In this chapter:
• Using email to promote thought leadership
• Email must-haves
• A/B testing for email
• Tracking email results
Now you have your website section for thought leadership as well as your optimized landing pages for campaigns. The next step is to create campaigns to drive interest. In this section, we’ll profile emails. Subsequent chapters will look at social media, paid search, and search engine optimization.
Email remains an important channel for acquiring, nurturing, and retaining leads. Here are some best practices in email creation and subject line testing you should always use:
• Present simple messages with no more than one call to action. Studies have shown that offering users, whether consumer or B2B, too many choices suppresses responses. Users report feeling overloaded by information today. Your email layout should be clean, streamlined, and easy to digest. Don’t make your user do too much work in deciphering it.
• Test subject lines. Make sure they are relevant to the content but catchy. Some research suggests that shorter subject lines yield higher open rates but longer subject lines increase click-through rates. Usually click-through is more important because an open without a click is not a lead. But if your goal is strictly brand awareness, shorter, punctuated subject lines may be best.
• Test different email content with distinct segments. You may decide to have two to four versions of a mailing with varying content. For example, you may want targeted versions for different industries or personas if those differences are relevant to the information you are presenting.
• For consumer audiences, consider asking for user-generated content such as reviews, stories, contests, and other interactive devices.
Four email must-haves
Never send an email without these four features:
1. An opt-out or unsubscribe option: You should have clear contact information on the footer.
2. A statement on privacy or a link to your privacy policy: Your privacy policy should cover what information your company collects online, how it uses this information, how your company shares it, and how your company safeguards it. Make sure to include user options for opting out of emails and disabling cookies.
3. Social media icons for easy sharing
4. Dynamic personalization: To make your emails more customized, consider dynamic personalization, in which some content is generated by what is known about the recipient. For example, users who have downloaded a report but not attended a conference could receive an email with an offer for another webinar sign-up. This can be an effective way of nurturing leads. Marketing automation tools can assist with this process.
A/B testing for email
Creative decisions will often require subjective judgments. The best way to determine the course of action is through A/B testing. Vary one item and test to see which version performs better. Good candidates for testing include subject lines, headlines, calls to action, or a creative element like colors or font size.
Testing isn’t effective unless you ensure a random selection of the population you are testing. You want to ensure that any differences are caused by the variable (subject line, creative element, etc.) and not by differences among the recipients. Many marketing automation tools include list-building features to randomly select nonbiased samples.
Another element you must test is the optimal sending time for emails. You may find the results surprising. Are weekdays or weekends better? Which part of the day? During the commute or the workday? Which days in particular?
Much of the answer will depend on whether you are reaching consumers or B2B customers. But with mobile usage accounting for a high percentage of email opens, the best times for users to receive messages are changing, so testing is needed. You may even segment your list by optimal times.
Tracking email results
Once you have deployed your campaign, you will want to track it. You need to measure three main factors:
• Engagement: What percentage opened the email (number of opens per number of impressions)? What percentage clicked on the email (number of clicks per number of impressions)? A more telling metric is the click-to-open rate (number of clicks per number of opens)?
• Conversion: Did the email recipient respond to the offer? Every email should ask the user to take an action—to purchase a product, sign up for a webinar, or fill out a form and download a report. The key metric is conversion rate (number of conversions per number of impressions) and conversion to click-through rate (number of conversions per number of click-throughs). You can track this with the goal function on Google Analytics.
• Reach: What percentage of the emails reached the recipients? There are two kinds of failure notices: hard bounces and soft bounces.
Hard bounces are permanent. The email will never reach the recipient for a number of reasons. The domain may not exist, the email address may be wrong, or the email address may have been terminated. If a recipient leaves a company, for example, usually the email will hard-bounce.
Soft bounces are temporary email delivery failures caused by out-of-office messages, full inboxes, or too large a file size. The good news with soft bounces is that if you resend the emails at another time, they should be delivered.
A hard bounce or several recurrences of soft bounces indicate an invalid email address, which your marketing automation tool can scrub from your list.
In order to track the success of your email campaign, you will need to create a unique identifier for each person who responds by adding a tracking link to the URL of the call to action. A tracking link is a tag added to the URL that identifies the user as well as other information such as the campaign name, source (which email offer), and date. Link tracking is crucial for tools like Google Analytics to show the sources of website traffic and conversions.
Through tracking and reporting, you can measure your results and adjust your future email campaigns. Which creative test versions and/or messaging yielded the best results? Each successive campaign should incorporate what you’ve learned for ongoing test-and-learn strategies.