the goal is growth and the puzzle pieces are marketing strategy, tactics, and technology. Ready, go!
As you redesign your marketing emails, it helps to reference some of the latest trends and ideas from fellow marketers. I recently discovered some fellow email geeks and innovators at ReallyGoodEmails.com who have curated, captured, and categorized thousands of emails for our viewing pleasure. They take quick snapshots and categorize them them for easy reference.
Some key categories below:
When planning upcoming marketing campaigns it helps to take a look back at your historical metrics to determine if your tactics were successful or not. If it was an email campaign, you’re naturally looking at open and click rates. If you launch a paid search ad, you need to know your average click-thru-rate (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC).
Once you know these numbers, the next question is “What does success mean for each?” And that’s where gets interesting. Some metrics can be determined by working back from business metrics but other times you just want a quick reference to industry benchmarks.
Insight Venture Partners, a leading global private equity and venture capital firm, created this Periodic Table of B2B Digital Marketing Metrics.
It often surprises me when I ask email marketers, “How is your campaign going?” and they answer with something similar to “Very well! Our open rate is 30%, which is above the industry average by 10 percentage points.” I cringe. Not because the open rate isn’t important, but because using it as your key primary indicator (KPI) often misleads your email marketing campaigns.
What’s wrong with the open rate metric?
It’s not 100% reliable, to say the least. The open rate is counted when a small 1×1 pixel image is loaded by the subscriber’s email client. A preview pane in Outlook counts if the images load. Thumbing through emails where your image loads counts. These examples show your recipients may be opening it but haven’t seen any of your content. Open rate does not mean they read your email.
Knowing this you can then logically deduce what constitutes a non-open. Simply, the image not loading. If you read it as TEXT on your Blackberry, you didn’t “open” it. If your Gmail blocks images, then you’re an unengaged subscriber to the marketer. You could have read all of the content by clicking “View as web page”, reading it in your browser, and the email would remain “unopened”.
What can you learn from the open rate?
Assuming you’re measuring it correctly… Emails Delivered / Unique Emails Opened = Open Rate … the open rate can tell you some interesting things about your campaign. Comparing it over time, you can make some high level guesses (I’ll explain later why I say guesses) about your emails. You can see if your contacts are becoming more or less interested in your content. You can A/B split test two emails against each other to see which subject line helped push it higher. You can get an overall performance of what percentage is engaged, as long as you remember the chance of error up or down as previously pointed out.
Many assume that there is a direct correlation between subject line and open rate. Mostly because there isn’t a great alternative if you’re using open rate as your primary KPI. Marketers will slave over the subject line attributed every up and down to the power of the subject line. The problem is that all of the invisible factors get ignored and decisions are made on the subject line alone.
Below are some other factors that affect the open rate:
Look at your own email habits.
As marketers, I’m guilty of this, we get so caught up in the numbers and content that we forget about our own habits. Sometimes I subscribe to an email newsletter because I dealt with the company or wanted to receive their content. Over the next few months, they send me emails here and there. I don’t unsubscribe because I still value the relationship, but often don’t read the emails either. I delete them from my iPhone because I compulsively avoid the small red circle with numbers telling me I have alerts. But the images loaded before I deleted it and as a result the email marketer is patting themselves on the back because they have a large list of people who are “opening” their emails. Their running to their boss saying “Look! Look! We’re making a difference!” But are they? Take a look at your own email habits and accept that it’s probably similar to your subscribers.
What’s better than the open rate metric?
Anytime you can get closer to the “sale” or at least the conversion, the better. A click… Emails Delivered / Unique Emails Clicked = Click Rate… is better than an open. A registration is better than a click. A lead is better than a registration. A sale is better than a lead. These other metrics are sometimes ignored because they are often small. It seems more important to report large numbers. It’s impressive to say we have a 45% open rate versus saying we have a 5% click rate. I’d argue that you can learn much more about the 5% that clicked on the email than you can about the 45%. What link did they click on? When did they click on it? How many times? You can’t get that with an open rate. But you can use this information to improve your email as I hope you believe, the most important factor is the content. Try this thought experiment. Would you rather have 100% open rate and 0% of the people engaged with your content (i.e. clicked) or 0% open rate and 100% of the people clicked. Yes you can have a click without an open, per our definition above.
Summary
The purpose of this post is to challenge the open rate as the primary KPI. If you’re an email marketer who is currently using open rates to make tactical or strategic decisions about your emails, I’d caution how much information you actually have. There is an infinite number of reasons on why someone opens an email but a much more limited number of how many engage with it by clicking on the content or following up with the company down the line in the sales funnel. Be aware of the open rate as a trend guide, but don’t rely on it to prove your campaign is successful. When asked the question “How’s your campaign going?” I’d hope you answer along the lines of “Very well. We saw 25% of our engaged customers click on a whitepaper in our last monthly email newsletter. Of those 25%, we’ve converted half to buy more from us.” Good luck!
If one of your digital marketing tactics is email marketing then you understand that the most important aspect is actually getting your content to your subscribers. This is one of the most common questions from marketers. There are a myriad of things you can do to either help or hurt your deliverability. It’s important to understand both.
I recently discovered a simple, yet very helpful, infographic by Pure360. Pure360 is an email & SMS marketing provider based in the UK, who specialize in helping businesses get the best results from their campaigns.
Improve Email Deliverability Summary:
Click here for more email deliverability infographics by HubSpot
If you’ve ever developed an email before, you know that the coding doesn’t stop when your design looks good in the browser. In fact, it doesn’t stop when it looks good in every browser (FireFox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari). Let’s not forget too that the email also needs to look great on every device that could potentially render it. I’m talking about phones, tablets, iPods, and anything else that gets dreamed up. Professional email designs should only be approved after they have been thoroughly checked in every email client (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, etc.) on every device.
Why do you need to check it on every device and email client? Seems a little overkill, no?
The reason you need to do so much “checking” is because every combination of device, browser and email clients produces a different result. Meaning, they render the email differently. For example, Outlook supports stylizing the email in the tags, Gmail does not. Gmail supports vertical alignment of content, and Outlook does not. Margin is supported in Outlook in all versions except for their new cloud version Outlook.com. Minimum and maximum widths aren’t supported in Outlook but work great on Apple Mail and the iPhone/iPad. If you’re going to use heavy background images, you’ll get support from Outlook 2000 and 2003 but not Outlook 2007, 2010, or 2013. Click here for a useful chart.
Email Programming Tips and Tricks:
Below are some tips and tricks for coding emails taken from the infographic that Litmus, a leader in email testing and analytics, created for debugging common problems.
Every company, every industry, and even every department in a single company can have different results. If you want to truly want to know how to get the best from your marketing, then you need to make testing a priority. Don’t rely solely on industry best practices, but instead come up with your own. That being said, below is some interesting information for email marketers.
According research by GetResponse, a complete email marketing solution, emails have the highest open rates and click thru rates within the first hour of being delivered in the subscriber’s inbox. This is important because we know as marketers that the more people who see our email messages, the more will convert to paying customers.
The obvious next question is “How do I maximize that hour by choosing the right time to send it?” According to the infographic below, the top engagement times are 8 a.m to 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sending during these times could increase your open rate by as much as 6%.
That being said, there are other important questions to ask. “What are your competitors doing?” “What happens if everyone sends at 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.?” The research shows that 38.7% of all messages are sent between 6 a.m. and noon. If you want to reach your customers then maybe test out sending it in the afternoon before they head home for the day.
Best Time To Send Email [INFOGRAPHIC]
Customers want to engage with brands they actively spend money with. This is apparent through rise of social media and the interaction with companies across all industries. Therefore, as your company’s marketing leader, it’s up to you to initiate those interactions and continue the conversation by always being front-and-center. A great tool for doing this in a non-invasive way is email. Most customers would gladly give up their email address and welcome transactional emails based on something they’ve done. It’s surprising however, that many small and some large companies are missing this opportunity. Here are 5 emails that you should be sending to your customers at minimum.
1) Thank You For Your Order
It doesn’t matter if your company provides products vs. services or is B2C vs. B2B, you should be sending your customers a “Thank You” any time you receive their businesses. This should go out at the appropriate time, consistently, and inform them that everything is on track.
2) Weekly/Monthly Newsletter
Help make your company more personal by sending out a regular newsletter email. Take content from your site or partner’s sites to ease the content creation burden. Let them know all of the changes you’re making to your company and how you’re doing. A little transparency can go a long way in deepening the relationship with them.
3) Special Discounts / Promotions Email
Everybody likes a great deal and many companies can leverage their engaged audience by throwing a great promotion out there. Target former customers or cross-sell your current customers in an attempt to drive up business and help them save some money. Note: Don’t abuse this media channel. Email recipients have a low tolerance for anything resembling a “spam” email. Make sure your promotions are highly valuable to the recipients.
If you’re not doing any email marketing today then it’s probably time to start. Throw a registration/contact form up on your website and start pulling together every email you have. Look into some cheap email service providers that connect to your CRM. In many cases you can automate some of these emails with a little configuration in the beginning. Start now, because you can assume that even if you’re not contacting your customers, your competitors probably are.
Bonus Email Ideas:
Even with the growing popularity of social media, e-mail marketing is still one of the best ways to reach your customers. Just about everyone has e-mail address, and they’re likely to pay more attention to their inbox than they are to the thousands of messages that come across social media feeds every day. There are several reasons to take advantage of e-mail to grow your customer base.
1. Develop a Highly Targeted Message
E-mail marketing is a targeted method of reaching people who are interested in your products or services. When people sign up for your e-mail list, they’re asking for more information and giving you permission to provide it. Unlike with social media updates, you can personalize e-mail newsletters to make each person feel like you’re talking directly to them, creating that all-important connection between business and customer.
2. Generate Repeat Business from Customers
You want people who have already visited your website, stopped by your store or bought from you online to remember your company. By offering them the opportunity to sign up for an e-mail list when they shop, you’ll ensure that your brand will pop up in their inbox on a regular basis with special offers to entice them to make another purchase.
3. Get to Know What Engages Your Audience
Most e-mail marketing tools offer a way for you to track what percentage of your contacts open each newsletter and how many links are clicked. You can use this information to better target future campaigns and create stronger calls-to-action.
4. Build Far-Reaching Advertising Effects with a Low-Cost
In general, e-mail marketing is much cheaper than other advertising options. You can often get a great deal of options for a flat monthly rate, so you can send as many e-mails as necessary to further your current ad campaign. If you want to reach beyond your contact list, consider including buttons to Like, Tweet or Pin new products and special offers. Making it easy for recipients to share their favorite things from your newsletter allows you to reach a wider audience without any further effort on your part.
5. Control Your Brand Message
Even if every social media update that you share has great marketing potential, you can’t guarantee that it will be as visible as your e-mail newsletter. With e-mail, you have complete control over the content, delivery method and recipient list. You can divide your contacts into groups based on their purchase history and market directly to their specific interests so that every newsletter is relevant to their preferences.
With its affordability and ease of use, e-mail marketing offers businesses a great way to engage with customers and keep them coming back. Through targeted advertising and personalized content, you can reach people on their terms wherever they are.
In the area of online marketing, there are many different tools that you can use. Pay-per-click campaigns, banner ads, article marketing and email marketing are just a few of the options that you have available. Of the most prominent marketing methods available, email marketing is one of the most effective strategies that you can apply to your business. Why exactly is email marketing such a powerful way to market to your customers? Let’s talk a little about how it works.
How Email Marketing Works?
Email marketing is a discipline in which you gain access to a list of email addresses of individuals. Once you have the list, you then send out email messages to these individuals to promote a product or service. Typically, a link to your website is included in the email so that the recipients of the messages can click directly on the link and be taken to your site to make a purchase or engage in some other action.
Email Marketing Is Highly Targeted
One of the major advantages of using this type of marketing is that it is so highly targeted. When you send emails out to a list of subscribers, you are sending messages to people who are receptive to what you have to offer. They have voluntarily signed up for an email list and they want to learn more about a specific topic. This means that you are not just cold marketing or sending your message out to the masses. Instead, you are actually sending messages to people who want to receive them. This vastly increases the conversion rate of your marketing efforts and makes it so that you can sell more products or services to your email list.
Easy To Procure - Purchasing Access To An Email List
Another reason that this method can be so effective is because you can essentially gain access to any list that you are willing to pay for. While you always have the option of building your own email lists, this can take some time. Depending on your situation, you might just want to skip over this and buy an email list from someone else who has already developed it. Once you do this, you’re essentially able to skip to the front of the line just by paying a small access fee.
Email Marketing Is Cost-Efficient and Effective
In many cases, email marketing is also one of the most affordable ways for you to get your message out to a large audience. If you are trying to market to a specific audience, you can end up paying a large sum of money through pay-per-click or some similar method. With email marketing, it’s much more cost-effective.
Something To Consider
While email marketing can be effective, you have to do it correctly. Choose the right email list to market to and then spend some time crafting the perfect message for your prospects.
As an email marketer, I’m constantly looking for ways to achieve an increase in effectiveness of the emails I’m sending on behalf of myself and clients. Even a 1% increase in click rate could equate to 1,000+ individuals for some large blasts. By influencing those extra people and engaging them to click and engage with the content, the chance that they make a purchase goes up significantly. Without action there is no ROI to measure. They are a meaningless subscribe. If they open however, one can attribute that back to influence and transactions.
Email marketing is effective because it’s highly measurable. You’ll be able to know exactly how many people opened, clicked, bounced, and unsubscribed. Use this data to develop a strategy for getting through to your customer. Always ask, how can I add value to their inbox?