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It is very important to have a consistent message in your emails from the very opening (subject line) to the end (landing page). If you don’t do this, your recipients will get confused and your response rates will suffer. Many companies get very excited because they have such high open rates. However, you could have high open rates from killer subject lines but extremely poor click and conversion rates because the email did not contain what your recipient expected.
Subject Line: An Introduction to your Offer
It is very important to have a good subject line in order to entice the recipient to open your emails. This will set you apart from similar offers. However, you want a subject line that summarizes what you are offering so that the recipient will not be surprised when they open the email. If they open the email and the message does not convey what the recipient was initially interested in (perhaps 30% off a certain) product, the recipient will discard your email.
Header: A Quick Summary of your Offer
A header is a great way to summarize the offer you are giving to the recipient. An example would be bigger bolder text telling the recipient they will receive a 30% discount if they click through to your landing page. If this header matches the original subject line, the recipient will know they are still on the right track and continue looking at the rest of your email content.
Email Content: To Click or Not To Click
The rest of your email content should support the messages you just stated in your subject line and header. If it does, you have a good chance of the recipient clicking through to your landing page.
This sounds easy enough, but one of the problems I have seen is that the creative will give the recipients too many offers and the recipient gets confused thinking where did that 30% offer go? Therefore the opener never becomes a clicker.
Landing Page: The Place to Convert
This is one of the most important places to carry your message through from the email. This is where the recipient will potentially convert to a customer, and many are lost in the land of the landing page.
Once again, a big problem is when the landing page does include the original offer, but it also includes a lot of other offers. This is not straightforward to the recipient and the confusion may cause them to give up.
Another problem can be if there is not a landing page at all. If you send them to a search result and there is no mention about this great discount they are about to receive, they may not want to go through all of the trouble of adding an item to their cart just to find out they were not going to get the discount they were expecting.
The Keys to Success: Consistency and Simplicity
The main thing to note from this article is to keep your message consistent from your subject line all the way through to your landing page. Another important aspect of messaging is to keep it simple. Give them that 30% offer, but know that if you throw in other offers, it may just confuse them and cause them to give up.
There are many factors that affect the deliverability of an email. Deliverability is a tough aspect to overcome because a lot of the control is with the ISPs. Once they are blocking your emails, it is very hard to earn back your reputation. The following are some things you can watch to help your emails make it to your recipient’s inboxes.
Bounces
Bounces are one indicator that your emails are not reaching the intended recipients inboxes. If you have a bounce rate over 5%, you will want to dig deeper into this problem. This causes additional problems with an ISP is blocking your emails to all of its recipients. If they see that you have a high bounce rate, they may consider you as a spammer.
Another thing ISPs may do with bounced or abandoned accounts is set up spam traps. They use abandoned accounts to see if you continue to mail inactive accounts. If you do continue to mail these accounts, they will block you.
Spam Complaints
It is important to keep your spam complaint rate low in order to maintain a good reputation with the ISPs. If you have a complaint rate of over 2% this could cause problems for you. This also indicates to the ISPs that you may be a spammer, so they block your emails.
There are great reputation services out there such as Return Path’s Sender Score and Goodmail that will work with you to keep your spam complaints low and also report on how many spam complaints you have received after each email.
Opt-Out Rate
ISPs may not know what your opt-rate for your email program is. However, it is a good indicator for you to keep your reputation in check. If you have a high opt-out rate and the email is performing poorly in other areas as well, you will want to analyze that email and decide if you should not send this type of email in the future.
Opt-out rate and spam complaints can go hand-in-hand because recipients may use the “This is Spam” button rather than your opt-out link to unsubscribe from your email.
Spam Compliancy
Make sure that you are complying with all of the CAN-SPAM Act laws. Not only can this save you from legal problems, but it can also save you from looking like a spammer and being blocked by the ISPs.
For a refresher, you can visit: www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm.
Email Reputation
If you work with an Email Service Provider, you may want to set up a few different accounts so that you can build your email reputation. If you have a poor reputation and are known as a spammer, your emails are likely to not get through the ISPs. My recommendation is to send your emails with the best reputation from your best account, and then if you have some that need a little work, have another account that you can send those from, so you don’t ruin your account with the good reputation.
I am certainly not condoning any spamming from a less reputable account; I am just saying that if you have emails that have higher opt-out rates and don’t perform as well, you may want to send those out from another account while still making sure you comply with all of your ESPs terms and conditions.
What can you do to Improve Deliverability?
For the majority of your email campaigns it is important that you keep your list clean as far as bounces, opt-outs and spam complaints. One way to do this is to only mail to your engaged customers on a regular basis. This could mean only mailing to those who have opened or clicked an email in a specified amount of time. If you think about this, it is really a benefit to you as well because you are not paying to send emails to all of your dead weight.
Don’t completely forget about the rest of your list. You can have special campaigns to reactivate and win them back. Ask them if they want a great offer or if they would like to be removed from your list. If you don’t constantly mail your dead weight, it shouldn’t effect your email reputation.
Another important thing to do is to make sure you keep your list clean. If an email has bounced more than 2 or 3 times, it’s important not to email them anymore, otherwise you may get sucked into the spam traps mentioned above.
Hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to improve your email deliverability.
For a refresher, you can visit
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm.
As I have mentioned in previous articles, I have had email marketing positions with three different companies. My past 2 companies were very large well-known companies with successful email marketing campaigns. However, at my first company we stored close to 500 of our database attributes in our email application. At my current company, we do not store any data inside the application which has been a huge adjustment for me. All data is first queried, and then a list is imported into the email application. I will discuss the pros and cons of storing your information in your email application.
PRO: Less Time Running Lists
When all of your information is in the application, you do not have to rely on your own database queries going through all of your data just to find the data you are looking for. Our emails currently tax our database more than any of our direct mail lists, so it takes practically all day for lists to run because all of the other marketing channels are running their lists as well. When you have your data in an email application, you still need to generate data to send your emails, however since it’s a copy of some of your database attributes, you are not competing so much with other marketing channels. It’s really a huge time saver.
PRO: Easy to Segment and Personalize Data
Within your overall list you pulled, you will probably want to set up some smaller segments and provide people with dynamic content. This is really easy to do if all of your data is in the application. Most ESPs provide their users with a drop down menu with all of your attributes and then give you a verification method to make sure you are using them correctly. However, if you are importing data from a list, you need to make sure you set up all of your segments correctly in your querying application, which isn’t too difficult. What has been difficult is dynamic content, because you need to have a field that spells out a specific attribute for each email address. Since you are generating text, this can add a large amount of processing time to your database query application. I have found that I can only do so much dynamic content with ours; otherwise our application times out and taxes our database.
PRO: Reporting Much Easier
Since all of the information is already in the email application, it’s easy to look at how specific segments performed or specific pieces of dynamic content performed. It’s a little harder when data is outside the application because you first have to download all of the email addresses that clicked or opened an email and then run a database query to match up those email addresses with your database attributes.
PRO: Marketer Can Manage Entire Email Marketing Process
If you are running lists outside your email application using an advanced database querying application, you will most likely need to involve an analyst or someone from your IT team to run the list for you. However if data is already in your email application, it is very easy for someone in a marketing role to set up segments by picking attributes from dropdown boxes. Of course it is very important for the marketer to know the data inside out.
CON: Harder Time Fixing Data Problems
If you do have a problem with the data, you are relying on not only your technical team to solve the issue but also the team at your email vendor. I have had a few all-nighters due to waiting on an outside vendor to fix our data issues. You also have to have a technical person working with your vendor to make sure database refreshes or uploads are working appropriately. If you want to query on additional data not already in your email application, you need to add new fields which can take a while to set up, or you need to upload lists to account for the missing data.
CON: Space Issues
If you run your lists in house, you already have the space available to you and do not have to worry about that aspect of email marketing. However if you have all of your data in your email application, you most likely have to pay for the additional space. Also once you hit a maximum threshold and want to add more data, your costs will likely increase.
CON: Hard to Obtain Approval by Higher Levels of Your Organization
Many organizations I have worked with will not go through the process of getting their information in their email application because they know they would never get it approved by their upper management. One reason behind this lack of approval is because another company has access to your personal information which is against your company’s policies. However, I have known many companies who work with credit card accounts and purchases, and they have never had a problem with storing certain attributes in their email application.
Better Email Marketing
As you can see by my number of pros to cons, I am an avid proponent of storing data in the email application. I think it makes for a better overall email marketing program and allows you to easily get the right message to the right customer segments.
Email marketing isn’t as well defined as some of the other marketing disciplines, although it is certainly on the way. When I started in the email marketing, I had a very hard time trying to decide what metrics would really be useful to me. After working at two very large companies that have solid programs, the following are the metrics that I have found to be the most useful. I am sticking to metrics as the basis for this article; future articles will give you ideas on how to effectively use these metrics to analyze your email marketing campaigns.
Emails Sent
This refers to the number of email addresses to which you sent a specific email. All of these emails will not necessarily get delivered due to bounces and blocks by ISPs. This is a good metric to use because you can analyze how much money you are spending on emails that do not make it to the inbox for some reason.
Emails Delivered
This is the number of emails that actually reaches a recipient’s inbox, however there is no guarantee that it did not go into their spam folder. I base most of my calculated metrics on this metric because you know that the recipient actually had an opportunity to open the email unlike “emails sent”.
Percent Delivered
This metric is the total emails delivered / total emails sent. If you are below 97% you probably have issues. It is a good indicator of how clean the emails on your list are. If this is a low number for you, check out your bounce rate to see if it is high. You may have a lot of people signing up for your email and then abandoning their email accounts.
Open Rate
Open rate is calculated by total emails opened / total emails delivered. I use emails delivered rather than emails sent, because at least everyone had an opportunity to open it since the email was actually delivered. This metric can tell you how interesting your subject and from lines are to your prospects.
Click Rate
Click rate can be calculated differently depending on the company. I have always used the click-to-open rate which is calculated by total clicks / total opens. The other variation of this would be total clicks / total emails delivered which gives you a very low percentage. A lot of companies do not use this metric because if they didn’t open the email, there is no possible way they will click on the email. Just make sure you are consistent and compare your campaigns using the same metric.
One thing that may affect this metric is your message. If it is consistent with your subject line or an offer that the customer really likes you will see higher rates. However if you have a high open rate, but very low click rate, you may have issues with your subject line and message not being in sync.
Bounce Rate
This metric is a measure of total bounces / total emails sent. A bounce is an email that does not make it to the inbox because the email address is not valid (hard bounce) or the inbox is too full (soft bounce). For an overall analysis, I generally include hard and soft bounces together, but if you are doing a deeper analysis into list cleanliness, that is where you may want to look at each one separately. The reason email sent is used in this case is because the email never reached the recipient, so using emails delivered would not make sense.
One reason mentioned above for a high bounce rate may be potential customers initially interested in receiving an incentive for signing up for email, so they use a junk account that they never pay attention to or close. When you try to send them emails, they bounce. That is why it is good to have a policy in place where if they have 2 or more bounces you remove them from your list. Otherwise ISPs may start blocking your emails.
Opt-Out Rate
This is the total opt-outs (unsubscribe) / total delivered emails. If you are looking at your email marketing program overall, it is a good measure of the interest your customers have in receiving your emails. It is also good to look at this metric for each email campaign because it is probably not a good practice to continue with email campaigns that have high opt-out rates unless they have extraordinary sales.
Spam Complaint Rate
This metric is the total spam complaints / total delivered emails. Many ESPs split this metric out into AOL and Other. In order to make sure you have a high deliverability rate, it is important that you keep this metric in check. If you have a lot of spam complaints, ISPs will start blocking your email because you look like you are a spammer.
Sales / Orders
Both of these metrics are pretty straight forward. It is just the amount of sales and orders generated from your email. You just have to decide how to set up your reporting correctly so you can accurately report on these metrics. In the past I have reported on these metrics both from business objects querying our databases and also Omniture.
Average Order Value (AOV)
This is a calculated metric based on total sales / total orders. This tells you how much the average order from your email generated. This is an important metric when analyzing why your sales are higher or lower than previous weeks. I always look at AOV to determine what effect it had on overall sales.
Sales / Email
This metric is calculated by using total sales / total emails delivered. This will tell you how much each email you sent generated. So if you sent 10,000 emails that generated $.05 / email, your total sales was $500.00. You can also use this metric further to predict if you were able to increase list size by an additional 10,000 addresses, in theory, a similar campaign would generate $500 more in sales from the increased list size.
Response Rate
Response rate can be calculated by total orders / total emails delivered. This tells you how many people of your total list actually responded to your email campaign. These rates are generally pretty low since you are using total emails delivered as a base and many of those people didn’t even open or click from the email.
Conversion Rate
This metric is total orders / total clicks. This tells you how many of those who clicked through to your website actually made the purchase. I prefer this metric over response rate because it is analyzing only people who are already engaged (clickers). It does not include those who didn’t open or click and therefore gives a higher percentage.
Wrapping Up
Hopeful this will give you insight into some useful metrics for your email marketing campaigns. In the future, I plan to continue writing about how to use this metrics to analyze your email campaigns.
There are many different stages of email marketing, some companies are in the beginning stages where they will send a weekly or monthly email to their entire customer base and everyone will get the same content. Ideally, most companies want to get to stages where they can be as relevant as possible so their customers will respond to their email marketing efforts. This article incorporates important aspects of an email marketing program to make your program not only profitable but also very relevant.
Acquiring Email Addresses
I have learned some lessons on this the hard way. First of all, it is very important for the sign up form to be prominent and on every page that you can get it on. I’ve worked on sites that only have a small link at the top of one page which is very ineffective. Everyone will see different pages so give them the opportunity to sign up wherever they are. The second lesson I have learned is to keep it as short as possible and ask for more information later. This really helped me increase the size of our email list.
Double Opt-In
A lot of email marketing providers only require you to use a single opt-in where once the customer provides their email, you can start including them in your program. However, I have found that if you send them an opt-in email asking them to confirm their sign-up, you have a more responsive list, and also a cleaner list. Without a double opt-in, you may have a list that includes a lot of bounced emails which can effect your email reputation.
Welcome Series
Once you confirmed sign-up, it is important to welcome your new contacts as soon as possible. The longest you should go is 24 hours; otherwise they may forget that they had interest in you. This can either be one email setting expectations of what you have to offer, or a series of emails that may include a discount to get them engaged in what you provide.
Email Newsletter
In my experience a weekly email should be the center of your email marketing efforts. If you send it more than that, people will tire of you, and any less causes the interest levels to go down. This newsletter should include news that is relevant to the customer and/or promotional offers that are relevant to them. The most effective newsletters that I have seen were highly segmented so customers only received information that pertained to them.
Behavioral Emails
Triggered emails are generally set up based on the customer’s behavior. Some examples of this are cart abandonment emails, post-purchase emails that include promotional offers and opportunities to review products, and emails based on the customers browsing behavior.
Reactivation or Win-Back Emails
There are many levels of engagement that a customer can be in. One of those levels is a customer who has not opened or clicked and email in certain amount of time. You can give these customers a steeper offer than usual to see if they will become re-engaged. It is also a good idea to ask them if they would like to opt-out because this will clean up your list which can increase email reputation.
Another engagement segment is those customers who are still opening emails, but have not purchased in a certain amount of time. You can send them a “Win-Back” email with a special incentive to try to get them re-engaged.
When implementing both of these offers it is most beneficial to continue to report on these specific segments in order to see if they truly become re-engaged or if it is a one-time purchase.
Opt-Out Process
When one of your customers does decide to opt-out, it is good to have a strategy in place. It is best to allow them to opt-out of a specific type of email (newsletters vs. promotional), rather than opting out of every email that you have. If you do have to opt them out of all emails, make sure they are aware of what opting out means. You also may want to ask them why they are opting out so you can understand if it’s because of irrelevancy, frequency, or other reasons.
Wrapping Up
I hope this has given you a quick overview of the aspects of a good email marketing program. In the future, I plan to write articles on each of these aspects and go into greater details on specific examples.
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