Save the sales pitch. The best subject lines are informative, not promotional. Promotional emails are inherently less likely to be opened than emails with useful, timely information. "Tax Tips for 2011 Giving" will be opened more frequently than "Give Now for Your Last-Minute Deductions" or "10% Off In-stock Gifts."
- Keep it short and direct. Unless you are writing to a precisely targeted audience that welcomes additional information, try not to exceed 50 characters. Epsilon, a marketing consultant firm, analyzed 507 million messages and concluded that shorter is generally better, but added that it is equally important to put your most important information at the beginning of the subject line.
- Avoid even the appearance of spam, especially because of spam filters. Your readers are bombarded with marketing from every direction and they are not willing to sift through huge volumes of mail to find the messages they want to read. Familiarize yourself with the words that trigger spam filters, as some of those triggers are not immediately obvious. Words like "help," "reminder," and "percent off" are among the seemingly-innocuous offenders.
- Let the subject fit the type of message. Do not be afraid to use a very plain subject line. "April Newsletter" is just fine for an audience of newsletter subscribers. It needs no embellishment. The idea is to build a positive relationship with readers, not to push products at them.
- Keep it typographically simple. Readers are justifiably suspicious of emails that insist on ALL CAPS to deliver their messages. Asterisks and other artful flourishes are equally suspect. None of your readers will find exclamation marks exciting!
In the end, there is no secret formula. The key is to offer something useful to your readers, something to make your message singularly welcome amid the relentless onslaught of junk.
For the past couple of months, I’ve dug around in the data regarding Infusionsoft’s email performance. Infusionsoft sends nearly 60 million email son behalf of our clients every week with an average deliverability rate of 99.5%. I’ve been looking at open rates, click through rates, spam complaint rates, and more to uncover trends that we can share with everyone.
In this post, I’ll share examples in email performance between two businesses in the same industry. They have two unique styles of following up with their leads along with two very different results.
I’ll be comparing two companies. Let’s call them “Company A” and “Company B.” I came across both of these companies when I was looking at the highest-volume senders with the highest average open rate and the lowest average open rate.
Company A was ranked lower in the list with an average open rate of 5.97%. They also have a decent-sized list that’s growing at a pretty steady rate. They have an online membership site that gives access to daily videos and other content. They put on events and they cross-promote with other businesses that target their same market.
Company B was ranked sixth in the list of highest average open rates at 24.21% and also have a decent-sized list that’s growing at a much more rapid pace. Their website is full of content. They offer tips, tricks and suggestions to educate their prospects and promote their products.
Here’s a comparison of the two companies:
List Growth Rate is the average growth or loss of people on their list after every email sent.
There are many reasons why an email is opened (or not) by recipients. First and foremost, it has to get delivered (and 99.5% of the time it’s getting delivered). After being delivered, the email must make it past a series of spam filters along the way. Unfortunately, this is still a challenge among all email senders. ReturnPath recently reported that only 81% of email actually gets to the Inbox. That’s only half the battle though. The recipient still has to wade through a ton of email to hopefully open and read yours. (As an aside, don’t rely completely on your open rates; read my previous blog post to find out why.)
There are two major differences in how Company B does their email marketing, which increases their response rates — and neither of them have anything to do with the subject lines. In fact, they are something anyone who sends email can do!
Deliver truly engaging content that serves your audience.
This is probably the most important component to getting your emails opened. This has been proven more important than a crafty subject line. If you can get your prospects and customers to anticipate your emails, it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from or what the subject line says, they’ll open it. Company A’s content is mainly a notification of the content of the new video their members are getting today. It’s well designed and has great copy but the emails are simply reminders to go log in to the site to watch the video. Company B takes a completely different approach. Their content is 95% educational and 5% pitch. Their emails say things like, “I was working on this today and learned this powerful lesson…” at the end of the explanation of the lesson they offer one of their products that complements the lesson they learned. This process of serving your prospects and customers creates that anticipated content you need and encourages consumption and engagement with your list. This trend also supports the notion of being conversational in email matters. People like that, too.
Deliver on the specific expectations at the opt-in.
If you only have one lead magnet on your site, then you’re doing it wrong. There are many reasons why people come to your site — you need to know why. If you have a vague or general opt in process, you’ll get a vague and general opt in list. When you specify what your prospects and customers will be getting when they fill out the form, your list becomes cleaner and more specific. Company A’s lead magnet is “Sign up for our free membership” where one of Company B’s lead magnets says “Fill out the form and here’s what you’ll get…” While Company A has one lead magnet, Company B has a few. Company A has a great lead magnet, but they’re not learning anything out about their prospects, except giving them access to the site. With Company B’s lead magnet, the only people that fill the form out are the people that want to get access to the content being offered, and they are segmenting their list based on the specific forms being filled out by visitors.
If you ask anyone else in the world how to increase your open rates, they’ll likely suggest to change your from address, or come up with more clever subject lines. Not me. That’s such a minor part of getting your emails opened. If you want to increase open rates, leverage your emails to serve your prospects and customers and leverage the opt in process to create a cleaner more segmented list. Focus on the behavior around the emails, not necessarily the emails themselves.
Are you tracking the right stats and metrics that matter in your email marketing campaigns? We hear questions from users about how to increase opens, clicks, deliverability, and more. These questions usually surround one point: how effective are their email marketing campaigns?
Email marketing effectiveness can be measured in a variety of ways. Here are five ways to size up your email marketing effectiveness along with why they matter.
- Open and Click-through Rates – These numbers combined help you see if your email messages are relevant to subscribers. Essentially, this is asking, “When our message is in front of you, do you open and click on it?”
- List Retention per Broadcast – Monitoring your list retention with each broadcast should indicate the loyalty your subscribers have with your list. This is easy to track, simply calculate the net number of “marketable” subscribers after each broadcast. (This excludes opt-outs and bounces.)
- Email Clicks to Conversion – Is email the right medium to close sales? Take an inventory of any sales that were directly associated with an email broadcast. This will suggest that your email campaigns are driving revenue for the business and there’s meaningful ROI from email marketing.
- Revenue per Subscriber (Recipient) – Another way to look at the success of your email marketing is the revenue gained per subscriber. In other words, are you marketing to profitable prospects? Do you have dead-weight on your list? With segmented email marketing, you will experience higher revenue per subscriber.
- Long-Term Customer Value – Okay, so if traditional email stats dictate that your campaign was poor, look at the long-term customer value such as upsell opportunities, retention, referrals and overall “quality” of the sale. Calculating the Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) down to the campaign level, you will be able to discover the real value of your email campaigns, regardless of open rates or click-throughs.
The point of these tips isn’t to say that basic email marketing metrics are wrong. Rather, it was to help you think about different ways to arrive at defining email marketing “success” beyond the standard-issue stats like opens, clicks and bounces.
What uncommon ways do you measure success in your email marketing campaigns?
By: Al Bredenberg
Thinking about making email a major component of your marketing and communications efforts? Don't go off half-cocked. Put together a plan first.
In many companies, the launch of an email marketing effort is right out of an old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie:
"Hey, gang, let's do a show!"
"Yeah, great idea!"
The next thing you know, the gang is cavorting around the set in beautifully choreographed dance moves, singing in perfect harmony. That's the way it works out in the movies, anyway.
But without a plan, don't expect your email marketing effort to get a standing ovation. Here are the elements we include when developing an email communications plan for a client:
- Marketing Objectives
What are we trying to achieve, in measurable terms? - Audiences
Who are we trying to speak to? Who are we trying to serve? What are their characteristics and their needs? Keep in mind that you may be trying to reach multiple audiences. - Value/Benefits
What can we offer for each audience we're trying to reach? How will they benefit, what will they get out of the email communications we'll be sending them? - Messages/Information to Communicate
What do we want to get across to each target audience? What will be the content of the communications we send out to them? Consider both marketing and editorial content. - Media/Vehicles to Use
What form should our communications take? What kind of list? An announcement list? A discussion list? A newsletter? News items? Daily tips? A series of brief commercial messages? Keep in mind your various audiences and what format will be most appropriate for their needs. - Resources Required
Who's going to do the work of building the list or lists, setting up the technology, creating content, writing copy, composing messages, managing lists, sending out mailings? What software will you need? How about hardware? And how much of this are you going to do in-house versus seeking outside vendors? - Budget
How much will it all cost, and where will that money come from? - Schedule
Set out a timeline for all phases of the project -- setting up the technology, promotion, list-building, content creation, mailing. Work out a production schedule that will allow you to have your messages all ready to send on time. - List Development
How will you promote the list and gain new subscribers?
If you're going to market by email, be sure to develop a workable plan. You don't want your show to be a flop!
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