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Archive for the ‘Email Marketing’ Category
Bring Your Zombies Back To Life
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011How to increase your email deliverability
There’s a new development in email marketing that could have a negative impact on the deliverability of your messages.
An increasing number of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are now monitoring engagement statistics to determine where your email will land in a recipient’s inbox. This protects the deliverability of emails that are consistently wanted, segmenting them from email with low engagement statistics.
What does this mean for you?
If the emails you are distributing are acquiring a high number of known opens and click throughs, for example then the ISP will send your email into the recipient’s inbox. On the other hand if your email activity is suffering from high bounce rates and minimal known opens then the ISP’s are more likely to file your email in the junk folder.
To improve your email deliverability, we recommend the following actions:
1. Boost click-throughs
One of, if not the most telling sign of positive engagement is someone clicking through from one of your emails. Even users clicking on the ‘view in browser’ link will improve your reputation with ISP’s. As a result it has become quite common for companies to flood their emails with links however this can look too over facing to the recipient.
One way to avoid this is to distribute single call to action emails broken down into three sections, all ending with a link to the relevant content on your website:
• A sentence summarising the content.
• Followed by a Bulleted List highlighting the benefits to add more incentive to those who require a bit more encouragement.
• Finally, the full blurb providing a detailed explanation of the benefits that await them by clicking through.
2. Boost ‘not junk’ responses
One of the ISP’s measurements of engagement is to monitor which emails are moved from the junk folder to a recipient’s inbox. This is a real vote of confidence in your email reputation and will help increase deliverability of your whole campaign. It is quite common for companies to ask people to sign up for email content on their website, during this process you should include details of the address your emails will be coming from and even the subject line, preferably on the sign up landing page and the welcome email. This should provide enough motivation for the new sign up to search their junk box, if the welcome email has not already landed in their inbox.
3. Segment your email communications
In response to the ISP monitoring, many companies are starting to segment their email lists by the level of engagement. This allows you to cater the email content to each segment, therefore increasing the relevance. The email marketing industry has identified 3 levels of engagement:
• The Zombies
• The Fence Dwellers
• The Converted
Here is our advice on how to tackle each segment:
The Zombies – Those who have not opened one of your emails for over 6 months. These have most likely abandoned their email accounts, perhaps they have moved job and the address hasn’t been shut down. If they do still exist you will tend to have very little rapport and therefore it would be best to remove them from your email list. If this sounds a little bit dramatic maybe try sending them one last email with a sensational subject line.
The Fence Dwellers – These people are regularly opening your emails and reading your content but don’t feel the need to click through very often. A little more encouragement is required to get them to jump down from the fence and engage in your emails. Content is key, perhaps make the call to action a little softer, a little more fun and elaborate.
The Converted – People who always open and nearly always click through, without even thinking about it. The converted really like you, so let them help you convert others. Make it easy for them to socially share your content (Twitter, Facebook icons, ‘tell a friend’ buttons), it’s more likely to go viral and send newcomers to your website.
A little segmentation can really bring your emails to life.
Email marketing: you must have a plan
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011You only need to look at your inbox to see how popular email marketing has become. This is because it’s a relatively cost-effective way of distributing marketing messages.
Now take a closer look at all the emails you receive, especially all the ones that end up in deleted items. You’ll see the majority are really poorly executed. So how do you make sure your email campaign doesn’t become one of them?
Here, in the first of a series of blogs, I’ll talk about the stages you need to go through to make sure your emails are the ones that get read.
Planning
The planning stage is the most critical part of any marketing campaign. It ensures you’ve thought about all the elements you need to make your campaign a success.
In terms of email marketing, before you even start to thinking about what your email looks like, you need to ask yourself five key questions:
- What do you want to say?
- Who is going to read it?
- What will they get from what they read?
- What do they do after they’ve read it?
- What do you do in response?
Having the answers to these questions will allow you to formulate an effective email marketing plan. So let’s think about each one in more detail:
What do you want to say?
Marketing emails aren’t the place to write a novel, so what are the key messages you need to get across? There’s also a killer question to ask: is email the best way to get these messages across?
Who is going to read it?
Knowing who your audience is will help you build the right mailing list and tailor your message to their needs. This is really important because sending the wrong content to the wrong people will only alienate.
What will they get from what they read?
Let’s be realistic, your audience isn’t waiting with bated breath for your email. You need to find a way of grabbing their attention and maintaining interest through content that they genuinely value.
What do they do after they’ve read it?
So your audience like what they read; what do you want them to do next and how do you get them to do it? Think carefully about your call to action.
What do you do in response?
You’ve got your message right and people respond to your email. Will you build on the momentum and send them further emails? Maybe you’ll phone them up? Whatever you decide to do, it’s best to have a plan in place before you’ve pressed send and the emails start to land in inboxes.
So that’s the planning stage of your campaign done. In my next blog on email marketing I will look at how you start to put your plan into action by creating targeted and relevant content.
Thanks for reading.
MIKE
Mike McNabb
Client Services Executive
The best day to send a B2B email campaign
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010At Ignition we often get asked by our clients “When’s the best time to send a marketing email?”.
If you search the web the consensus amongst the digital marketing world is that Tuesday is the day.
We decided to test this theory by looking through all the stats of all the B2B email campaigns sent through our C3 marketing system.
The average you could expect from an email campaign is 25.8% of emails sent being opened. If you look at the stats on a day-by-day basis there is some fluctuation around this average:
You’ll see that Tuesday does have an above average open rate, but Friday has a higher average at 27.9%. Interestingly Thursdays have the lowest average open rate at just 23.8%.
Does this mean that your email marketing mantra should be “Send on a Friday and avoid Thursdays”?
Well our answer to that question is “NO!”
There really isn’t enough of a difference between the average open days to make this a planning strategy. In addition, at Ignition we don’t put too much emphasis on opens. It’s too unreliable. Just because your email has been opened doesn’t mean that it’s been read.
For us, the killer stat in email marketing is click through rates as it shows the level of engagement your audience have had with the email. If they’ve clicked on a link in your email it means that they’ve read the content enough to find the link and they’ve found the content of interest to want to click through.
The average click through rate for B2B marketing is 10.6% of opened emails. If you look at the stats on a day-by-day basis the results are far more varied.
The old favourite send day of Tuesday performs well above average at 15.2% of opened emails, but the surprise winner is Thursday with an 18.8% click through rate. Remember we’d written Thursday off as the ideal send day based purely on opens. It turns out to be the clear winner for levels of engagement.
Interestingly Friday, while having the highest open rate, has a below average click through rate. The clear loser is Monday with an average click through rate of 5.1% of opened emails. It seems very few of us take the time to open and read an email on a Monday.
So it looks like Thursdays and Tuesdays are the best days to send emails if you want your audience to properly engage with them and you should avoid Mondays like the plague!
Do we recommend this as a rule never to broken? The answer is No! If you’ve got important news alert, it’s better to send it on a Monday and for it to be timely rather than wait for Tuesday just to get more people to read it. But if you’ve got regular news emails, it’s probably best to go for a Tuesday or Friday.
Effective email marketing
Monday, March 1st, 2010Email marketing can be a quick and cost effective way to keep in touch with clients – both old and new. But to get the most benefit, read our top tips to effective email marketing.
1. Use good data. This means using email addresses with ‘opt-in status,’ that is people who are happy to be contacted. This can help to increase response rates by up to ten times.
2. Keep it simple. Remember, your goal is to encourage your prospects to get in touch. Why are you emailing people in the first place? Whatever your reason, keep it at the forefront of your communication.
3. Don’t complicate things. It helps if your message, including the response mechanisms, can be seen on one screen. And don’t use lots of different font sizes and typefaces. It will only cause confusion and distract from your main message.
4. Make the ‘subject line’ stand out. If you can interest, amuse or intrigue with that one line, people are much more likely to read on. If you try to ‘sell’ at this point – they’re much more likely to press ‘delete’.
5. Make it easy to respond. After all, that’s the main point of the exercise! Always have a clear, concise call to action and provide immediate access to your website, email, address and phone number.
6. Keep going! Research shows that response rates increase as the recognition factor increases. So don’t think of email marketing as a one-off hit.
7. Take advantage of HTML. Wherever possible, use HTML to create the message. It looks better on screen, and you can hide URL links behind interesting visuals.
8. Track everything. By this we mean the number of emails opened, ‘unsubscribes’, clickable-links, emails received, telephone and faxes received, and so on. Simply tracking the clicks is only half the story. You should also monitor what happens when a click-through occurs on the website, and how your call centre deals with the phone calls. All this information is vital to creating successful future campaigns.
9. Get the timing right. Don’t broadcast overnight to business databases – they’ll simply be deleted. Research shows response rates are higher on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for business broadcasts. Sending messages to consumers on a Friday can also prove successful too.