I am not hung over, but I am definitely a little tired after partying the night away with this year’s MarketingSherpa Email Awards Winners at our gala in Miami. (You can see who won plus inspirational creative samples at the link on the bottom of the page.)
Aside from the fact that these people can dance, what else did I learn while judging the more than 250 entries in this year’s competition? Three things every e-mail marketer should be testing:
1) Tiny lists = big sales
Segmentation, segmentation, segmentation. Oh, my. Awards were based nearly solely on results (judges also reviewed strategy and then creative for tie-breakers), so you know winners had the best opens, the best clicks, and/or the best conversions. What blew me away time after time was when a tiny little list — perhaps a couple of thousand names — would beat previously much bigger list campaigns in terms of total overall sales or registered prospects. (Not just higher percent response rate, but higher total responses.)
For example, one award-winning British b-to-b marketer took his campaign clickthroughs from 6% clickthrough up to 46% clickthroughs by segmenting his list into loads of engineering niches.
For most marketers I know, segmentation is tough because you simply don’t have the staff time to handle it. Each campaign — including list selection, copy, HTML, scheduling, and measuring on the back end — is taking at least five hours, maybe eight, maybe longer. So it’s easy to say segment but hard to implement it.
Therefore, if you’re going to send only one special segment, make it a triggered campaign, some type of autoresponder that you can create, test, and then leave in place throughout the year without any additional work on your end. This might be a special welcome to all new opt-ins or a special offer to first-time buyers or an automated birthday campaign. Triggers at special points in a prospect or customer’s account lifecycle with your brand seem to work the best.
Or you should segment for your biggest time of year, putting your effort into the time that will make the biggest impact on the bottom line. For b-to-b marketers, this might be first quarter so that resulting sales have enough time to wend their way through the cycle. For b-to-c marketers, it might be in the holiday season.
Best idea for holiday segmentation tests came from Sprint, which sent historically frequent clickers more e-mailed offers this past November and December than it sent less frequent clickers. It worked. Sprint’s biggest fans were delighted to get more offers, while its moderate fans were happy to get just an e-mail or two when it really mattered.
2) Try content that’s not articles
The Internet stopped being text only eons ago, and now for most demographics your customers are on high-speed connections. So why are so many e-mail newsletters still offering nothing but articles?
If you produce a newsletter for marketing purposes, consider offering content that’s not just more reading for your subscribers. You might try an audio file, a checklist, a photo, a quiz, a video — you name it. The data I’m seeing suggest many “readers” are delighted and even relieved to get different types of content. (Okay, I’m saying this in an article; oh, the irony.)
3) Prelaunch mail opt-ins
Several marketers had incredible results from posting an opt-in offer on their Website a few months or weeks before a big product launch. Anyone who wanted more info could sign up. Then comes the day of the launch, and they send a special note to those opt-ins. Gangbuster sales every time.
The Automobile Association of America was just one of the brands that tested this to win an award this year.
Do you already have a normal opt-in offer on your home page that you don’t want to displace for the launch special? No problem; just add the launch notification offer to your thank-you page that appears right after folks opt in. They can check the box and click “go” or “subscribe” one more time to get on that list too.
Give them the power to ask for information; they will respond if they want it. And your bottom line will benefit.
Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing case studies and benchmark data for its 237,000 marketing executive subscribers. To view the 2007 Email Awards Winners, including campaign notes and creative samples, go to the online gallery at: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29889
© MarketingSherpa, Inc. 2007
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