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Making an Email Campaign Successful
What makes an email promotion successful may sometimes seem
like a mystery. Many organizations are surprised to find out
that optimizing the effectiveness of their email efforts hinges
on three basic principles: Testing, Timing and Tracking. It's
astounding at how much these three T's can increase the success
of an email campaigns!
Testing
Test, Test, Test! Testing is often overlooked by businesses
because time pressures or staffing issues hinder their ability
to focus on preparation. All of the effort goes into getting
the email newsletter or promotion out the same time every month.
As a result, no effort is made to send a few small test emails
first. Missing the opportunity to learn something with each
mailing is a big mistake. After all, shouldn't this be what
drives the content and creation of your next email campaign?
Your goal by sending a test in the first place is to make sure
your full-scale mailing gets read by the highest number of subscribers,
encourages the highest click-through rates, and creates the
most sales.
The following steps are a good place to start: |
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Identify promotional goals then
test around those goals. For example, if you want
to maximize the number of redemptions for your in-store
coupon, try testing subject lines, the dollar amount of
the coupon, the length of time it is valid, or the placement
of it in the body of the newsletter. All of these factors
will effect how many customers open and respond to your
message. |
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| 2. |
The most effective promotions typically "cut to
the chase," and present the "call to action"
or offer within the subject line and the first paragraph
of the email. However, some products and services may
require a lengthier, soft sell approach. The key is knowing
your audience and your product well enough to make an
educated guess as to what format will drive the highest
response. Once you have 2 or 3 ideas, run tests to determine
which works best! |
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| 3. |
Test with a small portion of
your list first. Many businesses get itchy trigger
fingers when it comes time to send an email and they blast
their first draft off to their entire audience. The problem
with this approach is gauging success. Testing to smaller
audiences initially will allow you to determine what elements
were successful, and which elements were unsuccessful. |
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| 4. |
Start with small segments. If you have 50,000 names
in your database, start by setting aside 2 or 3 segments
of about 5,000 names each with which to do your testing;
that will leave 35,000 names for which to mail the "winning
test." The volumes you select for the tests are important
if you want statistical significance; however, some lists
are not large enough to yield large test cells. Bottom
line: use enough names in each cell to get a good read
on your response rates. |
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| 5. |
Modify only one variable at
a time. For example, if you want to test the 15%
coupon vs. the 10% coupon, do not also modify the subject
line on the 15% coupon test. To accurately determine which
coupon is more effective at creating customer response,
the only variable that can be different is the value of
the coupon. Same concept goes for testing newsletter content.
If you want to see which article placement encourages
the highest click-through rates, do not also change the
length of the greeting paragraph, the graphics, or the
subject line.
It is also important to make sure you select a "control"
for your test. The control should be what has proven in
the past to work the best, or at least is your "standard"
format for this type of communication. Important thing
is to vary only one attribute in each of the tests - all
other portions of the email should be exactly like the
control. Also, to reduce any effect from time differences,
all tests and the control should be mailed at the same
time. |
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| 6. |
Test. Fire. Adjust. Ensuring
that your tests are set up properly and have a strong
chance of "beating the control" version is the
most important focus for testing. Doing it right will
allow you to read the test results and know that they
are accurate. |
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Once you have mailed your tests, spend time reading the results
with the reporting available to you. ICAM CONNECT's online tracking
allows for real-time online tracking of delivery information,
open rates, click-through rates and percentages. This information
is all absolutely necessary to include in your analysis, and
is even more powerful if you can couple it with "back-end"
data on sales conversion rates from your commerce system or
your sales force.
The whole process is about learning and making adjustments based
upon what you have learned. This should be the way you approach
every campaign.
Timing
Sending your message at the right time and frequency for your
audience can have a dramatic effect on your readership and your
ROI! Here are some timing tips to follow:
When
to Send your EmailM
There is no universal rule for when to send an email promotion
or newsletter. The best answer is "it depends." It
depends upon several factors: your audience (business vs. consumer,
or technical vs. non-technical), what you are selling (high-price
vs. low price, or service vs. product), and your objective (sales
vs. leads). The best way to determine the appropriate day and
time of the week to send your email communications is to test.
There are, however, some general common sense guidelines that
you can follow that will get you off to a good start.
Business-to-Business
In general, emails that focus on a business market should be
sent during the middle of the business week, between late in
the day Monday and Thursday afternoon. The goal is to avoid
the Monday morning "inbox glut," as well as Friday
afternoon when business people have already mentally "checked
out" for the weekend. This includes business emails that
feature news, products or services of interest to other business
personnel. You need their full attention and their time, and
you are most likely to get it during the heart of the business
week.
Business-to-Consumer
Determining the time to send emails to a consumer population
is a little more involved. The type of product/service you are
selling and the location of your audience will dictate when
you should send your message. Many consumer products and services
will get attention during the business week and in the evenings,
depending on where your customers access their email. Some products
will do better on weekends when your audience is likely to have
a little more free time to give to your offer.
How
Often to Send your Email
Before sending any email promotions or newsletter, you should
first determine the frequency that you intend to send these
communications. Experience shows that sending an email to a
specific email address list more than twice per month will increase
the attrition rate of your list, and lead to unhappy subscribers
which may cause list burn-out. Twice per month is the maximum
number of contacts recommended for most audiences unless the
timeliness of the topic is of key importance to the communication
(such as daily news updates, etc.).
Use
Urgency Dates to Increase Response Rates
Getting your subscribers to take action now is one of the most
important things you should strive for in an email promotion.
People are so busy these days, especially if they receive email
at their workplace, that if you don't catch them now they are
much less likely to respond later. If their inbox reaches a
certain depth, they may just delete your email.
Get your customers to open your email by including urgency dates
in the subject line and in the body of your message. For example,
a company selling payroll services might use a subject line
such as: "Cut Payroll Prep Time in Half. Offer ends April
30th!" This effectively uses an expiration date to increase
urgency and will achieve a higher open rate and response rate.
When coupled with an appropriate re-mail plan (see below), the
use of urgency dates is even more powerful.
Re-mailing
Will Increase your Revenues
As stated above, two communications per month should be the
maximum. However, you can operate within these guidelines and
still achieve great results. Many businesses create and send
email promotions for a single delivery only. What they are missing
by doing this is the portion of their population that either
didn't understand their offer the first time or ignored it.
Re-mailing an offer a second time, with a slightly different
subject line, layout, or messaging will often achieve a response
rate as high as your initial mailing.
Tracking
Back in the days of catalog marketing, you had to wait several
weeks or months for data to come in. Not so with email. Email
tracking allows you to send a campaign and begin seeing the
results in the very same day. If you're conducting testing,
as much as 70% of your response will happen in the first 48
hours after the mailing, giving you the opportunity to pick
a test "winner" in only two days! The reduced time
to read results allows you to react quickly to changes in your
business climate and take advantage of late-breaking opportunities.
Imagine if Sears was able to peek into your house on the day
you received your catalog. They could see if you opened the
catalog, know which sections you read or didn't read, even watch
you throw it in the trash. In many ways this is the power available
to you via email promotions, since leading technologies allow
you to view the following statistics: |
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Total emails sent |
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Emails that were undeliverable |
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Total emails delivered |
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Emails opened |
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Links clicked |
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Unsubscribes |
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Open Rate and Click-through Rate |
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The ability to read the "Email Open Rate" is one
of the statistics unique to email. HTML, graphical emails allow
a marketer to not only track the number of emails opened, but
who opened them. Typical open rates range from 40 - 60% for
opt-in email campaigns, going even higher for more qualified/targeted
lists. Being able to identify who is reading your messages provides
you tighter targeting opportunities for your next newsletter
or campaign by allowing you to send your next email to only
those that opened or that didn't open your last email.
Hypertext links give you the opportunity to track which links
inside emails are clicked on, how often they are clicked, and
who clicked them. Marketers call this tracking feature "click-through."
Click-through rates for email average 5 - 15%*, higher than
for other online media such as banners which now average click
rates below 0.5%.
The ability to track click-throughs gives you an idea of what
interests your subscribers. Closely monitoring click-through
rates can help you hone your content for your next mailing.
For example, though your editorial section of your newsletter
may be your personal favorite, it may not receive many subscriber
clicks - meaning that your topic may be more interesting to
you than to your readers. Good news is, you'll always have your
next newsletter to develop more popular content.
Undeliverable
Emails
Email delivery shares at least one thing in common with snail
mail; if the address is wrong, the mail won't get delivered.
Unique to email, however, is the fact that email will "bounce"
if it finds a mail server that is "down" or out of
service temporarily. Most email software will just stop there
and not attempt to deliver the mail any longer, assuming that
the address is wrong. More sophisticated software will re-send
to these bounced addresses at some predetermined time interval
after the initial delivery attempt. This will ensure the highest
number of your emails reach the intended audience.
Unsubscribes
If you are doing email marketing correctly, you are practicing
permission-based marketing and are only sending to subscribers
who have asked to receive your communications or have "opted-in."
Allowing your subscribers to unsubscribe or opt-out at any time
is a must, and tracking the rate that subscribers are leaving
your list is one way to understand how strong your list is,
how loyal your subscribers are, and how well your content is
being received.
One of the tenets of permission marketing is that your messages
should be relevant to your audience. Unsubscribe rates should
average less than 1% for each mailing you send. A higher unsubscribe
rate could mean that you are missing the mark with your communications
and your messages do not contain the content your audience expected.
It could also mean that your messages are being sent too frequently,
and your subscriber base is growing tired.
*(source: Jupiter Communications) |
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