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Optimizing Your Email Campaigns

Guest post by: Jim Stafford

Article Overview: Forrester's recently published study on Interactive Marketing (email, social, dialog, banner, etc.) reveals 68% of survey respondents expect to achieve increased email marketing effectiveness over the next three years. Furthermore, survey respondents also indicated they would increase interactive marketing budgets by 60% by shifting funding away from traditional channels: direct mail (40%), Newspapers (35%) and Magazines (28%). The picture that is emerging here is one where marketers have high expectations on interactive marketing and expect to focus less on traditional channels. A lot will be riding on this reallocation of marketing budget -- so what will marketers have to do right to fulfill their hopes and expectations?

Optimizing Your Email Campaigns

This particulararticle will address best practices that must be followed by email marketers. Future blogs will address social and dialog marketing in detail. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I can handle more emails coming into my professional and personal inboxes. I get so many from the same companies that I don't even open them -- not even when they come from companies I opted into. Companies that email too frequently create so much "white-noise" that it affects their open rates as well as the open rates for other companies. In addition to white-noise emails, I also get many others that made me think -- "why did I even get this?...I don't smoke, so why am i offered a smart smoker trial?"..."I have only rented mystery and adventure movies from you, so why are you telling me about The Lion King release?" You experience the same things and feel the same way too. So, what can email marketers do to ensure success and rise above the noise and mediocrity we see everyday? It takes only three things -- relevancy, segmentation and testing. These three tactics are the key building blocks to optimizing your email marketing efforts.

Relevancy - A blog I posted a couple of weeks ago spoke to email relevancy -- that it's about personalizing the email, segmenting your audience and testing your content (copy, images, subject lines, etc).

Segmentation - Your audience will differ by demographics, personality, shopping habits, geography, etc. Simple segmentations where different messages are sent to each segment can deliver huge marketing ROI. A recent Marketing Experiments webinar offered a case study on American Greetings.com (AG). AG's goal for their email campaign was to increase individual Ecard purchases as well as Annual Subscriptions. They created two segments -- Segment A contained customers that purchased humorous Ecards in the past, while Segment B contained customers that purchased traditional Ecards. Each segment got an email that spoke to their interests based on this past purchase behavior. This simple use of segmentation resulted in a 70% improvement in conversion rates when compared to a control group -- that's HUGE! Just imagine what more sophisticated segmentation schemes might produce!

Frequency - Ok, so I have a real issue with this particular topic. I can't begin to tell you how much junk I get in my inbox. I don't even open emails from some marketers and yet I still get an email every day from them -- please do some analysis on open rates and realize, I'm just not into Chocolate Covered Strawberries -- OK?! Oh yes, back to the informational part of my message... The same webinar by Marketing Experiments (I suggest you Google them!) provided another case study on a very large anonymous Ecommerce company. They segmented their customers into seven segments. Each segment got a different number of emails over a 60 day period. At the extremes, one segment got an email every other day, while the other got an email every 15 days. During the webinar, the audience was polled to see what they thought the optimal number of emails would be. They chose 3-4 per month based on their own experiences and readings. Well, the actual results were quite surprising. Their test showed that customers that received emails every two days produced 3X the revenue of the segments that got 2-4 emails per month. In fact, there was a significant positive correlation across all segments based on the number of emails they received.

You would think this is illogical. Most email marketers believe we face a tradeoff -- that there will be an increase in revenues at first, but then we'll experience more unsubscribes or non-opens as the frequency increases.So, what is the disparity between the experience of the webinar audience and the results of this study? Well, we are simply seeing that each company has a unique customer base and a unique relationship with them. You can't just assume your optimal frequency should be what is best "on average" or for a specific company they read about. It means that every company must do segmentation and testing to determine the right frequency for their unique audience.

Caveats? -- there is always one or more:

1) Tell your ESP that you'll be doing experiments and they may see greater volume than normal. After all, you don't want to be blacklisted.

2) Also look at open rates and unsubscribes during your testing. The anonymous email marketer in the 2nd case study saw no correlation between frequency, and open rates or unsubscribes per email sent. But your experience may be different. Remember, an unsubscribe doesn't just effect revenue from a given campaign, but it also erases expected/future customer lifetime value.

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Article Tags: email marketing, emarketing, interactive marketing



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