How to get good ROI from your email campaign
Email marketing tends to come in Marmite flavour – when poorly-managed, it is much maligned for filling recipients’ inboxes with irrelevant and unwelcome sales messages. On the other hand, carefully planned and delivered it can be a highly valuable element of the marketing mix. We’d rather your campaign fell into the second category!
One of our own recent email campaigns returned a new client who has already spent more with us on one project than we are likely to spend on our marketing budget for the entire year! If we look after this client, we hope that we shall work together for many years to come. That’s a good return on our investment!
How can you ensure that you get a good return from your email campaigns?
Mailing list
A good mailing list is vital – preferably one that has been collected directly by you in daily business activity. Ensure it is as clean as possible before you mail. If you don’t have a list, you will need to source one, but choose your supplier very carefully; there are plenty of people selling substandard data out there. Don’t forget, however, the more you use the list, the cleaner and more reliable it becomes.
Attract interest
The text that appears in the recipients inbox is vital to ensuring that you maximise open rates, so make sure it is engaging and accurate. Gimmicky headlines tend not to work and there are a few words to be avoided at all costs in this header e.g. FREE.
Make an impact!
When people open the email, you need to ensure they get your key sales messages instantly and that ideally they are hooked enough to click through and find out more. This means careful consideration of the layout of the mail, the imagery used, placement of text and choice of language. We would advise that you send an html version and a text only version so that you maximise open rates for those viewing on Blackberry’s, etc.
Tell them what to do!
Don’t leave it to chance; make sure you tell your prospect to contact you! Either provide a phone number, or ideally link the email through to a landing page on your website so that you can give them more information and ask them to get in touch.
Follow up
One of the best ways to maximise the success of your email marketing campaigns is to track:
- who opens your email; and
- which “openers” proceed to click on something.
Most email mailing systems, like the one we use will provide data so that you can see immediately which addresses have “bounced” (so they can be removed from the list) and also who has clicked on and opened the email. Ideally, call these contacts and ask them if they have a particular interest in this product or service. Do this soon after you’ve mailed them so they remember the email.
Drip drip drip
Don’t just send one email and expect it to bring instant results, ideally plan it as part of a campaign (direct mail, email and telesales follow-up), or as part of a series of emails so that people get a consistent and on-going message from you.
Evaluate and learn
You can use open rates and click-through rates to benchmark one email against another, or against the industry average. The average open rate for B2B newsletters is currently 23% and the average click-through rate is 4%, according to the index that is tracked by our marketing partners, Resonates.
Recently Resonates sent a newsletter to two different audiences in two separate mailings. The first mailing, which was sent to new contacts, got an open rate of 54% and click-through rate of 53%. The second, which was sent to lapsed contacts, got an open rate of 22% and a click-through rate of 50%.
There are a few things we can learn from this experiment:
Keep going
If you neglect your prospects, they start to forget about you. More people might have opened the second mailing if they still recognised the senders name. Also, if they don’t remember you, they might not like receiving your email.
Cleanse your data
If someone doesn’t want your emails, make sure it’s easy for them to unsubscribe or manage their preferences. And if they no longer use their email address, take them off your mailing list. These simple measures will make sure they don’t get annoyed, block you, or drag down your open and click-through rates. Focus on your active subscribers instead.
Cleansing data is easy. With the email marketing software that we use, you can remove bounced emails automatically.
Be relevant
Fewer lapsed contacts than new contacts opened the email, but the percentage that clicked through after opening was almost the same. This suggests the content, once people actually saw it, was just as interesting to both audiences.
As long as your emails are relevant, you will succeed in engaging people. That’s why we use software that lets you choose which stories to send to each of your audiences.
Test, test, test
Controlled experiments such as the one that Resonates used can help you to figure out why a certain audience isn’t opening your email, clicking on your stories or taking you up on your offers. You can improve your open rates by addressing these problems.
So make sure your email isn’t Marmite flavour for your audience – it should leave an unquestionably good taste behind and ideally bring you some new business!
For more information about email marketing click here.
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