With a downturn in in the public’s buying habits, it can be difficult, and if not, then impossible, to instinctively identify specific reasons for low performance in email marketing. After all, low demand might be common across all your competitors. Then again, it might be something specific you could improve. How to work out which?
Whilst it might be indicative of my age, I’ve always thought that going back to basics has a lot going for it. The old ways used to work. There’s no reason to suspect they won’t work now.
The success of email marketing depends on delivery rates, open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, click rates, and actions after clicking through. There are other data points that should warn us of poor performance, but they all come under the six above. Attack each in sequence and you’ll crack it. Or rather, you’ll know if the problem lie0s with you or with the marketing environment in general. Even if it is the latter, you’ll be able to improve.
With low delivery rates, your email service provider will, er, provide solutions. If it’s something wrong with what you are doing, it will be easy to identify, and just as easy to correct. You will wonder why you didn’t do it before.
The solution to any problem with open rates is to test and test again. It’s easy to say, and in most aspects, easy to do. You should have the necessary skills as you should have been testing at every email marketing campaign. Ideas on what to test might concern you, but the solution is simple. Try something similar to your nearest successful competitor, everything from their From Name onwards.
Click-through rates is one of those metrics that has to be worked on all the time, for every email marketing campaign. If your subscriber has opened the email and doesn’t click through, accept that you have failed them. Ask yourself what they wanted, what they expected and why you didn’t supply it. Don’t blame other factors; it’s almost always internal. You probably know what I’m going to say, but here it is: test and test again.
Anything in the email can affect click-through rates: from colour of the background, through choice of typeface, to positioning of images. Even slight changes, say from Arial to Verdana, can have a measurable effect. Go, find out what you can improve on.
Low activity after clicking through is the most depressing problem. They are interested, they’ve shown you that, but something stopped them. It’s testing again, I’m afraid.
Unsubscribe rate is somewhat different to the problems above. The fault can lie with sending rates, both too often and too infrequently, or with the way you recruit subscribers to your email marketing list. Solutions to these and the other causes requires different methods, so it’s a question of testing all.
We’ll cover each specific in future articles, and probably mention testing a number of times, but it is the most dependable indication in email marketing of whether you are on the right lines.
