VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Case Study: Test a Subject Line in 2 Minutes & Get More Clicks

Recently we did a survey on the State of Small Business, you may have received it. Our Marketing team performed a subject line test in the email. One subject line was very generic and one was a bit more specific. We split our list in half using the list segmentation tool. It took just a few extra minutes but from what we learned it was worth it.

The first subject line: Take Our Survey and Tell Us What You Think

We received 181 more opens and 35 more clicks than the following more specific subject line: Take 5 Minutes - See How Your Business Stacks Up

In this specific case it seemed to be that we had more opens and clicks from the generic subject line and more people taking our survey. This illustrates why it's important to be testing subject lines to get more opens or content inside your email to be getting more clicks.

Make All Of Your Clicks Count

You spend your valuable time creating your email marketing campaign, you load it with images, text and links, but where do you send your clickers? Hopefully not a black hole where they don't really know what to do! Let's take a look at 4 places that you are probably sending your clickers to and what you could do better.

Your E-commerce Site

If you're selling a product, the worst thing you can do is send your clickers to your home page. Why? You want to get them to the specific product page fast since that's what they're really interested in. If they have to search for the product they're interested in it could result in them being frustrated and potentially leaving your site.

Also, put as much information about your product on the page you send them to. Having them click to another page to get even more info is unnecessary and can be frustrating for them. If you do have lots of images you might want to try using thumbnails that they can scroll over to enlarge so that the page isn't so long.

Your Website

Websites can get out of control over a period of time can't they? You keep adding pages and pages. So it's better to be very specific when sending anyone there. If you've got a press release or you want them to download a white paper, fill out a form, or watch a video, make sure you send them right to the specific pages on your site that host these things. In general, people don't have the time or the patience to weave through your site to find them.

Your Blog

If a recipient clicks on a link to read the rest of a story and is directed to the front page of your blog where they may have to scroll to find the story, you'll likely get a frustrated reader. Even if your current story is at the top the day you sent your email, your reader might not read your email for a few days. In the meantime you might do another blog post forcing the post they want to read down the page.

I understand that you may want them to see other things on your blog, but don't worry, people will look around if they're interested. So send them to the 'permalink' of your post, it is the permanent link to where that post will always be.

Your Landing Page

If you send them to a landing page that is specific to the product you want them to buy or the story you want them to read, that's great! The benefit of you doing this is that you can test things on that page like placement of image, or copy to see what gets the best results. Then if that test results in you getting more products purchased, change your page for the better!

Analyze

If you have Google Analytics (free) or another web analytics program installed on your ecommerce site, your blog or your landing pages, that's a step in the right direction. As a side note, VerticalResponse has an integration with Google Analytics that takes analyzing email campaign clicks a few steps further. You'll be able to track where else people go from your email campaigns all over your site, blog or landing pages. Then you'll see what type of content they're really interested in and you could put it to work in your next email marketing campaign.

5 Easy Things to Test to Get a Better Response in Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Testing something new or changing something seemingly small in your email campaigns can definitely tell you something about how your recipients will respond. You'll either get more open & clicks or you won't. But you won't know until you try.

Testing something new can SEEM like a lot of work but it's really not. If you're going to create an email marketing campaign anyway, it's just three more tiny steps.

    One: Make a copy of the campaign you're creating
    Two: Change a little part of the campaign (see below)
    Three: Test with a small portion of your list or split your list in two

These three simple steps could get you a better response to your next email campaign and it takes just minutes for you to do. Unleash the mad scientist in you with these 5 easy things to test within your next email marketing campaign.

1. Subject Line - If no one opens your email, it doesn't matter how pretty it is on the inside, so why not test two different subject lines? Here's an idea; look at your past campaigns and see what your recipients are clicking on, then include that offer or article in your new subject line. After you send it out compare your open and click rates to see if you got a better response than normal.

2. Offer - Test a % discount vs. a pricing discount like 20% off vs. a $10 savings. Run a test with free shipping vs. no free shipping or with an expiration date vs. no expiration date. Then roll out to the rest of your list the winning offer.

3. Format - Instead of including a sidebar in your emails, try removing it so that perhaps more of your content is "above the fold" or the part of an email or web page that is visible without scrolling. Make sure you've got some links above the fold so you can tell if it's working. If you get more clicks you may want to consider changing your format for good.

4. Links - If your email has 5 links to your offer, try including 5 more and see if your response increases. Read Are Your Clicks Happening Below The Fold?

5. Images - Try removing images and see if a text version of your email works better. How 90's of you!

You can either split your list in half and do the test or you can break off a small piece of your list and do the test a day in advance of your real email campaign date. Then roll out to your bigger list with the winner. Here is how you can do it using VerticalResponse.

One last thing, if you are going to test any of these make sure you test them one at a time so you know which change actually made the difference.

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.