Recently, I was doing an Email Marketing Strategy Analysis and investigating why one of my clients email open rates were so low, hovering between 10% and 20%.
I started by examining the offers.
Every Wednesday, the same promotion promotion goes out to all of their 40,000 customers. To begin with I knew that the open rates were lower because they were treating their entire list of 40,000 as one big mass.
This company has over 30 unique products. Each product can be modified in dozens of ways. They also have a few additional services that not everyone on the list would be interested in. (Can you see where I’m leading? Segmentation.) But, even without segmentation I still felt the open rates were too low.
I moved to examining the subject lines. They were pretty good. Don’t see a problem there. I moved on to the creative. That looked good to. (The only thing I added was to make sure there was a visible call to action in each email, but that affects Click-Through Rate (CTR) not open rates.)
In the course of this I noticed something unusual. It looked like no one who opened an email or clicked a link had joined the list in the last few months… in fact, no one from the last half of the year.
Digging deeper I discovered that no one had been added to the list since July 2009!
The IT dept had been in flux during that time and when they switched from one email provider to another the process to add emails to their list from the website to their email service provider never happened. (And, no one double checked to see that it did!)
It turned out to be an additional 12,000 emails addresses!
Their list went from 40,000+ to about 53,000 almost overnight!
I segmented their list by date added and wrote an “Oops!” email and let them know what happened, apologizing, giving them a special offer and letting them know they’d soon start receiving the offers/information they asked for. Open rates were 38%. Now, that’s more like it!
Problem solved? Not quite.
I had the resident CRM guywrite a Workflow that sends a reminder email to a manager every 2 weeks to double-check to make sure email addresses are being added to the list daily.
With that solved I was still bothered that all offers were going out to the entire list. If you ask yourself WHY people don’t answer emails it basically boils down to Email Relevance. You aren’t sending them information they are interested in.
But, how do you get that Relevance in? When your email gathering methodology is to simply capture first name and email address, how can you possible know what they are REALLY interested in? (Remember, they have 30+ products and several other services that only apply to certain types of customers.)
You could always survey.
You could use CRM to create lists so that a person who has never ordered x-product in their history with you doesn’t get a special deal on it. But, just because they never ordered it from you doesn’t mean they wouldn’t ever… so, doing that may kill future sales possibilities.
How? How? How?
We need a way to figure out if they are at least INTERESTED in it. The company had been sending out promotional emails to their entire list every Wednesday like clockwork.
The email service provider (ESP) records the opens, the clickthroughs and the forwards. Ha! Now, we are getting somewhere. Do you open an email you are not at least somewhat interested in?
Through the ESP’s reports we can begin doing a little more segmentation of interest.
We did just that. The company has a particularly high-margin service that maybe a third or more of their clients SHOULD be taking advantage of but aren’t. Two emails have gone out regarding this service and have brought in a great deal of money (and almost all of it is profit).
The plan is to take the OPEN reports from both of those emails and mark those people as interested in this new service. About 15,000 unique opens on the two emails gives them PLENTY of prospects to boom that aspect of their business. Now, we can do more sophisticated follow-up via email, direct mail and outbound calling.
That’s the quick-n-dirty, let’s-get-somethin’-in-place-now solution. The email open rates have improved a great deal as have the Click-through rates. But, they are just a drop in the bucket. Now, customers will start getting less and less IRRELEVANT email messages which they eventually end up ignore altogether and getting more targeted and relevant emails that they open, read and benefit from.
The future holds even more possibility as my Omniture, CRM and ExactTarget integration plans move forward for this company, yielding some REAL, hardcore segmentation and follow-up possibilities.
Jason
P.S. If you’d like me to do the same type of thing for YOUR company, don’t hesitate to call me (817)734-6609.