Now that you have started growing your contact list for your email marketing campaigns, another point I would like to share is that email marketing is an ongoing process. Your ultimate goal is not just to increase the number of messages going out, but to increase the number of interactions.
One of the most significant features of email marketing the ability to immediately determine the success of your messaging by seeing exactly how recipients interacted with your email. You are able to determine who opened your email and what they clicked on. Every email campaign you send out generates a host of actionable data you can use to refine your approach and messages.
To find out what works best for your target audience, break your email list into two random groups. Then select one concept to test in each campaign, such as the day of the week to send out your messages. Keep everything the same in your messaging except for the item you are testing. In the example of testing the day of the week, send the exact same email to both groups but on two different days. Then see which day resulted in getting the most opened emails. Continue to use this same method to test other things like subject line messaging, the use of images, and placement and wordsmithing of links and downloads.
I recently tested the concept of including images in one of my newsletters. I sent the exact same content to two different groups of recipients; only in the second one I included an eye-catching image along with the heading for each topic in the newsletter. The results were fascinating. The percentage of those who opened the email that clicked on a link was 40% higher from the email with the images. These test results reminded me of the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words.” It showed that incorporating a related image in my emails may be more influential in soliciting a response than even the best written text.
This ability to continuously test content has made email one of the best marketing tools for companies today. And it is very important that you do not stop testing just because you found something that worked. Opinions and tastes change, your competition changes, and your recipient’s familiarity with your company and products change. Always being tapped into those changes will bring you the best chance for success.
Buying a list sounds very appealing. Easily “touching” tens or hundreds of thousand people with the click of a button sounds good. It’s so easy and that’s exactly the problem and why spam is an issue (81% of emails sent are spam). While I’ve heard success stories using purchased email lists, most businesses have very little or no success. Companies with strong brands tend to have the most success. If your brand is not well known, think twice before investing in a bulk email list.
I’ve worked with clients that bought an email list and none of them experienced success. According to SwiftPage, a respectable email campaign will have 30%+ open rate and 5%+ of those that open an email will click on one or more links. For example, if you send out a campaign to 10,000 people, 3,000 or more should open the email with 150+ of those people clicking on one or more links.
My experience with purchased email lists is significantly less – about 6 – 8% open rate and less than 1% click through rates. Whereas our clients that target existing customers and opt in contacts have open rates exceeding 40% and click through rates north of 10%.
The other problem you may encounter with a purchased email list is when people report your email as spam. People that don’t know you are much more likely to report your emails as spam. If a recipient of one of your email campaigns reports the message as spam, the recipient company’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) may block any future correspondence from your entire domain. This can be very costly, as it impacts not only marketing, but also sales, accounting and customer service — every piece of email communication.
Whether or not you purchase a bulk email list is your decision, however, I would not recommend it unless you have a strong brand – even then I’m not a fan of purchasing email lists. It’s a much better strategy to build your list organically. Start out targeting existing customers and people you know. Every month, ask each sales and marketing person to get permission to send emails to 5 people. If you have 10 sales and marketing people, that’s 600 new contacts each year.
Companies with successful email marketing campaigns know their buyers before they send their first email. If you are using email marketing to drive sales, it’s important to understand how well buyers understand your service.
If buyers understand your products and services very well, focus on why they should work with you (i.e. lower cost) rather than educating them about how your service can help them. They already know how it can help them. One of our clients generated $90k of new business in 3 months using this technique.
However, if buyers do not understand your service very well, your content should educate them on the problems your company is able to solve. Another client introduced a new financial service that he intended to sell to existing customers. He focused on educating customers on various aspects of finance positioning his company as an expert in this area. Within a year, sales soared.
Take the time to understand your audience before you start and open rates should increase over time. If you are just starting out with email marketing, take a few minutes to read Karl Ossentjuk’s, vice president of Comcast Business Class Services for Comcast Colorado, blog for his take on getting started.