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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You’ve heard how a targeted email campaign can transform your marketing communications into a thing of beauty, bringing in new leads, increasing your revenue and creating customer loyalty.
Now, a month into the New Year and your 2016 planning, you have a chance to make a fresh start by launching a new campaign or even beefing up your old one in a medium that continues to be extremely effective.
Email marketing is both your entry point, leading new customers to your business – and your anchor, connecting all your other marketing together. Says Jayson DeMers in Forbes, “You can draw people to your blog by offering snippets of content, or you can drive up your following numbers by inviting people to share deals on social media. You can also use your other marketing channels to invite people to sign up for your email list, resulting in a closed, cohesive system that nurtures your overall customer base as one unit.”
Here are 15 ambitious steps you can take to transform your email marketing:
1. Vow to grow your email list to expand your marketing capabilities. The number of ways to do that boggles the imagination (check out these 50 and these 24). Some ideas include website and social media opt-in forms, collecting addresses at point of sale and incentivizing employees to gather them for you. Also, consider the use of a lightbox (an online data-storage function) to create pop-up invitations to enroll as the user scrolls to a browser or reaches a certain scroll depth.
2. To prevent falling behind on your campaign mid-year, create an email marketing plan that projects multiple messages, anticipating holidays and special events through 2016. Work backward from preferred launch dates to set deadlines for writing content. Shooting for three to five emails monthly is a good idea, as is creating how-to videos and tutorials about your business or website.
3. Ensure your emails are mobile-friendly in design and content, since nearly 60% are now read via mobile device. Analysts predict in the next five years marketing via smartphone will become even more sophisticated, with responsive design increasingly boosting smartphone conversion rates.
4. Segment your list, fine tuning which kinds of messages you’ll send to targeted groups. Thirty-nine percent of email marketers realize better open rates through segmentation, says research by eMarketer, while 28 percent see lower opt-out and unsubscribe rates, and 24 percent see better email deliverability along with increased sales leads and greater revenue.
5. Offer as much personalization as possible, using data-gathering tools and customer surveys to your advantage by recognizing birthdays and anniversaries, referring to previous purchases and shopping patterns, and otherwise making readers feel valued. Location demographics, for example, allow you to mention events, landmarks, or stores near the reader. In a 2016 study of marketing firms by Emailmonday.com, 76 percent of respondents predicted email communication will be completely personalized in the next five years. In the future, analysts expect even more highly optimized 1:1 emails that allow for customized communication for each recipient within a single email broadcast.
6. Develop a welcome program, a series of follow-up emails to new subscribers introducing them to your company, products, and website. The emails can be automated by interval or triggered by customer action. Let readers know they’re coming, differentiate them from other kinds of emails in the subject line, and avoid hard-sell techniques. The first email should contain a warm welcome and thank you for subscribing, while subsequent messages might include a reinforcement of the benefits of subscribing, a special thank you offer, helpful information about your products or services, or links to your social media sites. Clear calls to action and appealing images are recommended.
7. The truth can set you free, so it’s wise to monitor response rates so you can adjust future marketing plans. Track open and click rates, revenue and conversion, unsubscribes and bounces, and use your website’s analytics tools to gauge reader behavior after click through. Industry-wide, email marketing is increasingly providing data for the analytics that drive other marketing efforts.
8. Following up with automated emails when recipients don’t open initial emails can increase your open rates by 30 to 40 percent. They all should include different subject lines. The first should come three days after the original, be shorter than 500 words and reinstate the benefits of your product or service. Subsequent messages could mention why your product is necessary and how it’s used, offer testimonials or reviews, solicit questions, and/or include an FAQ section.
9. Continually test your campaign and use the results to tweak further strategy. Consider a schedule for the testing of one campaign variable each month; those could include copy length and content, time and day of the week, frequency, call to action, and/or design. Also consider a heat map test of your website, a graphic display showing which areas are most frequently scanned by visitors so you can strategize where to place calls to action.
10. Pay more attention to creating effective subject lines, since they’re the primary factor influencing whether your audience will actually open the email. In general, the subject copy should be short (40 to 50 characters) and as straightforward as possible; it should change each time; leave out all capital letters and exclamation points, and avoid words like “free” or “percent off” to keep from being weeded out by spam filters. What works best? A question, a call to action, a sense of urgency, the mention of a benefit to customers, and/or a mention of the recipient’s name or city. Don’t use the space to mention your company, since that’s apparent in the “from” line. Consider studying popular click-bait sites like Buzzfeed that lure readers in with fun, short and punchy subject lines and preview text. How might you incorporate some of those techniques into your own campaign?
11. Listen closely to customer feedback. Survey subscribers about likes and dislikes, using the data to create more effective content and up-front value propositions. Use preference centers on your website to allow customers to dictate their druthers when it comes to content, format, and frequency. Be gracious and quick with those who ask to unsubscribe, since the last thing you want is to be perceived as a spammer (perhaps ask them if you can decrease email frequency or limit the content to certain categories).
12. Include opt-in forms as well as forwarding options on all social media networks, including LinkedIn. You might even email those who mention your business on social media, inviting them to opt in.
13. Sign up for other email campaigns and newsletters to compare what your competitors and industry leaders are doing. Consider whether to adopt their ideas and techniques.
14. Pay attention to industry trends. For example, some marketers are beginning to use modular templates for email campaigns that allow for faster switching out and editing. Others are moving away from coded emails toward tools that put more design control in their hands, while some are trending toward kinetic email that includes more videos and sophisticated animation. A relatively new method known as “double opt in” allows a reader to simply send a company a blank email to receive an opt-in email in return.
15. Take a hard look at whether your content is offering enough value to recipients. Instead of a constant sales push, think in terms of “sticky” content — bits of useful, fun, and/or humorous information in small, easy-to-digest portions that might capture readers’ attention and keep them coming back for more. Messages that are less sales-oriented work to develop brand awareness and customer relationships, paving the way for possible purchases.Other tips: Strive for original content, not just a recap of what everyone else is already saying. Tie your content into holidays, pop-culture happenings, and current events when applicable. Don’t go overboard with too many links. And gifs and videos can be powerful additions, too, since visuals are processed by the human brain in about a tenth of a second.
Other tips: Here’s how to make content marketing, email, and social media work together in harmony.
“Modern email marketing isn’t about making a sales pitch or attracting as many clicks as possible — it’s about providing value to your users,” adds Demers. “It isn’t enough to send a simple promotional email or a short list of new content on your site. Serve them well with better designs, more appealing copy and better offers. Free giveaways, discounts, and special deals are all winners.”
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Do you hear that? It’s getting louder. It’s the sound of millions of emails, targeted ads, and personalized web experiences fighting for relevance. Despite the noise, B2B and B2C brands succeed at delivering relevant information to their target audiences. According to Direct Marketing Association, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return-on-investment is $40.56. But there’s a difference between threading the needle and really creating something.
In many cases, data is being used to deliver personalized email campaigns with fantastic results. The Aberdeen Group says that personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. With results like these, the motivation to test, segment, and personalize email campaigns will no doubt increase. However, the success of these incremental improvements to email marketing depends largely on the next steps customers take after engaging with your email. Whether you’re sending them to a specific landing page or inviting them to take advantage of a personalized offer on-site, the work doesn’t end in your customer’s inbox.
By looking at how you use data to improve email marketing from the broader perspective of your web or mobile experience, you can multiply the impact of your targeting. And it’s worth it. According to Steelhouse, using correct targeting and testing methods can increase conversion rates up to 300%.
Break Down the Barriers
Closing the data loop and breaking down the organizational divisions between email marketing and website optimization is increasingly common. Marketers are adopting this strategy, particularly as facts about open-rates on mobile come to light and digital teams unite forces. But any brand making a significant investment in email marketing will soon be throwing good money after bad without an optimized, personalized mobile experience. Eisenberg Holdings says that companies typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site, but only $1 to convert them. Instead, make your money count twice by investing in a strategy that combines data from email marketing with on-site behavior for a comprehensive approach to optimization.
According to EConsultancy, 64% of companies would like to improve their personalization, 64%, their marketing automation, and 62%, their segmentation. The key is to unify these three key areas for a strategy that will keep your communications relevant and your audience engaged. Here, I’m going to share four ways your website’s optimization strategy can enhance your email marketing efforts, and vice versa! Let’s get started…
1. Use Website Data to Validate Email Segmentation
Segmenting your audience for email marketing is not an uncommon practice. However, the segmentation of your website traffic is often treated as a mutually exclusive effort.
Try This: Use your website data to validate predefined segments for email marketing campaigns with a URL parameter. By doing so, you can find out whether your segments behave how you expected them to with metrics that look at their behavior from first click to exit.
2. Use Email Marketing Attributes to Create a Better On-Site Experience
The data from email and websites can interact in either direction. One leading travel brand worked with Maxymiser, a website and app optimization solution, on an email campaign designed to bring users to the site by converting email prospects with a featured destination that best reflected their preferences (either collected or expressed.) Using Maxymiser’s optimization solution, the brand selected 36 destinations to offer and used each one as a specific variant of the test.
Try This: Segment visitors who came from email and determine which predictive attributes will make their visit the best possible experience. In the above instance, the brand took the attributes generated by an email campaign and used them to test and target on their site—and you can too.
3. Map Email Engagement and CRM
With the right tools, you can map the unique identifier to a CRM file and target specific individualized content to that visitor.
Try This: The data-driven marketer (you!) could place an individualized identifier in the URL of an email campaign. You can also match up an individual from the aforementioned unique URL to segments or visitor groups defined in the CRM file.
4. Test and Target from Email to Landing Page (Mobile or Desktop)
Using your optimization solution, you can test custom content on your predefined email segments by redirecting them from email to a specific landing page.
Try This: Optimize both your emails and landing pages in a single test and combine your analytics for a clear perspective on your user’s behavior. This might be a particularly interesting test to run on a mobile landing page.
In Q1 2014, more email was opened on iPhones (38%) than all desktops combined (34%). You can be sure that these percentages have only increased in the last 12 months. With that being said, if you’re hoping to convert a visitor with email, you have to optimize your mobile landing pages. A website optimization solution like Maxymiser can run the aforementioned desktop landing page test on mobile as well. A unified optimization and email marketing team could easily work together to generate a rich tapestry of insights by segmenting email audiences and testing the optimal experience on desktop or mobile, depending on where the user comes from.
So, don’t just think about the connection between email marketing and optimization; plan for success by aligning your strategy with a multi-channel approach like the one I have described above. On the road to becoming a holistic digital marketing organization, the marriage between email marketing and website optimization is one of the most valuable steps.
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