15 Things to Test in your Email Campaign

Email open rates and click through rate have both declined over recent month as reported by eMarketer (Avg. Open rate is 11.2% while Avg. CTR is 1.6%).

This seems like a bad news for emails. What is going on? Is Social Media responsible for this decline or are there other reasons?

Who knows what the future holds for email marketing but for now email is alive and marketers can improve both the open rates and click-through rates by just doing a little bit more than they are currently doing.

The key to email success is giving customer what they want and in a format that they want. Nothing revolutionary but something that�s often forgotten in email marketing.
All this boils down to

1. Segmentation and Personalization
2. Testing

To address the first point, read my blog post � 7 Ways to Create Relevancy in Emails.
In this post I am addressing the 2nd point i.e. Testing. Below are 15 things that you should test in your email campaign.

Open Rate Improvement
Below are the 5 things to test to improve the open rate of your email newsletter.

1. From Email Address
2. From Name
3. Subject line
4. Day of delivery
5. Time of the day

Click through Rate Improvement
Below are the 10 things to test to improve the click-through rate of your email newsletters.

1. Layout of the newsletter e.g. 2 column v/s 3 column
2. Colors e.g. background color, side columns colors, colors of different sections and links
3. Fonts and formatting of titles, text etc.
4. Images � e.g. size, placement of hero image (main image)
5. Images along with stories v/s stories without image
6. Article length � how many words should you show in the newsletter article summary before you make the users click to your site
7. Above and below the fold content � test if moving content above and below the fold impacts the click-through rate
8. Left and right placement of the links, stores etc.
9. Anchor text length in links � Do people click on longer links more than shorter links?
10. Action words v/s non-action words in hyperlinks e.g. Does �Download Now� works better than �you can download the whitepaper�?

Keep in mind that if you don�t give customer what they want then it will first show up in dropping click-though rates, leading to lower open rate and finally resulting in unsubscribes and demise of your email marketing.

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Conversion Tip: Making the Most of the Email Confirmation Thank you Page

Email sign-ups are a very common ways for businesses to capture a potential lead. Visitors who are interested in your product or services will likely take a step towards providing their email address to you.

Your job as a marketer in not complete when a visitor gives you�re your email address. You need to make sure that you provide proper scent (links, messages etc.) for them to engage with your site/content/brand etc.

Almost every contact with a potential customer provides a conversion opportunity i.e. an opportunity to engage them to view more content, products and /or sell. If you do not take advantage of that opportunity then you might miss out on many conversions that you could have had.

Email sign-up confirmation page is one such opportunity that is so often forgotten by the marketers. The main reason for that seems to be the use of 3rd party to manage your email subscription list. Often the small details are missed in a hurry to get the system live. I hope you are not making this mistake.
I am going to share two examples to illustrate my point.

Example 1: Missed Opportunity

This is from a site called Daily Checkout. I loved what they had to offer so I decided to sign up for their daily email.

After providing my email address on their site, here is an email that I got from them. (so far so good, though the �from� email address is the address of 3rd party they are using to manage their email list).

I clicked on the link to confirm my email subscription and I was taken to the page below:

That�s all I got. The title of the page shows me some other company�s name. I am sorry, which site did I sign up for? Where is the rest of the page? I want to look at more products on your site, how do I do that? MISSED OPPORTUNITY.

Example 2: Making the most of the thank you page.

This page provides a nice confirmation thank you page and also provides me a link to explore more content. Well Done.


What do you think? Do you have any examples of the email confirmation pages that totally miss the mark or the pages that do it perfectly? If yes, I would love to see them.

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7 Ways to Create Relevancy in Emails

People are bombarded with hundreds of email messages each day. However a majority of the emails end up in the trash because of their irrelevance to the recipients.

On Oct 30th, 2008 I write a blog post on relevancy and emails. To state my point I showed an example of an email that John Song received from Nordstrom. John, who had never purchased any women products from Nordstrom, was receiving emails promoting women products.

During our conversation John said that he was a big fan of Nordstrom and was ok with receiving and ignoring irrelevant emails but he wished that they would send him relevant products/offers though.

No matter how big a fan a person is of brand, eventually the patience runs out. Guess what happened recently? John got so tired of the irrelevant emails that he finally hit the small �unsubscribe� link on the email he recently received. Done. Gone. Here is what John wrote on his Facebook status (came via his Twitter update).

Companies work very hard to get people to come to their sites and then to subscribe to their emails. But it appears that not many of them work hard enough to keep these subscribers. Someone (subscriber) who took time to fill a form on the site to subscribe to the email is ready to open his wallet. It is the job of a business to help that person open that wallet and spend that hard earned cash. But it can only happen if the business sells the customer what a customer wants and not what the business needs or wants to sell. Unfortunately, most of the emails consumer get today contain the products that business wants to sell and not necessarily what a customer wants to buy. Below are 7 ways that you can use to create relevancy in your emails and standout from the crowd.


7 ways to create relevancy in the emails

• Browsing History - Use the subscriber�s onsite browsing history to find out what products he looked at but has not bought yet. This list should give you an idea of his interest. Based on this learning determine what products you should offer in your emails.
• Email Click Through - Use his past email click-though behavior to determine what peaks his interest. If a customer has shown interests in certain products/contents/offers in past then they are very likely to be interested in similar products/offers/content. Someone who only clicks on discounted is most likely to open an email that says so and also click on a product that is on discount. Use that information to target.
• Shopping Cart Abandonment - Use the shopping cart abandonment history to determine what products he is interested in. Use the time triggered email to encourage him to come back and finish the process. You can also send offers but be careful (check out Targeting Cart Abandonment by Email.
• Purchase History - Use his past purchase history to determine what he buys. Use not only online data but also offline, phone order and catalog order data. Make recommendations in the email based on past purchases. E.g. if you know that he buys blue shirts then recommend new blue shirts. Depending on what products your sell you might also send complementary items.
• Frequency and Recency - How often does the customer come to your site and when was the last time you saw him. Frequency and recency of visit is a strong indicator of a customer�s likelihood of buying from a site. The longer the customer takes to return to your site the more are the chances that you will loose him as a customer. Timing your email message can bring that customer back into buying mode. Use frequency and recency to determine if you need to send a coupon or some other promotion to bring the customer back to the site before it is too late.
• Help Them Help You � If you do feel you have to send something unrelated to persons interest (e.g. provide him an opportunity to see what else you sell maybe lure him into buying something he might not have considered) then send it along with something relevant to him. E.g. send discount on women apparel along with some discount for men stuff.
• No Email - If you don�t have anything relevant to send to a customer then please don�t send an email. As mentioned before people are bombarded with irrelevant emails every day, you need to stand out of the crowd and make your email count so don�t send any email if you don�t have anything to offer.

Hope these tips help. Email me if you need help finding the right analytics and email solution.

Questions? Comments?

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Relevancy Matters in Email Marketing

Let's begin with a profile of a customer who received an email from a large retailer.

Name: John S
Site: MeetJohnSong.com
Gender: Male
Age Range: 40 -50
Relationship: Married
Location: Seattle, WA
Profession: Executive in an Interactive and Technology Company
Hobbies: Golf, Madden 09,
Shopping Habits: Shops at Nordstorms.com, mostly interested in shoes and have borught a lot of them from Nordstorm.com. Also buys shirts, trousers and other male clothing items. Loyal customer at Nordstrom.com and Nordstrom for many years. Has an account online and login quite often when browsing.

From what it sounds like he is a perfect customer for any male clothing items that Nordstorm wants to sell. He will be very keen to look at Nordstrom promotions. He has opted-in for an email from Nordstrom.

Last week, John and I were talking about e-retailers, targeting (in particular Behavioral Targeting), personalization and product recommendations online. During our discussion he said �you have to see an email that I received from Nordstorm�. He forwarded me the email which is shown below:




Now my questions to Nordstrom or other etailers who are sending similar emails is, �Why would you do that?� You have so much information on your customers (John in this case) why not use that information to power your emails?

John was not annoyed with Nordstrom for this email(he is a huge fan of Nordstrom. Good for the brand.) but he was disappointed. He would probably have bought something if Nordstrom had sent something relevant to him in that email.

Here is a customer waiting to convert and you are disappointing him with irrelevant emails? Why?

Don't you want happy customers who are ready to open their wallet and give you money? Don�t waste your and his time with irrelevant emails send them relevant emails.

Here are few ways to create relevancy in emails

1. Use his browsing history to look at what has been looking at but has not bought yet � Target the correct promotion
2. Use his past email click-though behavior to determine what might interest him
3. Use his checkout funnel abandonment history to determine what to send in an email
4. Use his past purchase history and make proper recommendations
5. Use the frequency and recency of his visits to the site to determine when to send him a coupon and type of promotion
6. If you do feel you have to send something unrelated to persons interest (e.g. provide him an opportunity to see what else you sell maybe lure him into buying something he might not have considered) then send it along with something relevant to him. E.g. send discount on women apparel along with some discount for men stuff
7. If you don�t have anything relevant to send then don�t send an email. Consumers are bombarded with irrelevant emails every day, you need to stand out and make your email count so don�t send anything irrelevant

Sending relevant emails is not rocket science. Most of the email tools/services have a way to send highly customized emails. You just have to explore them.

Do you have examples of irrelevant emails or relevant emails that you would like to share? Send them to me.

Comments? Questions?

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Targeting Cart Abandonment by Email

Today I read an article called Four Ways to Improve Marketing ROI Through E-mail by John Rizzi, CEO of e-dialog. This is a good article for those who are trying to determine how to collect email, learn from email marking and email effectively. In his last point he says "Use Behavioral Targeting" to convert abandoned carts. He suggests using incentives to bring customers back to complete the cart they had abandoned. This is a great idea but I want you to be aware of following two issues before you jump into it.

1. Lack of Email Address: If you don�t have an upfront email collection process it is very likely that visitors (customers) will leave even before they give you their email address. If that�s the case then you won�t have any email to target (You can still deploy anonymous on-site behavioral targeting. Check out my article on behavioral targeting).
   If you decide to put email collection up front it might cause cart abandonment rate to go up. You have to provide a very good reason to your customers on why they should provide you email even before they started buying anything or checking out. Like any other change on the site, I suggest conducting A/B testing before you start collecting email addresses for all your customers. If the tests do not show desired result you might be better off with on-site anonymous behavioral targeting.


2. Backfiring of incentives: Let�s assume you have the email address and are ready to send an email incentive. As you already know the word spreads very fast these days. Most of your customers (visitors) will find out about your offers which could ultimately result in two outcomes:
   
   
   
   1. If the incentive is not too enticing (such as free shipping) your customers (even regular customers) might find out about it and start abandoning the cart in anticipation of receiving that offer or they might just use the coupon or offer code given to them by somebody on the internet.
   
   
   2. If the incentive is too good (such as $10 free for any purchase over $5.00, not sure why would you do that but I have seen companies giving free money just to get users to signup), the word will spread sending new customers to your site. So be prepared to handle the amount of traffic this viral marketing will generate and a possible bankruptcy.
      Appendix A shows what happened to Starbuck when they sent out an e-coupon to limited number of employees (or that�s what Starbucks thought).
      
   
   
   
   

So should you provide incentives to bring back customers who have abandoned carts? Yes I think so but think about all the pros and cons before you jump into it. Below are some of the steps that you should include into your process for using email incentives

1. Select a sample (say 20%) of visitors, who abandoned the shopping cart, who will receive any offer (I am assuming you have already created and tested a process for upfront email collection).


2. Test different offers within this selected group. Testing will show you which offer works and which ones don�t.


3. You can use more behavioral data (and I encourage you to do so) to determine what offer will make sense to which visitor segments (create few manageable segments so that you can stay focused). E.g. A customer who abandoned at shipping step might be more interested in free shipping than a user who added products to the cart but then left without clicking on the final checkout button (provided the customer has given you the email address), a 10% off coupon might be a better offer for this customer.


4. Unless you purposely want to engage in viral marketing, make sure coupons and codes can only be used by those for whom they were intended for and for specific period only. Also don�t forget to configure your web analytics tools properly so that you can measure effectiveness of these offers.
   

Note: If you provide users the same kind of incentives 2-3 times to a customer then he/she (most of them) expects it every time.

Appendix A: Starbucks Lawsuit
�Starbucks e-mailed the grande iced beverage freebie to a limited number of employees in the Southeast on Aug. 23, with instructions to pass it on to friends and family.
The forwarding turned into a frenzy as the coupon landed in thousands of inboxes and on Internet message boards � forcing the chain to reject scores of coupon-touting java lovers pouring into stores for the perk.� Source: ocregister.com