I interviewed Lauren Smith from Litmus, the email analytics software provider about some of the latest changes in the email marketing industry and what marketers can do to make the most of them

Email is consistently ranked among the most effective forms of digital marketing. The DMA's 2015 national email client report found that email has an average ROI of £38 for each £1 spent, which is spectacularly high. Given its effectiveness, email marketing is used by all kinds of businesses, from micro-businesses to the very biggest. To make the most of it you need to keep up to date with all the latest changes to platforms and tactics, which shift rapidly as ESPs launch new ways to view mail and mobile and desktop operating systems change the ways certain elements are displayed.

To help keep your email marketing efforts up to date, I interviewed Lauren Smith from Litmus, who are experts…

Predict what your email database will do to improve your click rate

The growth in Data Science techniques during the last few years has generated a vast interest in using analytical techniques to optimise engagement on email campaigns. Whether a company wishes to compare the performance of two email templates, compare the performance of multiple email templates or see the association between several characteristics of an email and a single metric, Predictive Analytical techniques allow them to acquire the answers they need. Below we are going to outline 3 techniques you can implement from ‘getting started’ lists of around 500 subscribers, to highly advanced models geared towards enterprise users.

Understanding Sample Size

For these techniques to make sense, it is important to have a basic understanding of statistical significance and what size of list may be required for your tests to be useful. Very basically, the larger the sample size, the more statistically significant…

Going beyond opens and clicks to evaluate and improve subscriber engagement with your email programmes

How engaging are your emails? It’s likely that you review open and clickthrough rates for individual  email campaigns and newsletters, but can you measure and prove how engaging your email marketing is on a long-term basis across multiple emails starting with the first welcome email. Dan Hare showed that it's challenging - he presented data which shows between 50-90% of subscribers may never open or click in a 6 month period. In this article I’ll show some more advanced techniques we recommend to assess subscriber engagement which go beyond the basic email metrics of delivery, open and clickthrough rates. [si_guide_block id="68233" title="Download Expert Member resource – Advanced Lifecycle Email Marketing Guide" description="A best practices briefing for high email volume businesses to take their email marketing to the next level. This guide is…

How does email compare to other channels in driving customer acquisition and sales?

We can see the importance of email marketing by using the excellent Custora Ecommerce Pulse - which is updated monthly to show the impact of different channels on sales across $40 billion of US retail transactions from retailers who are clients of Custora. Here are three data points showing the importance of email marketing:

1.  How many orders does email drive compared to other media?

In 2015 Email remains one of the top three channels driving sales, not far behind organic and PPC. This position is mainly because of sales to existing customers. The latest data from May 2015 shows that email marketing now accounts for 15% of all sales. All of the top 3 have fallen a little compared to 2014 as Affiliate prompted sales have grown. For all of our interest and attention on social media this…

Why and how to use hurdle rates to set goals for your digital marketing

The concept of hurdle rates seems to be quite widely used within finance and investment circles, but I rarely hear it discussed in blogs about measuring and improving digital marketing. Perhaps that's because they're most useful when related to customer retention, or the 'Engage' part of the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework. It's surprising since they offer an excellent way to set goals and track performance against them when you are looking at your effectiveness in communicating with an audience. You can use them to review email marketing, ECRM, customer engagement with social media or repeat purchases. Here's a brief introduction to hurdle rates and some ideas on where you can apply them.

Hurdle rate definition

The hurdle rate for engagement is simply the percentage of customers who perform an…

Although mobile opens are growing in importance, desktop clickthroughs dominate

This analysis of over 395 million sent via MailChimp reveals the impact of mobile devices on email engagement and how Responsive Design can improve email clickthrough rates (CTRs). We all know that mobile rendering is now important, but don't expect so many clicks from those emails read on mobile: Email clicks are higher from desktops compared to the 'combined clicks from mobile and tablet devices' and desktop users click on more email links - unique CTRs are 40% higher on desktop compared to mobile. So, the goal of emails rendered on mobile should be to make a big enough impact such that some readers will make a mental note to return to the email on desktop... Their infographic shares more interesting email engagement facts as it's apparent that Email Marketers and Marketing Managers planning and designing their email marketing need to take on board these device differences,…

Essential checks even the email professionals get wrong. What should your Email marketing broadcast checklist contain?

Does your email campaign check all the boxes? A possible mistake can be at best embarrassing, at worst a legal risk or an opportunity cost of missed revenues that could lose you your job. Although as marketers it is our task to get the most out of our communication, the test, test, test mantra only applies to split testing and sometimes Quality Assurance for email doesn't get the attention it should as we all battle common sense / best practices amnesia from time-to-time and Murphy's law must have been developed for email marketing, right? You'll know that there was once a man named Murphy whose law simply reads: 'Everything that can go wrong, will.' Similarly in email marketing, the more campaigns you run, the more mistakes are likely. But rather than just accepting you can manage these risks, in fact this risk reduction approach…

The Top 10 world ranking email clients

If you're an email marketing specialist you'll almost certainly know Litmus for their awesome email analytics tool and great insights. We've featured them several times before, including this great infographic showing trends of Email client share.  Here is the latest update from their Email client market share site which they update each month. We would probably expect Apple to be dominating due to the surge of iOS mobile devices and growing popularity of Apple devices, though it's interesting to see that Outlook is still popular and it reminds us of the importance of testing the effectiveness of designs for Gmail on different clients. When interpreting these results, we need to bear in mind variation across desktop and mobile usage and demographics which Litmus have in their…

5 advanced measures to evaluate and improve subscriber engagement with your emails

How engaging are your emails? You will certainly have ideas about their strengths and weaknesses - but do you really know how engaging they are? It’s likely that you review open and clickthrough rates of different email campaigns and newsletters, but can you measure and prove how engaging your email marketing is? In this article I’ll show some advanced techniques we recommend to assess subscriber engagement which go beyond the basic email metrics of delivery, open and clickthrough rates.

Techniques to Review Email Marketing Engagement

By using these more sophisticated measures to review your emails you will be able to zero in on which aspects of your emails aren’t working and so improve engagement. 1. Engagement with creative. Let’s start with the obvious short-term engagement with an email communication. This is where it’s common to measure opens…

Which email clients should we design and test for? 2014 update

It's important to agree the target email clients you want the email to be displayed in when briefing an agency to develop a new email template or enewsletter layout. Of course, large volume senders will want the email to render in all, but for smaller businesses it's OK to target and test a smaller number. Traditionally the main email clients to target were the main webmail services plus different Outlook versions. Hotmail Yahoo! Mail Gmail Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 B2B marketers would have added different versions of Lotus Notes and Blackberry with Gmail becoming more important through time amongst professionals. In 2014 this is radically different - you also need to think really seriously about how emails will render on different mobile platforms. This 2014 infographic has the data published from their clients for the whole of 2013 - it's from the excellent Litmus…