Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Agape.daphne,

Your 13.1% open rate and 2.1% click through rates are actually not bad.

To increase your open rates, experiment with changes to the subject line of your e-mail to something like:

"Really awful news!"
"Pictures of our latest disaster"
"Why does this always happen to us?"
"Sad, sad news"

Why? Because bad news always pulls a crowd.

To increase your click through and sales rate, talk to customers about things that are important to them, not to you.

The other thing you MUST do is refine your offer and PILE on the value. HEAP it on, but the perceived value MUST outweigh the price being charged.

You don't count. How great your product is, doesn't count. What counts is the solution your product offers, its tangible results, its practical benefits.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

P.S. If you've found this post is of value, I'd greatly appreciate your testimonial. Click my name at the top of this post and you'll find my profile and my e-mail address. Thanks for reading.

Agree, need some market research on this one; find out what the customers need and what they are paying for it now (or doing it in-house) & what are your competitors charging, then determine how YOUR product/service can save them time, money, energy. Then, come up with a 'hook' that will compel them to WANT to open your email. Bad news can indeed pull in the crowds, but when you're fishing in "customer" crowds, the right bait can help increase the number of bites you get.

General, I know, but hope something sparks,
jag
MarketBase

Dear Paul,

Subject lines are always going to be an area of ... er .. debate.

Do I LIKE the idea of negative subject lines? No, not really. But the point is they've been shown to pull higher opening rates.

As for Agape.daphne's issue?

Well Agape, the trick thereafter is not to tick readers off too much with any real or perceived disconnect between subject line, actual content, offer, and call to action, which is what makes it all such a pain to juggle of course.

There's no easy way out, but the critical thing is to take smaller sections of your overall mailing list, segment the living daylights out of it, and test subject lines, body copy, offers, calls to action, the works.

How many variables will this create? Lots, but an investment now will pay off later. There are those who say testing of this nature does not work. They're the quick fix merchants and they, poor lambs, are wrong and are doomed to a life of poor results which they'll forever blame on their recipients, instead of fixing the problem that's closer to home, which is their own myopic view of the world and of their message to recipient match.

No match, no connection.

But prior to all this, your list of prospects had better be a good one. No pre-qualification and all the wonderful subject lines, body copy, offers, and testing in the world won't help you.

I wish it was easier. Sadly, it isn't!

I hope this clarifies things. Enjoy your weekend.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Anytime you do blast emails, faxes, direct mail, or anything of the sort there is one huge inherent difficulty -- You are sending something to someone who did not ask you to send it and is not expecting to receive it. That doesn't mean you can't get it to work, you just have to be creative with it.

Find some way to lend some credibility to the email. Maybe email the contacts of people you have already done business with? Maybe email existing customers and see if all of their needs are taken care of? Use any of the variety of social media, or networking events to promote your company, and get the permission of potential customers to solicit their business. That should at least guarantee a nice open rate. The click through rate depends on what you offer, what value it has, and what benefits it provides.

Hi Dear :
I think it will be batter if u change to the subject line of your e-mail to something like:

there is no more time !
dont wait ,life is shot .
itis time to save your money .


in fact u need something to Encourage and motivet
pepole .

and in fact when u got email its importent to fell< like it was special for you .

u got what i mean any costomer like to fell (heis deffrent and some thing like that )

i hop it will help thanks



[email address removed by staff]

I'm assuming you're tracking each email separately. If so, then are the same people opening your email each month? If so, you know something about their needs - enough that the email gets beyond their spam filter and they care about the topic.

I'd be more concerned that your click-thrus aren't converting. That's what I'd focus on first. Then work on getting more people to open/click. Otherwise, you'll get more people looking at a site that doesn't cause them to become your clients.

Dear Agape.daphne,

Just came across this via Twitter from Landon Fears
(www.admance.com) @Admance, Houston, TX.

www.pinpointe.com/blog/10-best-performing-email-subject-lines

Hope this is of use to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Was this useful? Then consider following me on Twitter

Hi All,

Thank you everyone for the very good feedback. I didn't think 13% is a low open rate. As far as I concern, the number of leads generated by the email is the most important number, which I only had one. It is probably true that my email offering isn't good enough. I also agree that I should focus more on how our services can help them solve their problem instead of on discount offer. What do you marketers do with the list of people who opened the email? I think it is a great idea to resend the email to the people who hasn't opened the email after 36 hours of the first blast. However, I am not sure how to separate the two list. I believe that ConstantContact only allow you to export a list of contacts who have opened the email, not a list of people who hasn't opened it. My list is all in excel format and I don't know how to remove all the opened list from the original list.
Below is a link of the email I sent out earlier this month:
https://archive.constantcontact.com/fs041/1101367398083/archive/11025854350...

The landing page was the company home page and Feature page.

The title of the email was "Get More Event Registrations with A Professional Online Registration Form - Blow Out Sale - 25% Off"
What if I use the subject line: "Get Relief from Event Registration Headaches!"?
The last time I used this subject line with a Webinar, I got 18% of open rate and 4.3% of click-through rate.

I would appreciate it if I can get some feedback from some of you regarding exactly what was wrong with my last email blast.

Thanks!
Daphne

I think you have too much going on in that email.

And I think your two most important components of the email -- the white paper offer and the wonderful testimonial -- are buried at the bottom.

Try an email that offers only the white paper.

Good luck!

Hi Inbox_Interactive,

Thank you for your feedback. We have tried an email with just the whitepaper before and have received 20.5% of open rate with 23% of CTR. I am now just recycling the whitepaper in case anyone on didn't see our previous.

The Whitepaper download certainly have increased a lot of attention but very little lead. There was only 2 person out of the 80 people who downloaded the whitepaper clicked on the box that they would like to be contacted by us, and one of them clicked on the box by accident and don't need online registration service.

What should I do?

Daphne

Hi, Matthew again here.

I just checked your mailer.

The very first thing that hit me is very obvious :))

25% of WHAT??

You are selling a discount but you don't mention the usual price. Hence, I am not interested to click :))

It should say 25% discount if you register now (you don't know when they might have an event so if their event is 3 months away they don't need the form today but they may want to reserve in order to enjoy the discount.

Next show the pricing $100 $75.00

Or something similar.

In terms of your email and wen site message, I think you need a great deal of re thinking in terms of what you think you are selling.

I am guessing that your business started from a technology idea and then you tried to figure out how to sell it.

I would really take the focus of the word 'EVENT' and the word 'REGISTRATION" because it sounds too much like corporate events. Really hip up the site completely to give people ideas about how they can use your service.

Raves,
School parties,
Band gigs
BBQ parties
Charitable donations (attend a party and donate )
Sports activities.

What you have provided here is a simple 'Payment Collection Solution' for small time businesses and organisations that don't have their own.

You should be targeting any kind of clubs 'boy scouts, teams, the list is endless. How about 'Fan Clubs' for instance?

Memebership renewals; boy , with just a little re jigging of your web site and email message you could be getting hundreds of sales very quickly.

Mostly low value, one time users but volume is what you are after here.

A very nice technology upgrade to add here for bigger events is a bar code image sent via SMS txt message to the registrants phone.

They pay online using your form, they receive a txt message containing ther bar code ID, they show up at the event and they are scanned in with a regular bar code scanner.

fast simple and fairly easy to deploy (the technology is already in the market).

BTW: I think you need a serious re think on your very high pricing :) - you should simply ask for a % commission on each registrant 3% maybe depending on the ticket prices of course. If it is a free event, then make it $0.75 per head.

Please feel free to get in touch if you would like more help with this project because I think you have an exciting proposition especially for the US

My details are on my profile.

Good luck,

Matthew

Dear Matthew,

Thank you for your feedback. Your idea of listing the price instead of just saying 25% off is a great idea!

As for the why the email look like it is only for corporate events is because all our clients use us for their corporate events. The reason for that is because private events like Christmas parties or BBQs simply can't afford to pay $3.75-$4.75 per head for online registration. Our service usually only make sense for our clients if they either take payments before the event for their event or have a large number of registrations that require pre-registration.

We also would like to get to a place where we can offer different levels of features at different prices. However, due to the limited IT resources, that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Our pricing is actually quite competitive if not less than what many of our competitors charges. An extreme example would be TicketMaster. They charge like $20 per head and people would still use them. I think most of other online registration supplier charges $4-$10. Some might jack up the setup fee to $1000 (we only charge $200) and offer competitive registration fees.

You are indeed correct that our software started as a technology idea (a project came out of University of Alberta 5 years ago) and my job is trying to come up with ideas on how to sell it. I am the one person Sales and Marketing department for the entire company and MarketingProf is where I get my marketing advice from. Thank you for your feedback. I have certainly learned a lot and will test out a different offers next time.

Daphne