Most
marketers measure their email
newsletters in terms of the amount of opens
& clicks they can generate. These stats tells us how
well our email
newsletters might be performing but to understand
why something might not be here are some suggestions:
Frequency
Are you bombarding your customers with too many emails?
This is a common problem where you have seen response rates
drop over a period of time.
Content
Are your offers and articles appealing enough? How does
your content compare to the competition?
Relevancy
This is the biggest problem with most email
newsletters and another reason why you may
see results drop over time. If the emails you send through
have nothing relevant for a recipient why would they click-thru!
Relevancy can be resolved in a number of ways including
sending to segments of your database each time rather than
the whole list, using past email behavior to determine interest
and using tailored content blocks or dynamic content by
using a solution such as Maxemail.
Deliverability
Quite simply if your emails are not getting into the inbox
or being labelled as junk it does not take a genius to work
out that fewer people will open the email and even fewer
will click-thru. Take proactive steps by ensuring your email
provider is whitelisted and not blacklisted and that your
email has been scored in a spam
checking tool. If you are sending from an in-house
system you may find that an outsourced email
newsletter software solution will improve your
deliverability.
Rendering
Many email newsletters land in our web-based email clients
inbox looking mangled. Not only does it look unprofessional
it is also difficult to read and hence less likely for the
reader to be able to find something worth clicking on. Make
sure you are not having these issues by reviewing our HTML
for emails guide.
Data
Collection
How 'opted-in' are members of your list? Those that might
have subscribed while entering a competition are less likely
to be responsive as those that pro-actively requested your
information hence you will see this come through in your
campaign stats.
Email
creative
In particular what you should look at here would include:
- Call-to-actions
- are they obvious?
- Does
you message take into account the preview pane and the
fact that the top 300 pixels are the most important
- What
does your email look like with image blocking enabled?
