Email Marketing: What Do Your Customers Really Want?

Like it or hate it – email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers in a personalized way. A research conducted by campaign monitor reveals the key insights that can help increase your ROI. Here's a summary:

Consumers Still Prefer Brands to Communicate via Email

Key finding: There is no doubt, consumers still love email. More than half (52.7%) of those surveyed in the U.S. check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their favorite way to receive communication from brands  (compared to direct mail, mobile apps, social media, push notifications, and mobile wallet).

PREFERENCE OF COMMUNICATIONS FROM RETAIL BRANDS

Marketers are Delivering on Personalization

Key finding: 76% of consumers agree that retail brands are sending relevant, accurate emails which reflect their shopping preferences, location or purchase history. Companies across all industries are delivering on the promise of personalized emails. Overall, consumers overwhelmingly prefer to receive personalized emails across verticals.

AGREEMENT THAT BRANDS ARE SENDING RELEVANT EMAILS ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Along With Personalized Subject Lines, Discounts Drive the Most Opens!

Key finding: Across verticals, the top reasons consumers will open an email from a brand are personalization and discounts. Consumers are just slightly more inclined to open an email offering a discount (72%) than one with a personalized subject line (62%).

CONSUMER PREFERENCE BY EMAIL ATTRIBUTE ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Millennials Lead the Way in Making Purchasing Decisions Based on Email

Key finding: Preferences based on personalization and type of content received from brands did not vary widely among age groups. However, when it comes to taking action based on an email, millennials are far more likely to do so. 58% of millennials “always” or “most of the time” donated to a nonprofit while just 18% of respondents 55+ did the same.

PROPENSITY TO TAKE ACTION BY AGE GROUP ACROSS INDUSTRIES

The bottom line? Marketers must know their audience to run a successful campaign. Consumers prefer when brands personalize their email marketing campaigns, across age groups and verticals, and are seeking more of it. Brands must continue to personalize email campaigns to drive even more success and engagement, particularly with millennials. This trend will continue over time, as email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers!

Link: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/insights-research-report/

How to win at Email Marketing

Tonight I saw a blurb on TechCrunch about a new email marketing company called Iterable raising a seed round, and it got me thinking: email marketing is a (relatively) old medium, so what is new about Iterable's approach?

Based on a surface level review, I didn't see anything material that would differentiate them from ExactTarget (disclaimer: I am currently an employee at Salesforce.com, parent company of ExactTarget), ConstantContact, or others of that ilk. However, all of these companies seem to focus on optimizing effectiveness in certain areas, which can be construed as the key metrics for winning at email marketing.


Of course, the metrics to use for measuring a campaign should naturally vary depending on the goals of the campaign (Drive incremental sales? Increase awareness and visits to your site?). In other words, first define the goal of sending this email, and then focus on measuring and optimizing towards the metrics that are important for that goal.

Key metrics include:

1. Open Rate
Open rate can be easily tracked via an embedded pixel, letting you know just how many recipients are actually opening your email. In a B2B context, you can generally expect between a 10-15% open rate. Tracking open rates can be very useful for A/B testing purposes, trending, and other comparative analyses, but CTR is more valuable on a standalone basis.

2. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
CTR is another metric that is frequently top of mind, and is the intermediate step in the funnel between "open" and "conversion". This represents the percentage of recipients who not only open the email, but also click your link. In a B2B context, you can expect between 2-5% CTR (this will usually be lower in a B2C context).

3. Conversion Rate
Conversion rates essentially measure the effectiveness of your email- did it drive the intended behavior that you were targeting? This can be measured in terms of the percentage of recipients who subscribe, download, or buy from you, per the messaging in your email.

4. Bounce Rate
Bounce rates indicate the percentage of emails that go undelivered. There are two types: "soft bounces" and "hard bounces". Soft bounces occur when an email is not delivered due to a temporary issue like a full inbox or server problem. Hard bounces are much more serious, since they indicate a faulty target- an inactive email address, nonexistent domain, etc. Hard bounces are bad not only because they represent a worthless contact, but also because ISPs see numerous hard bounces as a flag of spamming activity- so it is important to scrub your list and maintain data quality.


5. Email Forwarding Rate
Tracking email forwarding rates is similar to tracking likes or shares on social media- it can represent hidden value in your campaign and additional "free" exposure.

6. ROI
Ultimately, you are sending these emails because you want to promote your business and make money, right? It only makes sense to build an accurate process for tracking how many sales are actually driven by the email marketing campaign, and weigh this against the costs of running the campaign.


In the pursuit of defining the purpose of the campaign and measuring/optimizing towards that goal, you can implement a number of tactics to increase the effectiveness of each campaign and each individual email. There is a great infographic on these tactics that wouldn't load properly on the blog, but you can view it here.


Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/08/iterable-seed-funding/
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/metrics-email-marketers-should-be-tracking