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 How can I improve my revenue from email marketing?
How can I improve my email open rates?
These are two of the most common questions that arise in email marketing. The first port of call is to check your email deliverability.
Deliverability Analysis - Open Rate by Domain
You may have very good email delivery scores, and Lyris HQ Email Advisor may tell you in your first delivery audit that you are getting into the inboxes of Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and so on. However, where your email ends up being delivered (inbox, junk folder, black hole) throughout your email campaign may change.
For example, if too many email recipients click the spam button as your email marketing campaign is being sent, your email campaign can end up being delivered to the spam or junk folder, even though it started off going to the right place. The only way to be really sure that your email is being delivered to the inbox throughout your email campaign is to check your open rate by domain. Here's an example:
As you can see in the chart above, there is an issue with aol.com open rates (click on image to view full size).
Email Frequency
If you have good open rates by domain then the next area you might consider is your email frequency. If you get 5,000 visits to your site from a weekly broadcast email campaign, why not send two email broadcasts per week and get 10,000 weekly visits driven by email marketing? This will be an effective approach only up to a certain point. For a business-to-consumer (B2C) email it depends very much on the sector.
Let’s say that after experimenting with frequency, you find that the optimum is two email broadcasts per week. Let’s say your response rates for these email marketing campaigns looks like this:
How can you improve open rates and return on email marketing investment without causing disengagement and unbsubscribes?
The golden rule here is that you can send email more frequently to recipients who are engaged with your brand. Here are recent response rate examples of email marketing in the fashion retail sector that are sent to recipients who are actively engaged with the brand.
Recipients who have looked at related content on the Web site in the last week:
Recipients who have expressed a preference for this content through a welcome programme or preference centre:
Recipients who have purchased items from this category in the past:
All of these targeted email marketing campaigns were sent over and above the regular twice a week email broadcasts. Clearly Web behaviour is the most powerful leading indicator for email response rate. This is because Web behaviour in the last week includes the crucial time component. Not only are these recipients interested in this content, they are engaged with it NOW. The Lyris HQ platform provides integrated Web analytics and email marketing capabilities, and we find the ability to create email list segments based Web behaviour to be extremely powerful.
Triggered Email
Bowers and Wilkins have also used triggered email campaigns to improve conversion rates of those people who have a Bowers and Wilkins music club trial subscription. These triggered email messages recognise that trial subscribers have certain questions and provide a gentle approach to converting them into purchasers of a full subscription. Since the introduction of triggered email messages, subscription purchases have gone up by more than 50% on a month by month basis.
In this example, Bowers and Wilkins were able to send more email marketing more frequently. The triggered email messages are sent in addition to the normal e-newsletter. Bowers and Wilkins did not see a decrease in response rates from sending more email, in fact, because the content was so relevant to the stage of engagement of the recipients, the response rates were well above normal with open rates of over 50%.
We have seen similar positive responses from sending "reward" email content to highly engaged email subscribers in many other businesses. Here is an intriguing comparison:
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Recipients
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Unique page visits
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Mailing 1
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12,433
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138,566
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Mailing 2
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157,004
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64,322
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Why does Mailing 1 achieve proportionately better results?
These are examples from The Celtic FC Online Superstore. Mailing 1 is sent to regular purchasers and is rewarding them with a good offer. Mailing 2, sent a week later, is an e-newsletter to a larger group (including regular purchasers). Sending a more targeted message to a specific group will often achieve better results than sending a general message to a broad group; even if that broad group has more than 10 times the number of recipients.
This approach involves sending many more than two email messages a week. The triggered email messages and targeted email campaigns segmented based on engagement are in addition to the two regular email broadcasts. They achieve the goal of increasing response rates without degrading your email list.
One additional benefit of this approach is that you can regulate the email marketing traffic to your Web site. The graph below is fairly typical of email traffic over a month showing regular peaks where broadcast email is sent. Using the email marketing approach I described, those peaks and troughs will become flatter resulting in a steadier flow of Web site traffic.
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