Perfect Your Email Marketing shows you how to use advanced tactics in your email marketing strategy including segmentation, automation, triggers and transactional emails, dynamic segments and dynamic content, split testing, lead nurturing, demographic and behavioral strategies and scheduled email and recurring email campaigns.
23. Peak Engagement(Send your email now) Purchase Validate Test Learn Post-Peak Engagement Dropoff(Engagement gets more difficult) Hello Timing Is Critical:
39. Why Your Readers Leave You: Inbox Cluttered Receive Too Many Not Relevant Source: CMO Council and InfoPrint Solutions Company, “Why Relevance Drives Response and Relationships: Using the Power of Precision Marketing to Better Engage Customers,” November 17, 2009
40. Email Provides Data – Use It: Click-through data 51% Demographic data 51% Open rate 48% Geographic data 47% Recency of purchase 39% Customer spending 30% Customer profitability 29% Acquisition source code 28% Website clickstream data 24% Customer service data 23% User satisfaction survey 21% Writing product reviews 5% SOURCE: Q1 2009 Global Email Marketing and On-Site Targeting Online Survey, Forrester (base of 103 marketing executives)
Notes de l'éditeur
Let’s look at email campaigns along a continuum ranging in effectiveness, from low to high. Atthe low end, you have blasts of newletters and promotions to your entire market base. These get the lowest clickthroughrates. When you add simple best practices to your campaigns, such as optimized subject lines and layouts, it can get a lot better. Adding segmentation and targeting raises relevance even further, by tailoring the message to a business segment and setting appropriate contact frequencies. Campaign Automation takes this up a level by setting transactional and autoresponse emails, such as autoresponders. At the top of the effectiveness range, you have the use of Merge fields and conditional content, as well as templates based on keywords you’ve stored in each customer’s record.
Ultimately, using lifecycle automation helps you drive revenue. According to that 2009 Forrester survey of marketing executives, Those who did not use targeting generated only 159 thousand dollars in revenue and 40 thousand in profits from their campaigns. By using web analytics, they were able to increase that to 540 thousand in sales and 185 thousand in profits. By adding targeting of message, they brought it to 664 thousand and 239 thousand. And with what Forrester calls social targeting, which is knowing the lifecycle-based interests of the customers, they took it up to 840 thousand in renevues and 306 thousand in profits, which you’ll also notice is a much higher margin than the other groups as well.
Showing a sphere with some numbers may not get the point across, so I will use this example. This is the data from one of our current clients. They send regular mailings about once a month to their entire list. On those mailings they get about 20% open rate and a 5% clickthrough rate. While these are very good numbers, we look at when they send a targetted mail to a pertinent segment. Their opens go up to 50% and they receive a 30% clickthrough rate. On top of this their membership list rarely receives unsubscribes because the only time the members receive a message, it is about something they would be interested in seeing.
The sooner you add subscribers to your list, the sooner you set expectations for the frequency and content in your campaigns. Try to follow this template, which shows the time periods in which you should take action. First, you have initial contact from a new subscriber. They are in the memory zone, where they will remember you. Next, you have a chance to send your reminders, and the re-engage zone is probably no more than 2 weeks. Then, you may have a last chance before 4 weeks goes by, but after that, you’re in the Try Again zone. The later you wait to engage, the more interest drops off and the value of your offering goes down. For existing subscribers, going for weeks or months without any communication has the same effect.
A recent study done by the CMO council showed that of the 91% of people that actively unsubscribe from emails newsletters instead of deleting them, the biggest cause for unsubscribing is being sent irrelevant email. The second highest was that a user received too many emails from the company. This clearly shows that sending targeted emails to your list is the best and over sending will cause list fatigue.
From another 2009 Forrester study, marketers were collecting these data to view the effectiveness of their lists. These are not exclusive groups, and 51% collect clickthrough and demographic data, going down to 24% who collect clickstreaming. This is following customers where they go after they click your email. Widget interaction and online review data, found at the bottom, are certain to increase as social media metrics begin to take hold in the marketing realm.