EMAIL MARKETING UNLEASHED

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!

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.

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.