Marketo Data Tells Us: What’s the Truth Behind the Two Biggest Email Volume Myths?

I hear this question from email marketers all the time: Does the size of my email send affect the performance?

To answer this question, we’re going to play MythBusters!

Email Myth #1

“The larger your email sends, the higher your unsubscribe rate”.

Hypothesis:
This one seems reasonable. I feel like if you’re doing huge email size sends, your messaging is probably going to seem “spammy”, and so a larger percentage of recipients will unsubscribe due to irrelevance.

Data and Analysis:

Here, you’ll see email send size against unsubscribe rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case.

There is no significant correlation here. In fact, you can see there’s actually a slightly negative correlation. Larger email sends actually have lower unsubscribe rates. This could be a result of companies with larger databases having more well-known brand names so they are more careful with their email campaigns. But, I think the opposite is true in that there are many “experimental” small email sends that are sent to “unknown” contacts.

Results:

Myth busted! Email send size does not affect unsubscribe rate.

Wow, this one wasn’t that intuitive. I assumed large email sends mimicked spam email which would warrant higher unsubscribes. But the data shows that email volume size doesn’t affect unsubscribe rate. However, it’s important to note that several other factors such as frequency, content, and relevance do. Take a moment and think about your every-day email behavior: if could be seen as annoying or irrelevant, you’re probably going to take the extra effort to unsubscribe.

Email Myth #2

“The larger your email sends, the lower your click-to-open rate”.

Hypothesis:

Just like the first myth, this one looks plausible. Huge email sends dilute the messaging so I would imagine email performance would suffer. It’s hard to imagine one email would be relevant to millions of people, at least not relevant enough for them to click through.

Data and Analysis:

Here, you’ll see email send size against click-to-open rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M emails because everything above that becomes a special case.

There’s a very strong correlation here. If I were to sketch out the natural curves, it would look like a sideways funnel with a huge drop-off at around 20,000 to 50,000. Email sizes above that rarely reach higher than 20% click-t0-open. This makes a lot of sense if you think of content relevance. More segmented email sends, with more targeted messaging, get more clicks.

And for all you inquisitive minds out there, if you’re wondering about just click rate, yes, the exact same phenomenon as click-to-open rate occurs.

Results:

Myth confirmed! Email send size is directly tied to performance.

I love science! We proved an industry-old myth with data! But if you really think about this one, it makes a lot of sense. Open rate is tied to your subject line and sender info. Click rate is tied to your content and offering, which equals relevance. The larger your email sizes, the harder it is to stay relevant and have a compelling call-to-action that appeals to that audience. Especially after the email send size exceeds 20,000—where the average click-to-open band narrows to 3-18%. It’s very rare to escape that band.

What We’ve Learned

The main takeaway here is to find a good balance between the granularity of your segments and the relevance of your content or offering. If you have the resources, segment your email campaigns based on the audience persona (industry, demographic, geography, etc.) and behavior (e.g. looked at your product webpages). As a general “guideline,” the email size sweet spot is around 5,000.

However, as long as your message is relevant and resonates with the recipients, you’ll get good email performance. It’s just very difficult to stay relevant beyond a certain audience size.

Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Leave your comments below.

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The ABCs of A/B testing | How to base your subject lines on science

 When time-starved customers are bombarded with emails every day, your subject lines can make an enormous difference in whether subscribers actually see your messages.

In fact, recent research shows 47 percent of email recipients quickly decide whether to open or ignore emails based on the subject line alone. Worse, 69 percent of readers who report email as spam are motivated to do so by how the subject line reads.

Of course, psychology plays a major role in that behavior, and researchers are continually trying to determine the parameters involved. For example, Experian last year found personalizing subject lines led to a 42 percent lift in unique open rates for the consumer products and services segment, an improvement that averaged out to 29 percent when applied across industries. However, personalization was completely ineffective in emails pitched to publishers, and it only improved opens by 1 percent when sent to media and entertainment representatives.

Because applying reader psychology to the email creation process is an inexact science, the only way to determine the most effective wording of your subject lines is often via A/B testing.

“There are limitless possible emotional combinations of language available,” observes Parry Malm on Econsultancy.com. “Knowing which work best for your audience is impossible without testing. The opportunity is to quantify emotion … then optimize based on the results … then profit from better subject lines.”

Fortunately, such testing is easy and convenient through the use of online tools.

VerticalResponse, for example, boasts an A/B testing feature that allows Pro Plan users to quickly and easily compare alternate email subject lines. Two different subject lines are sent to 25 percent of an address list, and within minutes of initiating the tests, the technology automatically sends the subject line that drew more opens to the remaining contacts, boosting the open rates for the entire campaign.

Testing options offer choices for better open rates

So how does A/B testing work? As its name implies, it helps you make decisions in your email campaign by temporarily presenting two different options to your audience, then gauging response rates to determine which option is better received. Here’s what the process generally entails:

1. Determine which factors you’d like to test. Before getting started, you need a good handle on the subject-line variables you’d like to compare. Industry research in that regard is valuable, but you often can’t determine what will work best for your specific audiences and circumstances without going directly to the source.  To think about elements to compare, consider the questions that have occurred to you as you’ve tried to finesse your subject lines in the past. For example, you may be wondering:

• Are short or long subject lines more appealing?
• How would my audience respond to numbers and dollar figures?
• How would recipients react to their names in the subject line?
• How much other customization is advisable?
• Should my subject line be phrased as a statement or question?
• Are exclamation points OK?
• Should I use industry jargon or more colloquial terms?
• Will humor be well received, or should I maintain a straightforward tone? Once you’ve established your most burning questions, you can create a spreadsheet allowing you to record and compare results.

2. Establish logistics. In designing your test structure, you must establish ground rules so results aren’t skewed; that way, you gain real, scientific insights. Aim to control as many extenuating variables as possible. For example:

• Your test groups should be equal in number.
• Your tests should run for an equal time interval.
• The tests should go out at the same time of day. Run your tests as frequently as you’d like. After the completion of each, you can fill in the results on your spreadsheet, after which you can take them up for consideration when crafting future emails.

Some common variables

As mentioned, you’ll need to decide which variables are most relevant to your campaign. However, you may want to be aware of research already conducted and how that might affect your own testing. You might also consider the following best practices in getting started:

• Question versus statement
  Sources differ on the advisability of incorporating question marks into your subject lines, but many recommend against it on the grounds the recipient may not open the email if his immediate mental answer to your question is negative. One source recommends instead making the subject line a statement, like “Question about your career,” which could prompt the reader to click to learn the nature of the question.
• Short versus long Brevity is of the essence when trying to appeal to busy consumers in a world vying for their attention. One study found subject lines of six to 10 words gleaned the most opens (21 percent), followed by those with zero to five words (16 percent) and 11 to 15 words (14 percent). Note 68 percent of emails are opened on mobile, and most mobile devices display only four to seven words of subject lines.
• Humorous versus straightforward That depends heavily on your target audience and whether it veers toward the conservative. Obviously you should stay away from anything that’s offensive, but in general, audiences respond positively to clever lines that are unexpected or make them smile. One study also points to much higher open rates for subject lines readers view as original. Still, overly ambiguous lines may lose you fans; one source points to 56 percent better open rates for messages that are very clear as to their intent.
• Emojis versus no emojis
  Salesforce reported last year on the increased use of characters and emojis in subject lines, estimating some 2 percent of B2C subject lines included them last year. “Using special characters and emojis in subject lines may seem gimmicky or silly,” advises Chad White in the report. “However, adding these visual elements to subject lines has proven quite effective for some brands, which should come as no surprise since adding images to tweets, blog posts or just about any other media also improves response.”
• Personalization versus no personalization
  Research differs on the extent to which personalization improves open rates. But most analysts believe it’s a good concept to embrace as consumers increasingly expect big data to help customize their business transactions. “Consumers expect their interactions with a brand to be dynamic and personally relevant,” notes Shelley Kessler on MarketingSherpa.com. “A brand that recognizes a subscriber by name in the subject line of an email is able to establish an immediate, personal connection with that subscriber, and that is reflected in our research.”

Recommended reading: Our Vice President of Product, Thomas Fanelli, gives readers five ways to to get started with personalization.

Also worth your consideration

Recent research points to the following other helpful information as you attempt to create meaningful subject lines for your emails. However, we still recommend testing these concepts on your own to determine whether they hold true for your audiences and circumstances.

• Email opens decrease 19 percent when the word “newsletter” is included in the subject line.
• Emails with no subject line are opened 8 percent more often than those with a subject line.
• Emails with “FW:” (denoting forwarding) in the subject line are opened 17 percent more often.
• Text that creates a sense of urgency and exclusivity improves open rates 22 percent.
• Using the words “daily” or “weekly” in subject lines boosts open rates, whereas the word “monthly” is detrimental.
• Subject lines that simply describe email content are more effective than those including a hard sell or call to action.
• Subject lines incorporating the word “free” are opened 10 percent more often.
• Other words that often perform well in subject lines include “content,” “video,” and “news.” Words that typically do more harm than good include “perfect,” “good,” “donate,” and “report.” 
• Certain words in subject lines are more likely than others to derail your email to spam; learn some of them here.
• Subject lines incorporating passive words perform up to 14 percent better than those with active words.
• Fewer than 1 percent of B2C subject lines include hashtags, which can deter opens but are nevertheless useful in pointing traffic toward social media campaigns. “Hashtags let you tap into big ideas and themes,” notes Chad White at Salesforce. 

Recommended reading: See more magic marketing words you should be using.

Ready to get started? A/B testing requires some thought, but it can help narrow down your email marketing strategy so you can take maximum advantage of one of the least expensive and most effective marketing tools available.

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Guide to Autoresponders Part 3: Follow-Up and Confirmation Emails

Autoresponders are an excellent way to stay engaged with leads and customers even while you’re busy doing other things. This kind of email automation saves you time and provides value to the recipients. In this final post, we examine follow-up emails and the automatic lift you get from incorporating them into your campaigns. We also look at various examples of confirmation emails and how to make them more than just a transactional message. But first let’s quickly recap what we cover in Part 1 and Part 2 of this guide.

In the first of this three-part series, we explore the top five ways your business can benefit from using email autoresponders. We also look at Welcome emails and how this type of autoresponder works to greet new subscribers and direct them to the next desired step with a clear call-to-action.

In part two, we provide an overview of Content Offer emails and how to get people to re-engage by offering quality content after a period of inactivity. We also show you a few examples of Survey and Feedback emails so you can set up a two-way line of communication with your customers.
For our final post, it’s all about follow-up and confirmation. Let’s get started!

Follow-Up Emails

We’ve written a lot about follow-up emails recently. That’s because by sending a follow-up email as part of your campaign you are likely to see an average 30% lift in your open rate.

Here’s an example we sent to VerticalResponse Classic customers this past April in celebration of Earth Day.



The open rate on the initial email was 21.15%. A few days later, we sent the same email to non-responders (the segment of the list that never opened the first email). That secondary, or follow-up email, received an open rate of 13.6%. That brought the new open rate up to 31.88%. By simply sending the same email to those who didn’t open the first one, we were able to lift the open rate by 50%.

As mentioned earlier, from what we’ve seen from our own campaigns to the campaigns of our small business customers who send follow-up emails, you can expect to see a 30% lift.

Just last week, VerticalResponse released a new feature for premium accounts that allows you to automatically schedule a follow-up email when you create and send an email campaign. This helps you maximize the results of your email without the extra work of manually segmenting your list of nonresponders and creating a new campaign. Both the original and the follow-up email stay tied together, and the results from both are visible in the reporting so you can easily see the benefit. We think it’s pretty super.

Confirmation Emails

When a customer makes a purchase, you can send an email to confirm the sale. Fitpacking, a backpacking adventure outfit, sends confirmation emails whenever someone books a trip.

“We’re small, and although there’s always someone staffing the company, during the busy season most of us are out in the wilderness guiding trips,” Steve Silberberg of Fitpacking explains. “If someone signs up for a trip and we can’t get back to them in a timely manner, they will quickly lose patience and withdraw or go elsewhere. That’s why we rely heavily on autoresponders to confirm trips.”

Here is an example of the confirmation email that Fitpacking customers get. It’s a simple text –only email but gets the job done.



In this next confirmation email, Mountain Play Association confirms the purchase and also provides links in anticipation of frequently asked questions..



Another use of confirmation emails is to confirm a recipient’s involvement in a contest. Check out these triggered emails for new contest entries:




Notice that both companies offer a promotion in their confirmation email to generate a sale.

Conclusion

Follow-up and confirmation emails are two autoresponders that make it easy for you to stay engaged with your customers. Use them to improve your email open rate, communicate important information, and inspire a sale.

Hop on your favorite social channel and tell us which autoresponders you use.


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4 Tips to Refresh Your Email Marketing Strategy

 Email marketing continues to reign supreme when it comes to reaching consumers. When compared to Facebook and Twitter marketing, it’s nearly 40 times more useful for acquiring customers. To help refresh your email marketing strategy this year, we’ve outlined four tips to make sure you’re on the right track.

1. Make emails mobile friendly

Mobile is the preferred method for reading emails. According to a study from Mobile Ink, 65% of email is being opened on mobile devices. And that number continues to rise as more people purchase smartphones. From 2013 to 2014, the amount of smartphones shipped worldwide increased by 23.8 percent. By 2018, 1.8 billion smartphones will be used around the globe.

In a perfect world, your emails will pique customers’ interest when they’re on the go, and they will make an immediate purchase or do so when they get to their laptop or desktop. 

How to implement: Your emails need to be use responsive design, which means they adjust to the screen size of any device. If you’re using templates in the latest version of VerticalResponse, your emails are automatically responsive, and you don’t need to do a thing. If not, you may want to hire a designer, or it might be time to use an email service provider that provides responsive templates.

Along with responsive design, we recommend using a serif font (those with legs or tails) for your headlines and sans serif fonts for any other text. These are easiest to read on a computer screen. Use font sizes between 12-22pt to make sure your email is readable. Headlines can be 22pt, additional font in the email can be 12 pt or more.

2. Ask your audience what they want to read or see

To get a grasp on what content your audience wants to receive, you have to ask. You can survey them, and then use the results to dictate the kind of content you create. Ask about what kind of content appeals to them, what products or services they’re interested in. You can also ask how often they want to receive email from your business. 

How to implement: There are many free survey products you can use to get a grasp of what your audience wants. For example, there’s SurveyMonkey, KwikSurveys, and SurveyPlanet, just to name a few.

Surveys are easy to create with these DIY sites. Just remember to keep your survey short, maybe 5-7 questions so you don’t lose your audience. Once you complete the survey, include a link to it in an email.

3. Measure results

An email marketing strategy is never complete without some form of measurement. You have to know how you did to improve upon your efforts the next time around.

“Create content that suits your audience but also spend time measuring it,” says Jasmine Sandler, an independent digital marketing expert. “You need to measure it as much as you create it.”

How to implement: Here’s a quick list of metrics to watch along with the average rates you should aim for.

• Conversion rate: How many people clicked that call-to-action link you included in your email? How many downloaded that how-to guide you’re advertising? Did anyone make a purchase from the last email you sent? The average conversion rate is five to 10 percent.

• Bounce rate: How many emails that you sent were undeliverable? The average bounce rate, depending on your industry, is between eight and 12 percent.

• Open rate: How many of the emails were actually opened? The average open rate for brand emails is 18 to 25 percent.

• Unsubscribe rate: How many people clicked “unsubscribe” at the bottom of the email? The average unsubscribe rate is .25 percent.

Note: All these metrics can vary based on your industry, your list and your mailing practices. Need more help gauging your metrics? Check out this previous post.

4. Email your blog posts, videos and images

You put a lot of effort and energy into your blog posts, videos, or images. You should include this content in your emails.

“If you’re wise, you can leverage other content that you’re spending money and time creating,” says Sandler. “You could send out a list of the hottest articles of the week or a wrap up.”

Aside from the fact that you’re going to get more eyes to see your content, you can also increase your website traffic.

Look at Carol Tice, who runs the Make a Living Writing blog for freelance writers. The entrepreneur, who boasts 12,000 subscribers to her blog, sends out sections of it to her readers and prompts them to “read more” on her website. VerticalResponse does this successfully with our weekly VR Buzz newsletter. 

How to implement: Choose content, images or videos that have already received a lot of hits, likes or attention. It’s a good indication that your readers enjoyed them. Don’t include an entire article in your emails; include only a teaser, and then link to the rest of the article on your website or blog.

There are many factors that go into a successful email campaign. As long as you plan ahead, and are willing to look back at your work to see what you can improve, you will be on your way to a better email marketing strategy.

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