For every £1 spent on email marketing, £44.25 is the average return on investment, with 82% of consumers opening emails from companies. This year alone there are approximately 3.6 billion email accounts, by 2016 this number will reach 4.3 billion.
When email marketing is used effectively, the results can be fantastic. Which is why in the latest episode of Coast TV, Online Marketing Executive, Sam Knott explains the 5 reasons why she is not engaging with your emails, and gives tips on how you can improve them. If you have any questions or feedback then we’d love to hear it in the comments below!
Video Transcription
Hello and welcome to another edition of Coast TV. I’m Samantha Knott, I’m an online marketing executive here at Coast, and I’m here today to talk to you about Email marketing. The topic of today’s video is ‘5 Reasons Why I’m Not Engaging With Your Emails’.
So number 1 is ‘I didn’t opt in’ – Now I’ve had clients come to me in the past and ask for my opinion on buying lists for email marketing. I have to be honest and say it’s not something that I’m a big fan of. I do try and steer people away from the idea of buying in lists, purely because in the past my experience hasn’t been that great – poor data has resulted in poor deliverability, high bounce rates and high unsubscribe rates and also high complaint rates, so what I really try and encourage my clients to do is really focus efforts on those lists of customers that you’ve built up yourselves over the past few years. So whether that’s people that have bought products from you, they’ve downloaded a whitepaper, maybe they’ve requested a demo of your product, and they’ve given you permission to email them, then these are the people that you really want to focus on sending your emails to, this is your most valuable list to your business and these are people that have expressed interest in hearing from you, so I do really encourage you to focus your efforts on these lists.
Number 2 is ‘the content isn’t relevant’ – now I’ve got a good example to illustrate this point. I bought a pair of hair straighteners about a month ago, and about a week after my purchase I got an email from that same business promoting the same brand of hair straighteners to me and it left me wondering why I’d got this email when I’d purchased that product a week ago. The best thing for them to have done would have been to email me thanking me for my purchase and trying to cross-sell me some relevant products such as hair styling products that they know I’d be interested in. So sending relevant content is really key in keeping users engaged with your emails and there’s a number of ways that you can ensure that the content you’re sending users is relevant. Segment your lists based on purchase behaviour, gender, location, that kind of thing, and combine it with a preference centre that you implement in your email marketing program. So include a link in all of your emails directing users to a preference centre where they can tell you what their interests are, what they want to hear about, and combine that with the information in your CRM system to build a really good profile of your user so that you can send them relevant content.
Number 3 is ‘too many emails’ – I don’t want to be bombarded with emails from you! If you send too many emails to me then I’m rapidly going to lose interest and I’m not going to open those emails. So you need to figure out what frequency works best for you. So do a bit of testing – do people respond well to weekly emails? Is a monthly newsletter better for you? And again direct users to a preference centre where they can tell you how often they want to hear from you. They might be happy to receive a ‘deal of the day’ every single day, or they might just want to hear from you once a month or once a week. So do a bit of testing, and also let users determine how often they want to hear from you.
And the 4th point is ‘subject lines’, and this is really key in getting people to open your email – a good subject line needs to be relevant, it needs to be engaging, enticing, and give me a reason to open your email. Tease a little bit of the email content – what can I expect to find in the email? Set expectations at this point and look at ways you can stand out in the inbox, so try a bit of personalisation, see if that works for you. Maybe try symbols in subject lines, see how that works for you, do a little bit of testing and think about including a call to action in your subject line such is a question which engages the user and encourages them to want to open that email.f
And the last point is ‘no call to action’ – don’t make it difficult for me to find out how I can take advantage of this really good offer you’ve sent me. So you’ve sent me an email, it’s great and I want to take advantage of whatever it is you’re promoting to me, what do I need to do next? So make the calls to action really obvious. Underline your links, make it obvious what I need to do to click through to your site. You’d be surprised how many emails I see where the calls to action are really poor and it’s not obvious where I need to click – it sounds really simple, but make sure that your calls to action are really obvious and make it easy for users to figure out what they need to do.
So that’s the 5 points covered there – you can take these away and implement them pretty much straight away, they’re easy, straightforward things to do. If you have any comments or questions then please feel free to leave them in the comments box below, or send us a tweet @CoastDigital, and we’ll see you again soon!