Max­im­ize your email mar­ket­ing out­put

Pub­lished on 01.07.2022

Email is an old hand on the In­ter­net and most com­pan­ies have in­teg­rated email mar­ket­ing—usu­ally via a reg­u­lar news­let­ter—into their com­mu­nic­a­tions for years. Once set up, this often runs without much at­ten­tion, pos­sibly even throws off a sat­is­fact­ory ROI or is simply seen as a must. Wrongly, in our opin­ion: As the chan­nel with the po­ten­tially highest ROI, email mar­ket­ing de­serves an extra por­tion of at­ten­tion. With op­tim­ized lists, tailored con­tent, a re­vised lay­out and A/B tests, you can get much more out of this chan­nel than it seems at first glance. We show you how to get your email mar­ket­ing strategy up to speed.

E-​Mail Mar­ket­ing: The Ba­sics

People send 200 bil­lion e-​mails every day, yet many com­pan­ies con­sider e-​mail to be the “hid­den cham­pion” among the vari­ous means of com­mu­nic­a­tion. Business-​to-​business com­pan­ies in par­tic­u­lar pay little at­ten­tion to this mar­ket­ing op­por­tun­ity. Yet e-​mail can also en­rich the mar­ket­ing mix of B2B com­pan­ies—at least if the con­tent gen­er­ates real added value for the re­cip­i­ents.

 

What makes e-​mail suc­cess­ful as a mar­ket­ing tool in the first place?

E-​mail mar­ket­ing works based on ex­ist­ing ad­dress data, for ex­ample, from cus­tom­ers or people in­ter­ested in the com­pany. There­fore, mar­keters can tailor con­tent to tar­get groups pre­cisely, which makes the rel­ev­ance of the con­tent very high com­pared to other ad­vert­ising media.

In ad­di­tion, e-​mail mar­ket­ing is flex­ible and there­fore super suit­able for a test-​and-​learn ap­proach: For ex­ample, you can test dif­fer­ent sub­ject lines or con­tent against each other within a cam­paign. Proper track­ing also provides in­sights for con­tinu­ous im­prove­ment of fu­ture mar­ket­ing e-​mails. Find­ing out which per­son­al­ized ele­ments have the greatest im­pact on a par­tic­u­lar audi­ence in an e-​mail be­comes re­l­at­ively easy.

 

Plan and im­ple­ment an e-​mail mar­ket­ing cam­paign: Here’s what to con­sider

Be­fore im­ple­ment­ing an e-​mail mar­ket­ing cam­paign, there should be agree­ment on what the pur­poses are and what the use cases are. Two ex­amples:

  • E-​mail push cam­paigns: Push cam­paigns refer to the clas­sic send­ing of e-​mail news­let­ters that pur­sue a pre­defined goal. This can be a one-​time mail­ing or a string of sev­eral mail­ings.
  • Drip mar­ket­ing: Drip mar­ket­ing is the send­ing of e-​mails that are auto­mat­ic­ally triggered by a cer­tain ac­tion by the user. In B2B, for ex­ample, this could be a con­firm­a­tion e-​mail for a we­binar re­gis­tra­tion.

In the fol­low­ing best prac­tice ex­ample, you will learn how to use a push cam­paign to bring users to your own web­site to trig­ger a cer­tain ac­tion there. The step-​by-​step guide is based on a pro­ject that Webre­pub­lic im­ple­men­ted for the in­ter­na­tional med tech com­pany Nobel Biocare.

Step 1: Ob­ject­ive and plan­ning

In the plan­ning phase, we re­com­mend start­ing with the over­all con­text and cam­paign goal and de­fin­ing pre­cise ob­ject­ives for each in­di­vidual e-​mail: What is the pur­pose of the cam­paign over­all, what is the pur­pose of each in­di­vidual e-​mail, and how will we meas­ure suc­cess?

In our col­lab­or­a­tion with Nobel Biocare, we pur­sued the goals of gen­er­at­ing aware­ness for the All-​on-​4® treat­ment concept and re­gis­tra­tions for a global we­binar series on the product. In the be­gin­ning, we made sure we could meas­ure and op­tim­ize the key per­form­ance in­dic­at­ors (KPIs) along the user jour­ney.

Step 2: Seg­ment­a­tion and qual­ity of the ad­dress lists

In a fur­ther step, we re­com­mend check­ing the data qual­ity of the ex­ist­ing ad­dress lists: What in­form­a­tion do the ex­ist­ing ad­dress lists offer? Do the data re­cords allow per­son­al­ized ad­dress­ing? Can the ex­ist­ing e-​mail data be as­signed to dif­fer­ent user per­so­nas? Is it pos­sible to see which in­terests or top­ics are linked to a par­tic­u­lar e-​mail ad­dress?

In short, the qual­ity and scope of the avail­able data de­term­ine how suc­cess­ful an e-​mail cam­paign can be and how in­di­vidu­al­ized the con­tent can be.

One way to clean up data and thus in­crease the qual­ity of ad­dress lists is to send re-​opt-​ins. With this you act­ively re­quest re­cip­i­ents to give their con­sent again to re­ceive mar­ket­ing e-​mails. At the same time, you can re­quest in­terests and other in­form­a­tion to bet­ter seg­ment ad­dress lists for fu­ture cam­paigns.

Step 3: Defin­i­tion of the user jour­ney

How many e-​mail pushes make sense is one of the most com­mon ques­tions in e-​mail mar­ket­ing. Should sev­eral pushes over a short period ‌convince read­ers to make the de­sired con­ver­sion? Or do monthly e-​mails over a longer period serve the cause more?

There is no single an­swer to this ques­tion, but the in­ten­ded storyline usu­ally sets the tone. Is it about pro­mot­ing a new product? Should you first tease the product (aware­ness), then ad­vert­ise the ad­vant­ages in de­tail (at­trac­tion), and fi­nally call to ac­tion (con­ver­sion)?

Webre­pub­lic fol­lowed pre­cisely this three-​step ap­proach and guided users step by step to the de­sired con­ver­sion—re­gis­tra­tion for the we­binar—by means of three to four push e-​mails within a month be­fore the launch of the we­binar series.

Step 4: De­velop con­tent

With e-​mail, you can trans­port a wide vari­ety of con­tent dir­ectly to users’ per­sonal in­boxes. The pos­sib­il­it­ies range from clas­sic text con­tent (in­clud­ing quotes and testi­mo­ni­als) to sup­ple­ment­ary im­ages, an­im­a­tions, in­fograph­ics, check­lists, video­con­tent and other formats. When choos­ing the con­tent, the focus should al­ways be on the added value for the re­cip­i­ents.

Set­ting con­crete in­cent­ives, such as free down­loads, can sig­ni­fic­antly in­crease cam­paign per­form­ance. In the col­lab­or­a­tion between Webre­pub­lic and Nobel Biocare, for ex­ample, we achieved ex­cel­lent res­ults by send­ing a we­binar cer­ti­fic­ate. In­cent­ives in cam­paign e-​mails should al­ways be clearly com­mu­nic­ated and eas­ily ac­cess­ible.

But be­ware: Less is often more for news­let­ter con­tent. Only choose con­tent that is spe­cific­ally tailored to the defined tar­get. If the con­tent is too often the same, re­cip­i­ents will quickly lose sight of the added value and, in the worst case, your e-​mails will end up in the trash or are even can­celed.

Step 5: Lay­out and design

As with a good web­site, the user ex­per­i­ence (UX) and the dis­play on mo­bile devices are ab­so­lutely cru­cial to e-​mail mar­ket­ing. Ad­here to your com­pany’s ex­ist­ing CI/CD guidelines and to an ap­peal­ing visual lan­guage. The con­tent should al­ways be struc­tured in such a way that the user’s main focus is on the call-​to-​action. Be­sides im­ages, in our ex­ample for Nobel Biocare, icons and stick­ers also helped pre­pare the con­tent for the user in an ac­cess­ible form.

We de­signed each news­let­ter mod­ule to guide the re­cip­i­ent as seam­lessly as pos­sible to­ward con­ver­sion, be­sides the goal of en­sur­ing a nat­ural read­ing flow. Webre­pub­lic con­sist­ently took cur­rent UX best prac­tices into ac­count when design­ing the cam­paign.

Step 6: Mail­ing

You de­signed your cam­paign and are ready for it to travel to the in­boxes of your re­cip­i­ents? Then it’s time to send it ef­fi­ciently—with the help of a suit­able e-​mail mar­ket­ing tool. De­pend­ing on the size of the com­pany and its needs, vari­ous tools are avail­able for this pur­pose: Mailchimp, Hub­spot, and Drip are pop­u­lar tools for the ef­fi­cient send­ing of e-​mail cam­paigns. Whichever pro­vider you choose, for good per­form­ance con­sider a few points when send­ing:

  • For­mu­late a grip­ping sub­ject line: It should con­tain the most im­port­ant mes­sage of the e-​mail. To stand out from other sub­ject lines, the sub­ject may also be in­formal. Dir­ect ad­dresses, teas­ers, or un­con­ven­tional for­mu­la­tions are suit­able for this pur­pose. You can play al­tern­at­ive sub­ject lines against each other with A/B test­ing. Ideally, the sub­ject lines should dif­fer by a spe­cific char­ac­ter­istic, such as tone: formal vs. in­formal.
  • The tim­ing of the mail­ing is also key, with dif­fer­ent re­com­mend­a­tions de­pend­ing on the con­tent and tar­get audi­ence. In our ex­ample for Nobel Biocare, we saw above av­er­age open rates over lunch­time. Some e-​mail soft­ware of­fers the pos­sib­il­ity to adapt the send­ing to the re­cip­i­ent’s time zone, which we ‌recommend.

Step 7: Ana­lysis and re­port­ing

We re­com­mend eval­u­at­ing the per­form­ance of each in­di­vidual e-​mail push not only after it has been sent, but also dur­ing the on­go­ing cam­paign. In this way, you gen­er­ate in­sights ‌you can im­ple­ment for the next push in the short term. In­sights from the eval­u­ation can re­late to the fol­low­ing areas:

  • If you see high bounce rates or low de­liv­ery rates, this in­dic­ates poor qual­ity ad­dress data. The ad­dress data needs to be cleaned up. In ad­di­tion, try to ob­tain new high-​quality data, for ex­ample, through tar­geted lead cam­paigns.
  • Per­form­ance dif­fer­ences of vari­ous­sub­ject lines: Infer cri­teria that are par­tic­u­larly rel­ev­ant to your re­cip­i­ents.
  • Which mail­ing period works par­tic­u­larly well for your re­cip­i­ents?
  • Which CTA gen­er­ated the most clicks?
  • Which click­able ele­ments gen­er­ated the most clicks?
  • Which con­tent is ‌most in­ter­est­ing and per­forms well with your tar­get group?

Res­ults: Open and click-​through rates far above the bench­mark

Thanks to the con­sist­ent ap­plic­a­tion of the ap­proach de­scribed here, we re­cor­ded above-​average open and click rates in e-​mail cam­paigns for Nobel Biocare. Over the en­tire cam­paign dur­a­tion, we achieved a very high av­er­age open rate of 40% (in­dustry bench­mark: 20%), a click rate of 15% (in­dustry bench­mark: 3%), and a con­ver­sion rate (we­binar re­gis­tra­tions) of 5%.

If you want to be suc­cess­ful at e-​mail mar­ket­ing, you have to ‌put in the ef­fort of care­ful seg­ment­a­tion and pre­par­a­tion—es­pe­cially com­pan­ies that haven’t used an or­gan­ized strategy be­fore. The res­ults clearly show: The ef­fort is worth it. With struc­tured e-​mail mar­ket­ing, you can give your mar­ket­ing activ­it­ies a meas­ur­able boost. Once you define the ba­sics with the right strategy, a suit­able tool, and re­li­able per­form­ance meas­ure­ment, there’s noth­ing stand­ing in the way of a con­sist­ently high ROI.

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