However, it’s not all bad news for email. There’s so much you can do to engage an audience and drive the desired action. Make the most of this channel by ensuring the following: personalisation, measurement and sticking to a single-minded proposition.
If the recipient of your email has subscribed to hear from you, ensure you make the most of the information you have about them. Meaningful but non-intrusive personalisation is powerful. We continually see increased engagement and ROI through the use of relevant personalisation.
Recently, for one of our travel clients, we segmented their database to provide personalised imagery and copy based on that particular customer’s interests. Party composition (family, couples etc) would receive content relevant to them and so would peak and off-peak customers. Loyal customers also received special promotions to thank them for their loyalty. This personalised campaign is on track to double the target response rate of 4.8% (20% uplift from previous year) to 8%-10% by end of June 2018. ROI after the first month one of activity reached 587% (achieving over £1m of net revenue to date).
If you’re starting out on a new email campaign (perhaps as part of a wider omnichannel campaign), your email platform will likely provide a set of metrics for you, take time. Think about the metrics that are most important to you: did they open the email (Open Rate or OR) or click on the links or call to action (CTA) buttons? Does your provider measure click through rate CTR or perhaps click to open rate CTO? Also, a lot of us are guilty of ignoring the unsubscribe stats, more on that to follow.
Email engagement metrics can help inform future design and content decisions, which can lead to more effective email marketing campaigns. The more you can measure, the more effective your campaigns will become. One top tip is to not limit yourself by open rates as a metric of success, because it may not be a sign they are interested. Recipients could have a preview pane in their email, and then delete it before reading it. Instead, look at click through rates (CTR) (particularly those on the CTA) as a strong indicator of email communication success. Be sure to record your results so you can benchmark against future campaigns and keep on improving. It is also worth keeping an eye on your unsubscribes – the industry average is about 0.5%. If your unsubscribes are higher than this you may be too many emails or emails that your recipient is not finding useful. Refer back to section 1 – of how personalisation could better cater for your varied customer base.
The basic requirements for capturing the attention of any recipient are: clear, concise personalised copy; impactful imagery; and a compelling call to action. If you are selling something, it’s essential to create an offer the recipient will genuinely be interested in. If you want your recipient to do something (such as subscribe, buy a product or provide feedback), make your call to action clear and don’t dilute it with other messages. With our clients, there are often so many great things they want to talk about, however we encourage them to resist the temptation of putting them all in one email. Most recipients will only have time to take in one key message – ensure it’s the message you want set to know about and build consider the future customer journey for when other appropriate messages can be communicated.
So there you have it. Personalise, measure and stick to that single-minded proposition.
If you think you could do better with your email campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We will start with an audit of your current activity before providing strategic and creative recommendations to help you increase the performance of your email marketing.
Have a great day all!