Just about every email marketer, regardless of his company’s sector, could learn from group discounter Groupon, according to Jay Schwedelson. “Understanding what Groupon does will radically change all your email marketing,” the CEO of list and marketing firm Worldata said at the beginning of his session, “What’s Working Now 2010,” at the DMA: 2010 conference in San Francisco. “They have captured the very essence of email marketing.”
Groupon sends one email a day to members, offering a discounted product and service for one day only for a limited number of people. Its model is based on what Schwedelson declared the Internet is all about: exclusivity and limited availability. “People will buy when they think something will run out,” he said.
To take advantage of those factors in your own email marketing, Schwedelson advised including some sort of deadline in your subject line to create a sense of urgency. He found among the emails he analyzed that including wording along the lines of “2 Days to Buy” or “Offer Ends Sunday” boosts open rates an average of 29% in business-to-consumer emails and 24% in business-to-business messages.
Similarly, communicating a sense of exclusivity in subject lines (“Private Event,” “For Subscribers Only”) results in a 24% lift in open rates.
Despite the effectiveness of deadlines in subject lines and offers, however, 18% of all clickthroughs occur after the expiration date in the email, Schwedelson said, with that figure increasing to 22% among b-to-b recipients. Yet customers who respond after the deadline have a lifetime value almost double those who respond during the desired time frame. This is doubtless due to the fact that consumers who click through despite the expired deadline are especially interested in the offer or engaged with the brand. For that reason, he emphasized the importance of serving those respondents something other than a generic pop-up stating “Sorry, that offer has expired” or, worse, an error page.
Among other findings and suggestions:
· Mentioning Facebook in a subject line (“Favorites of Facebook Fans”) will increase open rates an average of 32%.
· “All in” emails, in which every link except the opt-out, privacy information, and other boilerplate info goes to the same landing page, typically have a 48% higher conversion rate than emails that distract the recipient by directing him to multiple pages and potential actions.
· A landing page that features the same primary image of the email that links to it will generate a 19% higher response rate than one that does not use the image.
