The Potential Behind eNewsletters – Part 3: Results & Timings
To recap on the origins of these articles in the first place: a friend decided to work with me on a recent email marketing plan and I took the opportunity to try some variance testing on the email campaign, to see if we could get some definite trends and strategies in place for his 2009 campaigns.
The two main questions I was trying to answer for him were:
1. Should we use a “sales” email or just a straight eNewsletter for promotion?
2. How often should we be emailing his database?
The results clearly showed some useful and key information for him.
1. Sales email vs eNewsletter
For this test we took a % of the database and split them into two groups, one group would receive a sales email and the other would receive a standard eNewsletter.
The sales email was a dedicated HTML mail highlighting the products and services on offer and pushing click-thru’s to the website, while the eNewsletter carried general company info and news, while displaying promotional banners to show the products and services. These were placed in key hotspots within the eNewsletter.
Results:
- Prior to the first email broadcast, daily visitors were in the hundreds
- The first eNewsletter jumped visits to 2,887
- The first sales email went higher and recorded 3,996 visits
- The visits were always higher for the sales emails
- On average the sales email was producing between a 40% and 60% chance of an actual sale through the site, whereas the eNewsletter was lower at around 25% to 30%
Conclusions:
- There are merits to both these types of email and my recommendation would be to employ both if you have the time and resources
- Direct sales messages (if done correctly) proved to increase not only click-thru’s to the site but actual sales as well
- eNewsletters are more suited to the wordier format and general information, whereas the sales emails were short, sharp and punchy
2. Frequency of sending emails
We took a % of the database and split them into 10 groups. Group 1 would receive 1 email message, group 2 got 2 email messages, group 3 got 3 and so on. We slightly modified each email to provide new information, ensuring they remained fresh and unique.
We were trying to determine:
- What is the point at which complaints would start coming in from recipients annoyed at getting too many email follow-ups?
- What is the point at which response would fall off to the extent it makes no sense to continue mailing and incurring bandwidth and operational costs?
- What is the point at which the number of unsubscribes would become too significant to ignore?
Results:
o Mailing 1 = 61% sales
o Mailing 2 = 14% sales
o Mailing 3 = 10% sales
o Mailing 4 = 10% sales
o Mailing 5 = 8% sales
o Mailing 6 = 15% sales
o Mailing 7+ = response rate fall off
Conclusions:
- Customers could be emailed an optimal number of 6 times before the response rate fell
- Customers may not be able to respond to the first few emails, so it pays to keep working (if we hadn’t tested, we would have lost a lot of sales from Mailing 6 which was the 2nd highest sales result)
- Unsubscribes were extremely minimal
- Complaints were virtually non-existent
Overall View
Timing influences just about everything we do and it’s vital in email campaigns.
If you have something of importance for your list, you should tell them as fast as possible, if you are doing business online and have news of value to customers, they will want to hear it – that is the reason they signed up in the first place.
Vital information needs to be sent. Fear of getting flamed [define] comes from fear of not having anything of value in the email. Emailing a list whenever news they will deem important becomes available is highly imperative, if this means everyday then so be it.
To reiterate again: Fear of getting flamed comes from fear of not having anything of value in the email.
- Think about the Reach vs. frequency issue – would you rather reach 100% and convince 10% or reach 10% and convince all of them? Retention fades with sleep, repetition has its rewards
- Look at what time customers place orders and are most active on the website, then synch mailings accordingly
- Rich media is going to work better during Internet prime time hours (usually office hours). That’s where the bandwidth and mind share is
- Promotions about hobbies, things to share with the kids, holidays etc. these are leisure time decisions. You will want these messages arriving when recipients are more likely to spend quality time considering them
I hope this has helped everyone!
Thanks,
Tony
