 Optimizing Email: 10 Techniques to Maximize Your ROI
Volume 5, Issue 1 November 2003
BY REGINA BRADY
Marketers who are using email for prospecting or retention purposes can take many steps to ensure their campaigns are profitable. Here’s a quick guide to some tools and techniques that are guaranteed to improve ROI.
1. Get your mail delivered. Spam has reached epidemic proportions causing businesses to lose more than $10 billion a year. This is based on loss of productivity, bandwidth costs and the purchase and implementation of anti-spam tools. Keep in mind this is not just a consumer problem – business marketers are also affected. There are so many filters and blacklists in use that it’s difficult to reliably predict what email will get through and what will not.
Before you send a campaign be sure to use a spam content checker. There are free content checkers available on the web. You simply submit your email. They score it based on how likely it is to trigger a spam filter. These content checkers will also point out the words and areas of your campaign that may be vulnerable. Visit Sitesell and Lyris for fast and easy utilities to check your email.
2. Pay attention to your bounces. This is important because you want to be sure to deliver as much of your campaign as possible and also because too much undeliverable mail sent into any domain may get your mail blocked by that domain. There is good news on this front as reported by email vendor DoubleClick in their most recent quarterly report. Average bounce rates across their client base have declined to 11.5%; however, the “business products and services” category had an average bounce rate of 17.0%. That’s too high!
So what can you do? It all starts at the point you collect email addresses. You might want to consider prompting twice for the email address to ensure it’s a good address. Send an immediate confirmation email and if it bounces try list hygiene. If all else fails – take the address out of your file. Remember to set reasonable bounce thresholds. There are many ways to do this, but one rule of thumb is to delete any address that bounces in 3 or 4 consecutive mailings.
To re-capture bounces consider testing email append services.
3. If you’re prospecting, work with a knowledgeable e-list broker. They can help you navigate the sometime murky waters to determine whether a list is truly permission-based. A good broker is worth their weight in gold. They handle a considerable amount of coordination to make sure your campaign goes out to the right selects — with the right message — at the right time.
4. You’ve heard this before, but subject lines make a difference. Whether you’re prospecting or mailing to your own list be sure to take the time to test subject lines. Subject lines can dramatically improve open rates and cut through the in-box clutter.
5. Fine-tune your registration pages. Online publisher ClickZ reported on an interesting case study. The marketer in question tested a short and long registration page. The short form asked for name, company, title, phone number and email address along with one qualifying question. The long form asked two additional questions. The short form had a 70.5% conversion; the long form had a 48% conversion. That’s a big difference!
Ask only for information that you will use.
6. Grow your house file; it’s your foundation for success. Make email sign-up prominent on your home page and on frequently visited pages of your site. Promote your URL in direct mail, billing statements and other offline communications channels.
For business-to-business marketers your call center may represent a missed opportunity. A customer initiated call is a perfect opportunity to extend the dialog. In fact, one metric that some marketers now use to measure the effectiveness of their call centers is the number of email addresses collected.
7. Conduct data analysis and focus on collecting information that will make a difference. When you analyze your results you may find that one particular piece of data makes a difference. For example, if you know the SIC code of an email recipient and customize your emails based on that information; you may find that results dramatically improve. Let’s say you only have SIC code information on 60 percent of your file but customized emails based on SIC code yield a 140 percent improvement in results. You’ll want to strategize to determine how to motivate your list to provide this missing information.
A company that does a great job at this is HP. I’ve received a variety of emails from them that encourage me to update my profile. Over time they’ve used a sweeps for an HP product, the promise of more targeted communications and surveys.
8. Reactivate inactive customers. It’s a good idea to look at your email metrics over a 4 to 6-month time period to determine who has not clicked-through on any of your campaigns. Determine a strategy to get these people re-involved with your company.
I’ve received emails from a variety of companies that have asked me to re-confirm my interest in their programs. And, one personal interesting result is that I had a renewed activity level with those marketers because I received their messages.
9. Develop customer segments. A study issued last year by the DMA showed that 30 percent of business-to-business marketers were not tracking click-throughs, open rates, and more. Marketers who do, reap the rewards of higher ROIs on their campaigns.
Segmentation and data analysis should help predict: - Satisfied vs. vulnerable customer behavior patterns
- Best and high potential customers and prospects
- High risk and ripe periods
- Events that impact usage and buying behavior
One suggestion is to map out an e-customer lifecycle by analyzing recent customers separately from the balance of your file. As you know from your direct marketing experience, newer customers tend to be more enthusiastic. If you have added a large amount of new people to your email file, their performance may be masking malaise from your older customers.
10. Exploit the technology of the email channel. Two powerful techniques that work extremely well in email are “dynamic personalization” and “triggered messaging.”
Dynamic personalization provides the ability to use customer data to tailor the content of your messages in an automated fashion. To make this work you need to: decide which data elements are relevant, create variable message content, and define which content is associated with each data element. Here’s a simple example that could be used by any sales organization. The message template might have a picture of the account executive and include his or her signature and contact information. The basic message remains the same, but each lead or customer receives a message that appears to come directly from their sales contact.
Triggered messaging is a system that automatically sends emails based upon certain events or actions. This can be a one-time email or a series of emails sent over time. This technique allows marketers to create a real-time dialog with their customers. An e-commerce example might be: an email announcing a sale, a follow up email sent 3 days prior to the end of the sale, and a final email sent the last day prompting recipients to take advantage. Ideally, if your customer has already bought from the sale they would not receive any additional emails.
Also, keep in mind the day of week and time of day you send your campaigns can also make a difference. Generally, business-to-business marketers send their emails Tuesday through Thursday. And many have seen great results timing the delivery of their emails to reach recipient around mid-morning to noon. A practical suggestion for marketers with a nation-wide reach is to mail 10 am PST. West coast recipients will receive it mid-morning and east coasters will receive it right when they get back from lunch.
There are many ways to optimize your campaigns but these are all steps that have worked for other marketers. It may be difficult to implement all of these ideas. Pick a few that you believe will make the biggest difference for your company … and start optimizing!
Regina Brady is president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions, a direct and e-mail marketing consultancy. She develops well-planned and executed approaches that promote synergy across traditional and Web-based advertising, promotions and direct marketing channels and helps many companies as they focus their business strategies on maximizing online success. She can be reached at (203) 838-8138 or reginabrady@att.net
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