VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Reporting: How Are You Using It, Or Are You?

If you are currently using any reputable email service provider like VerticalResponse, you definitely have access to basic reports about how your email marketing campaigns are doing. The real question is, what are you doing with that information? I've put together some ranges for the stats you probably view and some ideas you could be doing with that information to make your email campaigns even better.

Open Rate

Customers who tend to have great relationships with their customers can get open rates as high as 40%, which is great. Others that have gathered their lists over several years and potentially lost some customers could be in the 14-18% range. 

Idea: Get rid of the dead weight. If you've been sending someone email for years and they've never opened your email or clicked a link, then maybe email just isn't the way you should be contacting them. Why not try calling them or dropping them a postcard to see if that wakes them up? THEN you can try to develop an online relationship with them at a later date. You'll be mailing to more active people in the long run.

Idea: Download your list of NON-RESPONDERS, these are people who have neither clicked on a link nor opened your email.  Then, a week or so after you've sent a campaign, send them the same email, but switch up the subject line to something more catchy to see if you can get more people opening.

Click Rate

Click rates usually fall in the 1-3% range.  However, if they've got an amazing story to tell or great deal to give, then we see it skyrocket to the 8-10% range. Anything over that you're off the charts. Again it all depends on that relationship you have with your customers. 

Idea: Test including more links in your email. We tested linking our article headlines and squeezed some more clicks out of people. Make sure all of your images are linked as well. 

Bounce Rate

We've seen our customers average bounce rates usually come in under .5%. However, lists mailed less frequently can have bounce rates in the 5%-7% range. A list that is mailed for the first time can have up to a 50% bounce rate depending on how "new" it is.

Idea: Download your list of bounces. If you have their postal addresses, send them a postcard asking them to update their email address. Then direct them to an opt-in form where you capture their new address. You may have to sweeten the deal with an offer on their next purchase or something free like a gift card. It's worth it for you not to lose that customer.

Unsubscribe Rate

A regularly mailed list has an average unsubscribe rate around the .2-.5% range. A less frequently mailed email list can creep up to the 2-5% range. 

Idea: Keep in more frequent touch with your recipients. Instead of once every 3 months why not make the time and increase it to once per month. A customer of yours may be on their way out the door, you don't want that.

Any ideas of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear them.

Are Your Clicks Happening Below the Fold?

I was recently analyzing some past email marketing campaigns that we do here ourselves at VerticalResponse, much like the one you (hopefully) read every two weeks.

Our newsletter as you may know has a column on the left hand side with some information and has our blog posts (2-3 depending on my level of "busy") on the top and down the right hand side.

I wanted to find out what percentage of clicks in a given newsletter really happen to those articles "below the fold". BTF is the area where you have to begin scrolling to see the rest of the email in your email reader.

Stats are always interesting to me so I thought I'd share.

43-60% of all clicks in an email happened in the first article which is mainly above the fold. Caveat, we have been using "anchor tags" above the fold to give readers a tease of what's below. We think it has helped our click rate overall. (I try to lead with what I think is the strongest to pull readers in.)

15-30% of all clicks happened on the 2nd article.

6-8% of all clicks happened in the third article.

Then I looked at all of the article headlines above the fold (which also serve as the subject line in most cases) to see the specific percentages of clicks in the given email:

• 6 Ways to Reduce Costs and Gain Customers - 43%
• Great Idea for Member Appreciation - 60%
• VerticalResponse Has Surveys - 54%
• Email Etiquette: 3 Things to Think About When Emailing Someone One on One - 43%
• 9 Cheap and Easy Ideas to Help Your Business Grow - 54%

The last one was interesting - Although it was in line with what our ranges are for the specific email it got the most clicks on a link ever. This email happened to have twice the amount of links included in it than any of the other campaigns.

There was one email with the article line up that looked out of the norm:

• 1st article: 6 Ways to Reduce Costs and Gain Customers - 43%
• 2nd article: 5 Ways to Put Surveys to Use for Your Business - 9.4%
• 3rd article: Lead Generation Idea - Good, Bad & Ugly - 26.2%

The third one was the only one that didn't fall in line with the rest of the emails. The only thing I could think of was that the the Lead Generation Idea did appeal to a wider audience than those interested in surveys.

What can I take away from it all?

I'm going to keep leading with what is the strongest content, what I want to get the most clicks to. 

I can test putting a strong article on the bottom, forcing people to scroll through the rest of my information. It could potentially give me more clicks overall. I think I'd take a small part of my list to do this though.

I'm going to double up the links. When I included more links in my email, even though the "Cheap & Easy" article was hot, the overall number of clicks increased.

Got any ideas of your own? Love to hear them!

New Feature! VerticalResponse Integrates with Google Analytics - Track Campaigns Even Further!

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service available to anyone (cool enough) but now you will be able to access and leverage its power in your VerticalResponse account. The VerticalResponse Google Analytics Integration helps you track email and marketing campaigns with even greater accuracy. You’ll be able to track your users’ behavior beyond the click to:

• Increase your conversions and profits
• Learn where your visitors are dropping off during the conversion process
• Learn which ad text is the most effective
• Compare email marketing campaigns
• Make informed site design improvements

It’s easy to set up and easy to get started! It is a powerful tool to help take your marketing to the next level. All you have to do is check the box in your VerticalResponse profile and you're up and running.

Email Marketing to Convert a Lead - The Corporate Sale

In light of this week being the Salesforce.com annual Dreamforce show (VerticalResponse will be there, stop by and say hi!), I thought I'd write a bit to those who might be selling large-ticket products or services in a multi-step fashion.

The first thing you'll need to do is attempt to define what's going to be successful for you. Defining metrics for success of a campaign doesn't have to be daunting and your metric doesn’t necessarily have to be about how much you “profit” from your email, ironically it could be how much you “learn” from your results. 

In general it’s a good idea for you to decide what your definition of success is up front, then compare your results to your metrics after you’ve mailed. Keep this in the forefront of your mind: it’s really about continual measurement and refinement to hit success.

The Corporate Sale

If you are selling your product into a large corporation and you have a longer multi-step sales process, your email marketing metric for success may depend on what lead conversion means to you.  One way to do this is to “back into it” from the total number you need to convert.

If this is the first time you’ve emailed this campaign, your “unknown” is going to be your conversion rate, meaning "what percent of your recipients are going to do what you want them to?" So your best bet might be to test before you roll-out to gauge where your conversion rate might fall. If you know you know you need to drive 500 conversions and your test shows that your conversion rate is 1.25%, then you’re going to have to email to 40,000 addresses to reach your goal.

Finally, you’ll have to assess how much you’ve sold to see if your revenue equaled, made more than, or made less than what you spent on the entire campaign.

The Truth About Landing Pages

Thank you Mark Brownlow for talking about landing pages in your latest Email Marketing Reports blog post. We are vigilant about the concept of the landing page here at VerticalResponse for tracking purposes. He talks about driving recipients to a single page and why it's a good thing:

"If we can dictate the landing page, then we can put specific content on this page that encourages the visitor to do what we want them to do. We can custom-design the landing page to fit with the goals of whatever advertising or marketing effort got the visitor to land there in the first place.

So the link in that email might go to a product page where the visitor can buy the item in question. If we just sent readers to the main website address, perhaps they'd never find the product or offer on their own before pursuing some other task or interest."

Great post Mark, keep them coming! Read the rest...

Trends Report Has Been Revised!

We launched the "Email Marketing Trends Report" last week and with it came a lot of questions. We realized that we did one thing wrong, broke our data down too much to where it may have seemed confusing and may not have told any real stories. So we decided to go back and simplify things a bit. We collapsed the list segments so you can now have a better understanding of where you fall, look at the report with confidence and gather intelligent info from it. Bob Kot, I hope I answered your comment about clicks below.

Some things to note:

• Across the board it appears that the normal trend for click and open rates decrease as a list grows large. It may be because many smaller businesses tend to have closer relationships with their recipients so the open/click rates are trending higher and in some cases 30% higher. Some list segments had unusually higher click rates only because their campaigns were *very* successful. Some of these campaign examples were surveys with incentives that got forwarded multiple times which affected the click rates positively, others were very targeted with great information.

• In all but 5 industries the bounce rate tends to go down as a list grows. In these 5 industries the rate increases with a list sizes over 20,000. This could mean that some businesses in those industries have data input issues or may not email their list as frequently. In general all industry bounce rates for each list size seem close.

• In 16 out of 30 industries unsubscribe rates increase with the larger list sizes. This could mean that as lists grow to a certain size and businesses become less familiar with recipients and they may tend to unsubscribe over time. It also might mean that businesses are not targeting their campaigns enough to keep their recipients interested.  Another reason might be that some of the businesses with these lists collecting data may not be using "confirmed opt-in" methods. This would bring this rate down quite a bit. An increase in attrition on larger list sizes is expected.

The main point here is that you should look at your rates and check them against this "average" range.  If you're above it? Great news! Love to hear your comments.

VerticalResponse Releases Q1 Email Trends Report

Here at VerticalResponse, we’re always trying to help make sense of the email marketing world. It’s a rapidly changing landscape, to be sure, which is why we’re introducing a new quarterly feature – the VerticalResponse Email Marketing Trends Report. The first installment of this series, now available in the Resources section of our website, examines open, click-through, bounce and unsubscribe rates for the first quarter of 2006.

While a number of studies track average response rates on a per-industry basis, we thought it would be useful to provide a little extra context and report on industry results according to list size as well. The end product is a report that offers data for companies in 30 different industries, segmented according to mailing campaign sizes ranging from 100 members to 1 million recipients. What’s more, we roped in our creative team to translate all those cold, hard numbers into attractive, easily digestible graphs that make processing the information a snap. To see their good work, check out the VerticalResponse Q1 2006 Email Marketing Trends Watch.

Don't Put all of Your Eggs in the Open Rate Basket

Although it's a good metric to look at, your open rate should never be the end-all-be-all when deciding if your email marketing campaign is working. Why?

Most major consumer ISPs (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Hotmail) have a “feature” where a user can block images in their email reader. Many ISPs even have it as the default when you sign up for an email account. So take note of the following when creating and assessing your campaign:

• Unsubscribes Beware - If your email campaigns ONLY contain images and the images in your recipient's email reader are turned off, the first thing your recipients are likely to see is your unsubscribe message. Ouch! They may be so frustrated they click on unsubscribe leaving you with a negative affect on your campaign and one less happy recipient.

• Open Rate Tracking - Most of the open rates are tracked by inserting an invisible image in the email. When this image is displayed in your recipient’s email reader, it tracks back as an open, so you can view who is opening your email. When a recipient has their images turned off the image is not displayed and the open cannot be tracked.

VerticalResponse's recommendation?

When you create your email, use a little bit of everything. Have a healthy mix of graphics and text. This way if images are turned off, your recipient will see the text of the email and they know what your message is all about.

When you assess your campaign look beyond the open rate. Count your clicks and overall ROI or metric for success for your campaigns.

Got any ideas of your own? Give us a comment!

Case Study: How WorkZ.com Increased Response Rates

Back in August 2004 my company VerticalResponse bought a small business content site called WorkZ. The site was made up of about 1500 articles and various categories about how to grow your business. Roughly 40,000 people had signed up to recieve the WorkZ newsletter.

What we did for WorkZ

Alf, our Creative Director redid the look of the site and I spent hours and hours weeding out old articles recategorizing the artices to enable visitors to get to the content quickly and easily. For instance instead of "Make Money" we categorized by "Marketing>Email>Copywriting".

Then we launched and sent our first email newsletter. What happened next is startling.

ALL of our AOL addresses bounced. How could this happen, i wondered? ALL email marketing campaign sent through VerticalResponse is on the AOL whitelist! So i talked to the kind folks in the AOL Postmaster group myself and told them my horrifying news.

"Oh, WorkZ was blocked years ago because of complaints and lack of a feedback loop," they uttered. "But we'll give them one more shot if you are taking over the emailing of it."

So we got WorkZ unblocked. STEP 1 in increased response.

Then we looked at our overall bounce rate, and a significant portion of the list bounced. Why? Because the list hadn't been mailed in 4 months. Ouch.

So we cleaned out a portion of bad email addresses and now mail each week, like we told members we would. STEP 2 in increased response.

Now it was time to start to grow the list and get a better click and open rate. Our open rates were pretty low because people hadn't been used to getting and reading our content. Alf's idea to Tracy, our Marketing Specialist was to test the "from label" from "Weekly WorkZ" to just "WorkZ".

Testing the "from label"  increased response by a few %. STEP 3 in increased response.

The next thing we knew we had to do was to get NEW names on our list of business owners. So Alf asked Robert, our Marketing Manager to help him acquire new members. Robert works with various companies to include us in their registration process so Robert started to send Alf hundreds of leads per week who had legitimately given us permission to email them.

We also advertised the WorkZ newsletter to our VerticalResponse customers telling them that WorkZ was the place to go for informational articles on how to grow your business. This garnered thousands more new leads.

The response went up by 20% by getting new email addresses. STEP 4 in increased response.

And finally, Alf had the idea that perhaps some people deleted our email or passed it by, so maybe we could just email those people that never responded at all, a few days later.

Mailing the same content the 2nd time around gave us 30% more of a response. STEP 5 in increased response.

So here are 5 ideas that might help you to increase your response rate and clean your lists! Oh, and check out WorkZ, it's got tons of great information.

Acceptable Bounce and Unsubscribe Rates

Understanding the bounce and unsubscribe rates of your list is as important as understanding the click and open rates.        

Bounces and unsubscribes are a natural part of email marketing and will occur even with the cleanest and most targeted lists. That said, for every bounce or unsubscribe you receive, that is one less person reading your newsletter. As a savvy marketer it's important to understand what steps can be taken to reduce these percentages for future campaigns.

Understanding Your Bounced Email

Bounces can occur for a variety of reasons: people move, change jobs, change their ISPs, etc. and they don't always remember to update their account information with their newsletter providers.        

The frequency in which you mail can also have an impact on the number of bounces you receive. An average bounce back rate for a list that is mailed regularly (at least once per month) can range from 2% - 5%. An average bounce back rate to a list that is mailed less regularly can range from 5% - 13%. In addition, we've seen bounce back rates for first-time mailing lists as high as 20 - 30%.

Here are a few tips to keep your bounce rate low:        

• Mail at least once per month – this helps to solidify your relationship with your subscriber base, especially the ones who've just recently signed up.

• Provide offers or newsletters that your recipients will miss if they change email accounts.

• Offer your recipients a way to update their email address and other account details somewhere on your website.

• If you do get a bounced email, call or mail your customer a postcard to let them know their email bounced and you'd like to get an updated one.

Evaluating Unsubscribe Rates        

No matter how enticing your offers are, or how targeted your lists, you will still have subscribers who choose to opt-out of your mailing list. Don't be offended, it happens to everyone. The key is keeping your unsubscribe rates as low as possible for the mailings that you send out. This is often where email content is most important because a bored or confused recipient is one step away from opting-out.

A "good" average unsubscribe rate for a list that you communicate with regularly can be somewhere between .2% and .75%.        

If you haven't communicated regularly to your list, your relationship with your recipients may become fuzzy, at least from their perspective. To avoid this scenario, send newsletters or offers at least monthly to keep your company fresh in their minds. If you tend to mail less than once per month you can expect to have unsubscribe rates between 2% - 5%.

Here are a few tips to keep your unsubscribe rates low:        

• First and foremost, only send your emails to recipients who have agreed to receive offers from your organization. This is a no-brainer!

• Send offers or newsletters at least once per month so your recipients are used to receiving your email and you don't lose touch.

• Only email the content your recipients requested. Over-mailing your customers can result in list fatigue, which can in turn lead to an increased unsubscribe rate.

• Most importantly, provide value in your messages. Be the trusted authority on a certain subject, continually offer great deals to your customers, and announce exciting news or updated product information.

Maintaining a high level of email deliverability is something all marketers strive for, it's what we strive for ourselves, and we see this as a two-pronged approach. First, the data collection methods must follow "best practices" to ensure that all subscribers have provided their consent to be contacted via email. Secondly, companies need to align themselves with Email Service Providers who are experts in the fields of ISP Relations and Deliverability Monitoring.