Chart of the Day: Understanding subscriber loyalty - Part 1 of 2
This is the first of a two-part blog, covering subscriber loyalty and unsubscribing.
What will be covered:
Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe-to-open Rate
Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. Well in email marketing, there is only one: unsubscription.
Customers can move jobs, not feel engaged by the messaging or can just change their minds. In fact, I cannot think of one company that I have been subscribed to and stayed subscribed to. Having a unsubscribe/update preferences link is a legal requirement for all marketing emails. It's important to give your customers a simple and easy way to change their preferences/choices.
In today's chart, I look at unsubscribes by sector. The average unsubscribe rate is 0.49%. But the sector with the highest unsubscribe rate is B2B (non-retail) is displaying at 1.08%. While the best performing is Public Relations…
Pre-flight checklist for email campaigns
Sending an email campaign can be a nerve-wracking experience for any marketer. There can be questions, doubts, and even a little fear running through your mind before you push send. Do all the links work? Are there typos that were missed? Will readers be engaged and respond to the email? Proofing and editing are a must, of course, but is that enough to ensure you haven’t overlooked anything? Sometimes you spend so much time looking at an email you miss the little details. And with email marketing being an important strategy for any business, it’s crucial that each email sent be the best possible.
To help alleviate this sending fear and also avoid the most common email errors, Campaign Monitor is happy to share this email campaign preflight checklist. It covers each part of an email, like…
How often should businesses mail their subscribers? Research reveals the average number of monthly contacts.
These are classic 'tough questions' for email marketers which always raise a lot of debate. A question on our LinkedIn group about email reminder frequency for events had 20 comments.
Choosing the best frequency for sending email emails is challenging since we are looking to maximise response, but avoid 'over-mailing' which can lead to unacceptable levels of unsubscribes and an increase in inactives since our audience may feel they are being spammed. Even if they don't unsubscribe they will become "emotionally unsubscribed". Worse still, with overmailing, the business may have email delivery problems and messages aren't getting through to the inbox at all.
On the other hand, with 'under-mailing', opportunities to explain the proposition and promotions or to get the right product in front of the right subscriber and sales may be lost.
The DMA's National Email Client Report now known as the 'Marketer Email…
Learning from 6 layered targeting options used by online retailers that can be applied to any business
There are many different levels in sophistication of targeting for email marketing. In this post I'll run through some of the most common examples used by retailers since I think they can often be applied to companies who don't sell online like relationship-building or B2B companies.
Here, I will outline what I see as the 6 most common segmentation approaches. More details are available in my book Total Email Marketing and my more recent 7 Steps to Email Marketing Success Ebook on Smart Insights.
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75% of your email list is inactive and therefore useless. You need to win them back.
Reactivation is aimed at attempting to reintroduce lapsed subscribers to your content and re-engaging their interest in your brand, most commonly by creating a specific strategy and utilising specific content that aims to bring people back into your pool of active customers.
There are many elements and variables involved in the process of creating an email marketing reactivation strategy, but every brand that uses email marketing as part of their digital marketing strategy should look to build in an email reactivation strategy, as its potential to create impact for brands in any sector, should not be underestimated.
Why focus on reactivation and re-engagement?
75% of your email subscriber list may be inactive. This is a worrying statistic, as it means that three quarters of your subscriber base may not currently be engaging with your marketing content. Many of…
Which day(s) and times work best for maximum impact for B2B and B2C?
"Which day of the week is best for sending email?" has been a common question since marketers started email marketing. As with a lot of questions about good practice, the right answer is : "it depends", but it's fun to speculate. Ideally you want your email to arrive in the inbox of as many people as possible when they're sitting at their desk or picking up emails on go via smartphone. Greater impact will also be helped when there is less competition in the inbox from other email marketers. So Saturday and Sunday can be best for this.
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Chart of the Day: How to not get lost in your customer's inbox
Subject lines are important to email marketing, but they are a complete pain in the arse. (And don't get me started on pre-headers!)
I spend a good portion of my time toiling with subject lines. Testing how they look in email clients, making sure I don't include any spam words and working on the actual copy. A common practise email marketers use, is to include a promotion in the subject line, but does it have any effect? That's what the below chart discusses.
If we look at the average for all the offers compared to no offer at all, it's clear to see that the subject lines with no offer work better with the Click-to-Open (CTO) of 9.4% compared to 7%! This disproves what email marketers have done for years. But if we think about it, it's not surprising.…
What data science taught us about 211 email subject line phrases
Once you click the send button, your email subject line is the most important part of your campaign. This is a fact.
Think about your own experience in the inbox. Mine is something like this:
Look at inbox
Look at sender name
Look at subject line
Make a decision whether or not to open it and read the content
Your sender name is important as it conveys your brand value. But it’s not something you can change easily.
Your subject line is important because testing and optimising them drives response rates like nothing else.
But, there’s a common problem with subject lines.
Dotmailer research reveals 26% of email marketer’s time is spent on email creative, 21% on deployment, and only 8% on testing. And, over 70% of email marketers don't split test their subject lines very often.
Here’s the thing: if people don’t open…
Batch and blast aren't pretty, and there are better email tactics. But nothing gets you more bang for your buck.
I don’t intend this to be a sales piece but I feel you need to know a little about myself and my company before you read this.
I work in marketing for an email service provider and my company preaches the value in sending sophisticated emails.
Now I’ve told you that, I have something to get off my chest. Something that would appear to contradict the opinions of my industry peers and perhaps, on occasion, that of my own company.
Here we go: although I think sophisticated emails are great, I think a ‘batch and blast’ style of emailing is better.
Yes, batching and blasting emails (the act of mass marketing through email) is great. I highly recommend it. Do it for all it’s worth. Seriously.
You will never, ever find a greater ROI rate…
Chart of the Day: After all your hard work creating your email, do you know if it arrived at its correct destination?
Firstly, let's make sure we know exactly what deliverability is.
If our marketing email arrives in the subscribers' inbox, that is a successful delivery. However many things could affect our emails deliverability, like Internet Service Providers (ISPs), bounces, spam issues to name a few.
In today's chart, the question asked, "How do you monitor and improve deliverability?" It is good to see that the majority do monitor it in some form. 37% test messages for the spam score and optimize before sending. Although still, 28% say they do nothing.
You need to monitor your deliverability. For example, if you are having high bounce rates, it could mean your domain is on a blacklist somewhere. And ISPs take notice of reputable blacklists like SpamCop.
With deliverability, you don't want to be complacent.…
