The Two Easiest (and Most Overlooked) Ways to Improve E-mail Response

Your house list, customers and prospects who've eagerly asked to hear from you, is one of your most valuable marketing tools. But if an individual signed up to be on your e-mail list within the past 60 days, he is vastly more likely to open, click, and convert for additional offers than is someone who opted in more than two months ago. In fact, MarketingSherpa's research has determined that recency is one of the most significant factors in response rates.

(This makes sense–it's always been true for print direct mail names–but it's still good to know that real-world studies support this conclusion.)

So if you want a high-performing list, you must focus on two activities, aside from overall e-mail best practices:

1) Place an e-mail opt-in form near the top of your home page.
You should try to get as many as possible of the truly interested visitors to your Website to sign up for your list. Multiple site analytics and usability studies have shown two critical factors play into getting more sign-ups:

* Putting your e-mail offer above the fold, because the vast majority of visitors won't scroll down.

* Including an immediately visible form field for e-mail address rather than asking visitors to click on a hotlink or a button to go to another page to sign up.

This spring, MarketingSherpa's research team conducted two observational studies to determine how well typical marketers were following these two critical rules. The results were mixed. Of 100 e-commerce sites (such as Amazon.com) visited, 79% placed an e-mail registration form above the fold on their home page.

But of 200 online publisher's sites (such as WSJ.com) visited, a mere 49% placed an e-mail sign-up offer above the fold — and of those only one in four used a form. The others simply gave a hotlink to click on to sign up. Given that online publishers depend commercially on the strength of their e-mail lists, these results are fairly pitiful.

2) Send all newbies a special welcome.
As noted above, multiple MarketingSherpa-partnered studies have found that new names are far more involved in your e-mail than are folks who've been on your list for a while. So a best practice would be to take advantage of this heightened interest by sending the new names something special.

Some companies, such as Dutch Gardens, send a special “welcome” promotional offer as soon as a new shopper signs up. Other companies, such as Travelocity, send a carefully crafted series of welcoming messages, all designed to convert a new opt-in into a faithful customer. We've got anecdotal evidence showing these sorts of new-subscriber campaigns do extraordinarily well.

So for our two studies this spring, we signed up for e-mail at the 100 e-commerce sites and 200 online publishers sites and then watched our research mailbox to see what would arrive. Sadly — and somewhat shockingly — very little did.

Only 3% of the e-commerce sites we signed up at sent us anything with a promotional offer (defined as a sale, a product offer, or a newsletter). Another 71% sent some type of nonpromotional form letter, often a subscription confirmation or a text-only thank-you note with no offer or engaging links. The remaining 26% sent us absolutely nothing at all for at least 14 days, if not longer.

The 200 online publishing sites we tested had extremely similar numbers. Three-quarters sent us some type of welcoming note — but it was a weak effort, a "you have been subscribed" form message with no other involvement device to bring the recipient back to the site, and back to interacting with the brand right away.

My suggestion based on this evidence? Go to your own site(s) and sign up for e-mail. Then watch what arrives in your inbox. See if it would move you to take action, to buy something, to read something, to return to your site…

If it would not (or if nothing arrives at all), then task your e-mail creative team with creating, testing, and tracking the results of a welcome series that is more powerful. And then sit back smiling at the comforting knowledge that you're probably five steps ahead of your competition by doing so.

Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing case studies and benchmark data for its 173,000 marketing and advertising executive subscribers. For a copy of the E-mail Marketing Benchmark Guide, go to www.sherpastore.com/Email-Marketing-Benchmarks-Conversion-Data-2006.html?8966.

© MarketingSherpa, Inc. 2006