I don't know a whole lot about email marketing, but I enjoy studying the marketing emails I receive and identifying the ones that are more effective than others. I talked to Scott, who handles our email marketing campaigns, and he praises email marketing for being "dirt cheap and very effective." I can agree on the cheap part: we use Exact Target, whose suite of email marketing solutions start at $1,000 per year for one user and go up to an Enterprise account ($15,000 a year for five users). While there are expensive email marketing packages available, you can definitely find an affordable option to start out with and get your feet wet.
As for effective? Well, we haven't been doing email marketing for very long, but our average open rate is 27.4%, with an average CTR of 12.7%. Our conversions vary, but we were able to sell 200 video training DVDs within 4 days of announcing the product via an email marketing campaign to our members. Considering how low the cost per conversion is, the conversion rate was pretty good. Here's an example of one of our email marketing efforts:
Our email marketing efforts are pretty bare bones and I'm sure there's room for improvement, but for the time being it's working pretty decently. In an effort to better understand email marketing, I sat in on an Email Marketing 101 webinar hosted by NetProspex. While their presentation focused primarily on B2B email marketing, I did learn some interesting statistics that I'll share below:
Spam. Spam spam spam spam spam. Not only do many email service providers have constantly improving spam filters, but the CAN-SPAM Act outlines some requirements that commercial emailers must adhere to when crafting an email marketing campaign. For those of you who aren't aware of the CAN-SPAM Act, it was created to establish requirements for marketers who send commercial email and spells out penalties for spammers and companies who violate the law and advertise their products/services through spammy means. It also gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them and requires these emailers to comply.
But you don't need to worry about violating the CAN-SPAM Act because you're not a filthy spammer, right? Well, in case you're wondering what the biggest no-no's are, there are essentially 4 main provisions:
Okay, say you're being a good little marketer and are complying with the CAN-SPAM Act but are still having problems tripping recipients' spam filters. What should you do? Well, here are some things to avoid from both a spam filter and a user's perspective:
- In 2008 thus far over 250 billion B2B spend has been driven/influenced by email in the US [Forrester]
- 80% of marketers say that email is the strongest performing media buy and that it has a higher ROI than search [Datran]
- 50% of marketers are emailing prospects as well as customers [Direct Magazine]
- 78% of marketers said this year they would significantly increase email marketing investment for customer acquisition [Marketing Sherpa]
- According to the Direct Magazine annual forecast survey, email has become the top medium choice for direct marketers. Of the firms polled for the survey, 72% said they send email to customers (a 10% increase over 2007), 50% send email to prospects (a 9% increase), and 55% of those who use email for marketing plan to increase their budgets for it.
Spam. Spam spam spam spam spam. Not only do many email service providers have constantly improving spam filters, but the CAN-SPAM Act outlines some requirements that commercial emailers must adhere to when crafting an email marketing campaign. For those of you who aren't aware of the CAN-SPAM Act, it was created to establish requirements for marketers who send commercial email and spells out penalties for spammers and companies who violate the law and advertise their products/services through spammy means. It also gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them and requires these emailers to comply.
But you don't need to worry about violating the CAN-SPAM Act because you're not a filthy spammer, right? Well, in case you're wondering what the biggest no-no's are, there are essentially 4 main provisions:
- False/misleading header information is banned
- Deceptive subject lines are prohibited
- Your email must give recipients an opt-out method
- Your commercial email must be identified as an ad and must include a valid physical postal address
Okay, say you're being a good little marketer and are complying with the CAN-SPAM Act but are still having problems tripping recipients' spam filters. What should you do? Well, here are some things to avoid from both a spam filter and a user's perspective:
- Don't use Excessive Capitalization or punctuation!!! You don't want your emails to evoke the professionalism and trustworthiness of a used car lot or a furniture liquidation sale.
- Don't use (or limit the use of) SPAM filter catch words, like Free Viagra Sex Guaranteed with Credit Card! Though I must admit, that sounds like one hell of a deal...
- Don't use cluttered layouts. Even if your email passes the SPAM filter, cramming a bunch of content into an email is likely to overwhelm and confuse your recipient.
- Don't just send one big image. Sometimes they won't display at all (in Gmail I have to click "Display images below" on emails from unknown senders) or they can be slow to load. If you do use images in your emails, be sure to test the emails thoroughly before sending them to hundreds of recipients.
- Don't excessively use "Click Here," especially in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Obviously, you'll want a call to action in your email, but don't go too crazy with it.
- Don't send your emails from free mail services like AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. This especially rings true for B2B marketing. Nothing screams unprofessionalism like sending a marketing email from "[email protected]."
- Create a compelling/interesting subject line. This recommendation extends beyond email marketing to social media submissions, blog post titles, newspaper and magazine articles, etc., but it's a good golden rule to keep in mind.
- Test, test, test, and test again. It's better to test too much than too little, and the last thing you want to do is overlook something and send your message out to thousands of recipients, only to discover that your call to action points to the wrong URL.
- Think above the fold. As with newspapers and landing pages, you'll want to try and present your most compelling information in the top half of the email. If users have to scroll down to get to the good stuff, most of them won't see it.
- Have a specific call to action. Once again, this is a general best practice with landing pages. Be specific with your CTAs; instead of "Click Here," try "Start Referring Your Friends Now" (from a Vonage email I received), "Shop all Road ID Styles" (from Active.com), or "All Outerwear 20% Off! Shop Now" (from a clothing catalog). Test which variations garner higher click throughs, but always strive for a compelling call to action that will entice your reader to click on it.
- MindValley Labs email marketing category on their blog
- Email marketing best practices from EmailLabs
- Exact Target's eemail marketing blogs
- An email marketing tip sheet from Audette Media
- Delicious bookmark results for "email marketing tips"
Thank you for writing about my corner of the internet. I can offer a few more to add to the list above:
Don't use messy html such as is generated from Word. Spam filters will look at the html code to text ratio when determining if your message is spam.
Don't use the CSS code that you love for your web pages. Email clients frequently strip it and your email will end up looking ugly.
Your good results for SEOmoz reflect your quality list. Sending email to people who really want to receive it is one of the most important requirements for success. And as your example email shows, don't under estimate the power of plain text.
Great tips, Jean! You make an excellent point about the quality of your email list. It's probably good to pare that down from time to time and weed out the duds. ;)
another reason to check you lists is that if you've got too many dead emails in your list that your hitting it can affect your status with the ISP's... that and the conversion metrics if your not paying attention.
That's interesting,are you saying that is better sending a simple text email versus an html email? I receive both type from different newsletters and i prefer simple text but i really don't know how people react to different emails.
Also keeping the email size to minimum helps.
I think one of the biggest things when doing email marketing is to not make the email feel like it's a sales pitch. May seem odd I know, but believe me it works. Making the email seem personal, like you really know the person (even though it's going to probably 100's) is a lot more effective then saying "Hey buy this, it's great".
The soft sell I think, and wish I had stats to back this claim up, is far more effective then the hard sell. Give me an email that is short, engaging, and informative and then have a link "to learn more, or visit our site" and I'm a lot more likely to click.
Thank you for writing this Rebecca! Great post.
Here are a few other tips to help you along your way....
*Keep the anchor text for your final CTA closely associated to your subject line.
*your emails are judged by spam filters using a point system. The more 'spammy' items in your email, the higher the score. Here are some of the
spam triggers used by one of two major spam point systems, called SpamAssassin
*Always provide a text version of your email along side your HTML version. You will get a higher spam score without it.
*While systems like Habeus and campaignmonitor.com can show you what your emails will look like in different clients, it is good to just set up an account with these ISPs to spot check them manually from time to time. hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol, aim, and comcast. Obviously you'll see many others but these are the big boys that will make up 90% of your list and cause 90% of your problems.
*Major ISPs have an email count threshold to be aware of. What this means is that after X amount of emails to their users within x amount of time, all other emails will automatically be sent to spam.
*Beware of Spam Traps. Hotmail is known for their spam traps. This is complex but basically boils down to an ISP using an old account that joe shmoe disabled (lets say [email protected])to monitor if a publisher is unsubscribing as they should be. If [email protected] is not taken off the list according to CANSPAM regulations, you can be banned from ever sending to that ISP again... or for a very long time.
I could go on for days but I'll stop there. If anyone is interested in hearing more, just let me know.
Cheers!
@trontastic
P.S. - The CanSpam Act of 2004 was updated this past July with some new rules. Some good, some not so good. It boils down to 4 new items to pay close attention to. You can read about them here at the Lyris HQ blog.
I've been doing a fair bit of email marketing this week, it generated great results (although I got banned from my provider after some barmy folk complained to US Senators & the IRS - you crazy yanks ;] )
Without further ado..
E-mail marketing always has seemed like a bit of a jungle to me. HTML is possibly, but interpreted in extremely different ways by all the E-mail clients, making it hard to have a goodlooking E-mail.
BTW: SEOMoz is now ranking 3rd (google.nl) for "Free Viagra Sex Guaranteed with Credit Card", nice job!Â
Only 3rd? :)
2nd now. :)
Not sure what is more alarming. That they rank for that or that you did the search and found out!
Hi Rebecca, great stuff i enjoyed reading it. Our Average Open ratio in the UK-company where i work (public sector) stands at 28%, CTR at 28%, bounces at 8%, unsubscribes at 0.45% and spam complaints (those who tag our emails as spam) at 0.07%. Unfortunately we do not measure conversions as it is not easy due to our non-commercial nature and without proper integrated online marketing tools.
The points I would like to add to your list are: - keeping an eye on bounced backs (we usually list out bounced backs that recur 5 times). We used to have an average of 20% bounced backs till we reveiwed our database and started using a different email marketing tool with better features.-keep an eye on unsubscribes, if the percentage goes up, it probably means your enewsletters of email communication is getting boring or fails the deliver at customer nees level. -if your emails are going to be made available on your website as web pages after the mail-out, choose carefully where you place some of your selected keywords and keyphrases on those punchy 'call to action' words. Those pages will eventually gain Pagerank and part of that pagerank juice can be passed on to your targeted landing pages in the medium and long run.
Also, these are some industry averages I learned from at an event organised by Direct Marketing Association in London. They are current UK industry averages on performance of email marketing campaigns and ezines. These were as follows:
For an email campaign or an ezine sent out:
Though these are UK averages for 2006 and may vary from market to market but they do provide a generic barometer to assess how successful your ezine or email campaign may be. I use them as baseline for my our campaings. It would, however, be interesting to know what other averages/standards, if any, direct marketers in your environments are using in the US.
*edited by Rebecca for formatting
Working primarily with an ad agency, I've developed more Emails than I care to admit.
Two things I see are essential to the process:
#1 - Come up with a (long) list of supported email clients, and make sure YOUR client understands you only develop for that software. With a large eblast there is bound to be someone with a totally bizarre email client, and that kook always sends a complaint.
#2 - Make a template, test it thoroughly, and reuse whenever possible. These links can help you to build this:
MailChimp's Email Development Guide
CSS Support in Email Clients
Keep as much text as possible at the top of the email, ideally above any big chunky images. Otherwise, everyone with Outlook will just toss it.
Great post Rebecca. I'm also an email newb and find this article very helpful. Good comments have been made by others as well.
And the last time I checked, my dad was confused by how to answer call waiting (let alone have an email account). It's pretty amazing.Â
One of the services I have had a good experience with is Campaignmonitor. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/ The site offers tutorials on best practices, templates, and tools for testing your email in multiple email clients before you send it out along with stats on bounces, etc.
Having the right email marketing solutions that fit your e-marketing strategy is key nowadays. I read a study that showed email marketing ranked #1 just edging out social media when it comes to conversions to investment rates. Email marketing is trending indeed!
Great stuff.
Great article Rebecca! It will go in my archives to send to clients that are considering embarking on the email marketing journey.
 I think it is also important to first realize the purpose of an email. Is it to inform, like a newsletter, or is it to sell something, like a special sales flyer?
 Expectations, graphics, description and even the call to actions vary so much with these two types of email marketing intentions.
Prefect timing Rebecca. This afternoon a client requested we take over there email marketing (through there exact target account). So we have 250k emails to use up before the end of the year.
 Thanks.
Thanks Rebecca, your readers can view the content from the Webinar here:
www.netprospex.com/resourcesÂ
very good !
We made the best results with text-only mails containing only a few words and links. As people tend to scan everything they read on the web and in mails, they almost certainly click on the link.
But bulk mailing can be quite annoying sometimes. If you have some 10,000+ emails to one provider (say aol or hotmail) - you'll get into the SPAM filter even if you're whitelisted ... that's a hell of a problem as you don't know which mails were delivered and which not (hotmail e.g. just swallows them) ...
Well I want to say bulk mailing ≠ spam. It is different from the unsolicited bulk email, commonly known as spam. Spam refers to emails sent for commercial purposes without permission from the recipients. If the recipients have given you permission to send them promotional emails, you are safe to send bulk emails to them. In this case, it’s bulk email marketing instead of spamming. Â
great to see the mindvalley labs link up there, im a keen follower of their material - i recently write a piece on increasing leads with relationship marketing & aweber - please take a look: - https://www.howtowebsite.co.uk/blog/increase-sale-using-email-marketing/
simply super..
E-mail marketing is a new trend today..
Useful post Rebecca, I've bookmarked that, thx.
I'd also recommend LitmusApp. Similar idea to BrowserCam (another favourite of mine) but for email testing. Lets you test your emails across a range of 14 mail platforms. Saves a lot of time.Â
Great Ideas! One thing that I would like to add about creating and executing a successful email marketing campaign is to make sure you have designed your "Call-to-actions".. Convert those emails into qualified leads.
great blog post. lots of good tips.Â
i'll add that another good tactic is to run an email series. i've worked with some marketers that email their marketing message in a series of 3 emails about 2-3 days apart with increasing urgency. the first email has a call to action. the 2nd one then states that time is limited. and the final may state a last call for action.Â
I not an email pro but handle email marketing for a client on a pretty regular basis. It probably will depend on your product and message but in our case I find that, just like on our website, qualified traffic is the best converter so we don't spam. We use strict guidelines on who we add to the list and therefore we have very very low opt-out and even lower spam report. We try to make our message short and above all its relevant. We tested what days seem to work best, we monitor click through rates and adjust our campaign accordingly.
I'd be interested to hear what you consider a high/low open and click through rates for email campaigns. Anybody have stats on that to compare notes?
lol, I hope you do a video interview with your mom ;)
"Considering how low the cost per conversion is"
I know very little about email marketing but one thing that I believe should be taken into account is the opportunity cost.
Does anyone here know if there are studies analyzing this kind of hidden costs and impacts on users when users receive one or more misses on their email from a company ?
Nothing particular on the email discussed on this post; I am sure that coming from Rebecca it would smell of roses;)
Great post and I'd definitely like to see more of them in relation to email marketing. We currently had been doing all of our email marketing through a hosted service, but we we just brought it all in house.Â
We went with a product called Email Marketer from Interspire if anyone is interested. So far I'm very impressed with it and the pricing is extremely affordable.
Does anybody know of, or use, any good email list providers? I have dabbled in the space to only break even thus far...lol...I think part of the problem might be my lists...
The most effective list is one that you develop yourself. Purchased or rented lists may just result in spam complaints. You may be able to develop your own list by placing advertising or content in a established complementary email newsletter with links to your site where they can then signup to join your list.
I have always found the key to building up a good keyword list is to offer some kind of service from your website..."Get free SEO tips straight to your inbox" offered as a service n your home page will give you a list of people you know ae interested in SEO for instance, and they will be expecting your email, so you have the opportunity to ask them to white list you.
I completely agree with Jean, and also feel it is important to test your offer to outside lists as well. Two very different dynamics going to a list who knows you and a list who does not.
Rather than buying a list or renting one, it is better to build a partnership with the owner of an audience you'd like to reach out to and have them send your ad to their list with an endorsement at the top of the email. That way it goes from a "cold call" to a friendly recommendation.
Perfect example... Rebecca's mention of Exact Target at the beginning of this post rather than Exact Target simply writing a blog post on Youmoz stating their services.
If an email marketer wants to make me open an email they just have to make it appear as if it is coming from "[email protected]"
and yes, I'm flirting. I miss the FlirtMoz. Shoot me. Deal with it. I miss flirting with SEO hotties discussing SEO tactics and sharing knowlege on SEOmoz.
The are tools for testing how your email will appear in different email clients - the one I use is https://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing/ Email clients are much more variable in the way they render html than web browsers. Outlook 2007 tends to cause me the most problems at the moment because it uses the rendering engine from Word not IE.
Its been a while but glad to see email marketing on SEOmoz!
As an Inhouse marketer I'm often involved in email marketing and its interesting to see the SEO communities thoughts on this.
I'd say that email is capable of quite a few things, and that people underestimate the systems you can use for it.
With the systems out there such as e-circle etc you can now multi-variate test subject lines and content, you can upload csv files containing customer data so that each customer gets personalised emails (ie say Male gets 1 version of a header image, female gets a different version) and you can also build dynamic templates etc.
As to ROI, it can often be far higher than search or SEO, at one point I made £200,000 off of one email that cost us approx £200.
Its a powerful system that is well worth using and exploring for customer retention and aquisition.
also you can now specify what email is displayed in different systems -ie HTML email, Text email, Blackberry format etc.
Hi all,
I'm new here but I thought I might add a couple of points. If you're sending HTML emails, be sure to include relevant alt text for your images, especially those that contain important messages. If users' email clients do not automatically download images (like Gmail), users will see nothing of your email. This may seem pretty basic, but I am constantly amazed at the emails I receive from big name companies that do not do this.
Regarding the use of CSS in HTML emails, this can be done but you'll need to test heavily in various email clients as some treat CSS differently, supporting some declarations and disregarding others. For best results, use sparingly and only with inline styles. Again, test, test, test.
 Thomas
Nice links! I know nothing of email marketing, maybe it's time to change that...
You've not written an actual blog post for ages! Hows it feel?!!
It feels weird...I wasn't sure how to go about doing it since I'm so rusty. ;)
I'll be writing more regularly again so hopefully it'll be like riding a bike.
This is a great post. Having done Email Marketing using your own data to build client relationships is sound marketing strategy.
Keep the message short unique and to the point with the CTA. If you have a good CTA use it, but don't use Email marketing as your only option in the digital strategy Â
Having done quite a few emails for my company. I have found that the one spam filter that catches us consistently (and is nearly impossible to get past) is Bayesian spam filters.
Paul Graham tells about how the filter works and why it is so effective:
https://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
https://www.paulgraham.com/better.html
I head you get more people to open your e-mails by asking a question. Have you ever tested this theory? pun intended...