Comparing email results across several mailings

Part four of four to building an effective engagement strategy

by Mary Foster, Community Relations | May 12th, 2011 | No Comments »

And the winner is…

If you’ve taken our lead and done some testing recently, you may be ready to find out how different mailings stacked up against one another. We wouldn’t send you on your way without providing some guidance as to what to do when the mailings are complete. Our compare mailings feature is the perfect way to find out what practices you want to keep and what should be left behind. You may discover things about your audience you never knew. Get ready to compare mailings, and find out which test is the winner. (Time to settle up on those bets, eh?)

Compare your mailings to see how they performed.

What is the compare mailings feature?

The compare mailings feature, found in the response section of your account, allows you to compare up to five mailings at a time. You can see an overall summary of the mailings as well as compare the opens and clicks among the five. This is the perfect way to see which subject line your audience members preferred or perhaps which types of links got more clicks (image links vs. text links, for example). You aren’t obligated to choose five mailings to compare; if you’d rather just compare a simple A/B subject test, choose the appropriate two mailings to compare.

Why compare your mailings?

Comparing your results not only allows you to see which of your tests proved more successful, but if a mailing’s response rates seem particularly low, you can do some sleuthing to find out why. Maybe you’re in the practice of sending on the first of every month. If the first happened to fall on a Friday and subsequently suffered particularly low results, you may realize you should always send on the first Wednesday of the month instead. It may sound simple, but the purpose of comparing results is to be proactive; use what your response rates are telling you to guide future strategy.

How to compare mailings in Emma

Emma makes comparing your mailings super simple. You are just a few clicks away from determining the winners of all the testing work you’ve done over the past few weeks. Click on the Compare Mailings button in the top right of your main response screen. On the next screen, check (up to five) campaigns from the list and click Compare Mailings. Or, after you’ve selected to view a particular campaign, you can click the Compare Mailings button to compare that particular campaign to others. The Excel spreadsheet will show you a breakdown of the campaigns you selected and a summary of all the numbers combined. Once you see the winner of the tests, you’ll be able to choose which strategies to keep and what to leave behind.

Wrapping up the series on engagement

From part one of this blog series, where I wrote about triggers, to parts two and three, where I gave tips on list hygiene  and new strategies for more personalized campaigns, we’ve covered a lot of ground.

I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about engagement. What tests are you running, and how are you gauging the success of your mailings? Have you compared mailings recently, and what has it revealed? Or do you have a different set of metrics in mind that I haven’t mentioned to validate your mailing success?

If you’re using triggers, personalization or other strategies to boost your response, let me know in the comments below.

Variety is the spice of email

Part three of four to building an effective engagement strategy

by Mary Foster, Community Relations | April 27th, 2011 | No Comments »

It’s time to think just a bit more about effectively targeting your most and least engaged readers. If you missed parts one and two of this series, give them a read here and here. And today, we’ll talk about new things you can try to reach a level of response you’ll want to write home about.

Trying something different can be a bit unnerving, require a few rounds of testing and even a little research. Why would you want to take on something that sounds like, well, a lot of work? The answer is simple. Just like your mother always taught you, “Variety is the spice of life.” The same goes for email. Mixing things up may reveal new strategies that work better than the old, as well as new things about your audience’s behaviors and preferences.

Creating personalized emails

Creating personalized emails means much more than merging a name into the body of your emails. While it’s nice to call someone by name, why not go a step further and get specific with the content as well? Targeting members based on location, interests and even something as simple as the weather in their region is a way to connect with them on a personal level. (Check out some of Emma’s advanced personalization options here.) Marketing Sherpa reports that 64% of people they surveyed were willing to share personal preferences in return for a more personalized online shopping experience. The email addresses in your audience aren’t just addresses. They’re real people. You wouldn’t carry on the exact same conversation with every person in your audience face-to-face, so why do it in email?

Special offers brighten up a rainy day.

Experimenting with subject lines

Another variable to test with your audience members is the length of your subject line. Return Path shows that click-through rates can be 75% higher in emails that have subject lines with 49 or fewer characters versus subject lines with 50 or more. Do you have better luck with super short subject lines? Have you done some testing with vague, quirky subject lines compared to content-specific lines? Picking two distinctly different subject lines to test may provide you with surprising answers for what your audience prefers. Feel free to test your intuition regarding subject lines here.

Test different subject lines to find out what works for your audience.

Determining sending frequency

Your sending frequency is another great variable to test. Email Stat Center reports that 54% of people who unsubscribe from permission-based emails do so because they’re receiving emails too frequently. We’ve also mentioned how sending too infrequently can cause problems with bounces and keeping your list current. To determine how often your audience wants to receive your campaigns, you could ask in a survey format, allow them to choose during the signup process or do some testing. Experiment with sending frequency, and compare opens, clicks and opt-out rates to gauge your audience’s engagement.

What works for one person’s audience may not be the same thing that gets your list actively engaged. Don’t be afraid to spice it up and see how your audience responds. There is no need to settle for mediocre response rates when a spiffed-up subject line or more personalized content is all that’s standing in the way of stellar response rates.

Tell us what works for you, and join me for the final installment of the series, where I’ll discuss comparing mailings and checking out how your results stack up.

Brushing up on your (list) hygiene

Part two of four to building an effective engagement strategy

by Mary Foster, Community Relations | April 13th, 2011 | No Comments »

Let’s pick up on our conversation about targeting your most and least engaged readers. Today, we’ll discuss how you can manage email addresses that bounce and recipients who don’t open your emails. You want to keep things looking (and smelling) good, don’t you? (If you didn’t catch part one of this series, check it out here.)

Start with a little hygiene

So, you smell nice and floss twice daily? That’s great. You’re an over-achiever, aren’t you? Now we want to point out an entirely different type of hygiene that you may not have considered since the day you opened your Emma account. List hygiene means you’ve done due diligence to ensure you’re working with a squeaky clean list of addresses from the get-go. If you’re an Emma customer, you may have had a conversation with one of our delivery specialists, as they helped you verify your list’s permissions. If you haven’t given it a second thought since then, now’s the time to build a strategy around bounces and non-opens. Doing so means you’ll keep a happy, healthy list and see much more successful response rates. Sure, your list is bound to lose some members over time through this hygiene process, but quality matters much more than quantity when it comes to your audience.

Review your mailing's bounces on the response page in Emma.

Re-examine your mailing frequency (and check your bounces)

Your bounce rate could be telling you something about the effectiveness of your sending frequency. Last summer, MarketingProfs reported that marketers who sent email less than once a month produced bounce rates more than 200 times that of those sending on a monthly basis. The longer people go without hearing from you, the greater the chance that they’ll abandon their old email address without telling you. Or, they may forget about you altogether and let their filtering program relegate your message to the junk folder.

Frequency matters, but you should also use bounce numbers to gauge the success of your mailing’s delivery. Use the information Emma provides in your response section to check for patterns like several hard bounced responses from the same domain or an abnormally high bounce rate over all. If something seems amiss, reach out to our support team to help in uncovering the reason. Emma is known to have a great sending reputation and delivery rate (currently 98%), but if you suspect that Emma’s not connecting with a domain you’re trying to send to, we’d love to help check things out.

Don’t forget to see who’s *not* engaged

Cleaning up your audience means following up with non-opens as well. Historically, you may not have segmented your audience by activity or inactivity, but it’s worth working into your email strategy. Members who have never opened a mailing are telling you that they’ve all but officially unsubscribed. Consider removing these addresses — you’ll have more accurate response metrics with an up-to-date audience.

Deciding the amount of time to send to someone before considering the address inactive is tricky. This Marketing Sherpa study shows that the majority of marketers consider six months as a reliable window before an audience member is considered inactive. Removing non-opens will allow you to focus on segmenting other levels of inactivity such as members who are reading, but not actively clicking or otherwise engaged.

Put these strategies into action

Now that you’re in the right mindset, use Emma’s search feature to find audience segments based on engagement level. And don’t forget you can search and segment by many other parameters — location, age group or company name, for example. (Find the how-to’s here.) Identifying bounced addresses is even easier, as bounces don’t require a search. You can view the bounces in the response section for each mailing. While Emma moves hard bounced addresses to the “error bin” for you, keep an eye out for anything that doesn’t seem quite right.

And now you’re on your way to an audience that’s so fresh and so clean! If you have other ways of managing bounced addresses and non-opens, let us know in the comments below.

Stay tuned for next time when I tackle strategies for boosting response success.

Your email results are in. Now what?

Part one of four to building an effective engagement strategy

by Mary Foster, Community Relations | March 23rd, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Use Emma's response metrics to see how many folks opened, clicked through, signed up and more.

Sometimes after you’ve worked so hard building your campaign’s content, it feels as if your work should be done. You created, proofed, tested and sent your email. So what more could there be? Well, analyzing the response data from your send-off is an important piece of your marketing strategy. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore the what, why and how of following up after your results come in. Reaching out to your least and most engaged audience members is an important first step.

You’re getting engaged! Or, um, they are.

What: When we talk about engagement, we’re not talking about you single folks looking for marriage. We’re talking about attracting and holding the attention of your audience. We’re talking about utilizing loyalty programs, triggers, content and social media to get your subscribers involved in your cause. After all, you’re hoping for more than just a ring opens, aren’t you?

Why: Analyzing audience engagement allows you to make decisions to target particular segments of your audience. Your least engaged recipients are the members rarely opening your campaigns. Have you done an Emma search to find those members lately? You can start by asking those recipients to update their information by clicking the manage preferences link at the bottom of your email. If you have subscribers that aren’t clicking, let alone rarely opening, allowing them this opportunity — to change the email address where they’re receiving mail — gives you a fresh chance to get your campaigns back in front of them.

You may also consider surveying these folks. The survey tool enables you to learn more about your audience’s preferences, what topics they care about and how often they’d like to hear from you.

But it’s also a good idea to make sure you aren’t giving all of the oil to the squeaky, least engaged wheels, er, recipients. Your active readers deserve some attention too. Have you thought about creating a loyalty program? MarketingProfs recently presented a study showing that loyalty mailings boost email open and click rates:

• Open rates for mailings sent to loyalty program members were a whopping 40% higher than bulk mailings that were sent to the same clients: 27.4% vs. 19.6%.
• Click rates for the loyalty mailings were 22% higher: 4.0% vs. 3.2%.

If you’re thinking that loyalty programs don’t quite fit your organization, you can achieve similar results by sending targeted campaigns based on website or email analytics. Targeting audience members that show an interest in a specific event or feature gives those members further reason to open an email from you. You’re offering something personal and informative about a topic they’ve expressed interest in. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Marketing Sherpa reports that specific, analytic-driven campaigns like these bring in impressive response rates:

• The open rate for the targeted campaign in their study was 48%.
• The unique click rate was 43%.

These numbers are well above the Email Stat Center’s industry average open rate of 22.5% open and click-through of 5%.

How: After thinking about what engagement really is and why following up with your most and least engaged members is a good idea, you may be wondering how to get started. First, make your content clickable. When you provide links in your campaign, you’ll be able to track which audience members are actively participating. And Emma allows you to target these engaged, active subscribers in an easy, automated way: Set up triggers emails based on click-through behavior. If you provided a link for members to learn more about an event, set up a targeted trigger campaign that provides more detailed event info.

Send an auto-responder to recipients who clicked on a link in a prior campaign.

Additionally, give your members the option to share your campaign with our Social Sharing feature. Enabling the share option puts your content in front of a brand new pool of people — and even potential subscribers.

Between purposefully targeting and speaking to your most and least engaged audience members, you’ll be on track to a long and happy engagement. Congratulations!

Be sure to join me for the next part of this series, which will cover how to manage bounces and non-opens.