Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Josee, you might want to post a project if you're interested in paying someone to really delve into this subject for you.

However, you're likely to get some very good insight if you were to post a few links to examples of your emails.

You say you have a good list. How do you know this? How was it sourced? Are you pruning the removes, hard bounces, and eventually the soft bounces?

Do you know that your email is being delivered? And to the main email folder, not the junk-mail folder?

Do you know that your email is rendering correctly across all of the major (and minor!) email platforms?

Once you've answered those questions, you can then dive into the three things that make a great direct-response effort:

1. A great list
2. A great offer
3. Great creative

We've already asked about the list, so posting some examples of your previous efforts will allow us to look at the offer and the creative.

-Paul

At the very least, take the cheap route and check on junk-mail folder delivery...

Ask everyone involved in your email effort to set up Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL email accounts. Add these email addresses to your database, and ensure that they are included in each mailing.

When you do your test mailings and live mailings, see where your email goes.

There are resources you can pay to do this, but the benefit/cost of this approach is pretty good!

Is your list segmented?
Have you split test your email subject line & copy to figure out what people are interested in?
Have you surveyed your email list to find out what information they're interested in?

I think this is a case for the direct marketing master, Ruth Stevens. You could hardly do better than to engage her for an expert consultation. I can't imagine that she won't be able to either identify the problem immediately or lay out a simple test plan that will pinpoint it. (She'll need some details, of course.)

I can put you in touch with Ruth if you're interested. Just send me a short email message and let me know how/if you'd like to proceed. (Use the email address in my profile and I will find Ruth and forward it. She may be traveling.)

You've got some good advice there, but let me add a few thoughts and questions. Since you've done your homework, some of this may be already known or tried, but here we go.

1. What are you using in your From line? If the From line is not recognized and valued, that can depress response.
2. You've tested subject lines, but how? Length? Syntax? Content? While everyone jumps on this as a primary test, many don't do it well. Remember, most people read only the first word or three in a subject line (or, note, in an enewsletter headline as well); longer lines (in AOL and some other clients, I think it's about 33-35 characters) can get truncated. Never use more than 55 characters--unless you've tested longer ones for your audience and they work. ? Are your subject lines engaging and benefit-oriented.? Do they answer the question “What’s in it for your reader?” whenever possible? And what are the results?
3)Have you tested deployment schedules--time of day, day of week? Many email marketers rely on conventional wisdom or "intuition". Wrong in both cases. For instance, for many mailers and industries, sending Sunday night to be in the inbox when the prospect arrives at work, works best.
4) What is your delivery rate? While this won't tell you how much ends in junk or spam filters, it's useful to know that under 95% suggest problems.
5) Sherpa recently reported that a majority of business users either have images turned off or leave that default setting alone. If your "open" tag is an image--and it usually is--that means your open rate is artificially depressed. (Conversely, use of preview pane, up to 80% of users, inflates the open rate. So while open rates are a problematic metric, if yours vary a lot from blast to blast, there could be indication of a deliverability problem. 10-15% is not necessarily too low these days, in any case. Used to be that 30% was the benchmark, but that was at least 4 years ago. A useful metric is the CTR/OR ratio. More than the open rate, actually.
6) The rendering issue is important. There are free programs out there, if not provided by your esp, that will show you what your creative will look like in all common email clients. Check into this, and then use analytics to determine the breakdown of email clients used by your list. You may discover a problem.
7)So your CTRs are low. How many conversion path links do you have in your emails? Have you used your esp reports to see which ones are being clicked? Have you used button links with clear calls to action text? Have you tested the text, placement and even colors of the buttons?
8) You've tested creative. How? As noted with image blocking, if your creative is image heavy, and the images are not part of the html code, they may be blocked. In that eventuality, or regardless, have you employed alt tags for every image?
9) Have you used free services like Return Path's sender score to check for spam words and phrases?
10) Ah, the list. How do you define good? I assume it's a true opt-in list from what you've said, but have you done a re-engagement campaign lately or ever? Have you purged continual non-responders or inactives via such a campaign or effort?
11) OK, so my order of points here is random. But is the enewsletter optimized for the preview pane? Are you taking advantage of the snippet text for a teaser? Is the content fresh, engaging, and relevant? Is the content re-purposed and thus not fresh or unique?
12) Are you using customized landing pages for marketing emails, and perhaps even for some links in the enewsletter? Are the landing pages optimized? Have you tested landing pages?
13) Are you able to use behavioral targeting? That is are you able to use either analytics or sales history, or some other profiling info, to segment and target your list? E.g., the subject line, even the offer, can be different for segments depending on website interest of readers,

And there are more I can't think of at the moment, but maybe this will trigger other members to offer you even more suggestions.

In sum, all of these factors must be considered or implemented in all of your email marketing and enewsletter activitity. Some will only provide incremental improvements, some may not help at all, but all should be in your baseline.

Happy to discuss (free, cause I like it) any of this in more detail.
Arthur Cohen
[Email address deleted by staff]

Josee,

If I might offer some assistance, we offer a free one-hour email marketing consultation to review and define your email marketing goals. There is no obligation or hard sell, just offering to give you advice from my 12 years of experience in email marketing. Sharing knowledge is what we do best. Again I'm just offering to help you any way I can.

You've gotten some good advice already here, and testing your campaigns is always the first step when it comes to email marketing.

Cheers, Chris