Email Marketing

In this marketing world where things are constantly evolving, it is quite important to stay on top of new trends, technology, research and best practices. As marketers, we are passionate about our industry and all the fast and challenging changes that come with it. When you start diving into the universe of marketing methods, it might be hard to wrap your head around the available information.

A good start would be to look at some of most common myths related to email marketing and try to better understand them.

Myth

1. Subscribers who have opted-in will always want to hear from you

Regardless of the methods you are using to grow your email marketing list, the most important is getting your subscriber’s permission. Of course, we are happy when we see people subscribing via forms on our website or blog, but this burst of happiness can decrease when we see that there is no engagement after a few months. Statistics show that 20%-25% of your email list will expire after a year since people get new jobs, change their email provider or a host of other reasons. Further, people tend to subscribe rapidly when you offer an incentive in exchange of their information. Subscribers who once took the time to fill out your form will most likely end up in your inactive users list.

The good news is that before they become inactive or even when they are, there are actions to be taken to either bring them back, on board, or to continue to harvest marketing awareness value out of them. Some of your customers will keep you top of mind by simply looking at your subject line. We’ll definitely go through all that, and other examples, in a future blog posts.

2. CAN-SPAM compliant = inbox

In spite of being fully CAN-SPAM compliant, your email might not land in your receiver’s inbox. The main reason might be your sender reputation. A lot of factors such as frequency, volume, hard bounce rate or spam trap hits make a significant difference, and that’s why it is important to monitor your campaigns. Your emails might also not reach inboxes because they are full or the email address is simply invalid – all items you can monitor and correct with the right visibility.

It is important to understand that in addition to being compliant, there is a lot to manage and improve upon to increase the likelihood of successful delivery.

3. The best time to send email is either on Tuesdays or Thursdays

The day all companies will sell the same product to the same type of customers with the same routine all over the world is when we might be able to define the perfect day and time to send an email. Every industry, every consumer, every product, every service has it’s own set of trends. It’s easy to say that deliverability in general is better on a certain day, but that simply may not be true for YOUR product or service. What is true, is that sending the right content to the right people at the right time will make a significant difference in your ROI. Thus, you absolutely need to test what works for your company and your customers. If you are starting email marketing, be patient and test different days of the week and times of the day. Depending on the size of your list and your email frequency, it will often take a few months of testing to get enough data to define the best combination of day/time in terms of engagement quality.

4. The most indicative email marketing metric is your open rate

The open rate happens to be one of the most misleading email marketing metrics for the simple reason that it is unreliable. Here are a few reasons why:

Because the open rate count happens when the graphic pixel inserted in your email is downloaded, a user that only has text format enable might read the email, but no open count will be registered. This happens with several email providers and it is frequent on mobile device. It might also be a personal preference.

Some emails might only be read in preview which won’t trigger the pixel download.

That being said, don’t completely disregard opens. The open rate is a useful comparative metric for A/B testing different subject lines for example. But if you want to report to the CEO on the effectiveness of your campaign, you can skip the open rate metric.

5. It is not recommended to send the same email more than once.

Why not? It is a low cost practice that can easily drives sales and engagement. We would recommend you take the time to slightly tweak the message with a new subject line, add a new banner, rotate the products or modify the hero image. But why spend time on writing and designing a piece that has been working? According to The State of the Email Marketing by Industry 2016 report from Get Response, an email marketing and online campaign management, the open rate average for all industries is 21.73%, which also means that 80% of your subscribers are not opening and could possibly open the next email you will send them. It’s worth the try, and the money and time saving!

6. Unsubscribes from my email list are bad

As much as it can be heartbreaking to see subscribers leaving you, keep in mind that this is part of a natural list cleanser and that you’ll always get new (and hopefully more) subscribers. As we saw previously, some people will only provide their email in exchange for a discount, or some people might realize that your product or service is not for them after sign-up. Again, simply keep in mind that a healthy unsubscribe rate should be under 1% and that it is better that someone unsubscribes instead of marking it as spam.

There are many other email marketing misconceptions out there and we will continue on this topic from time to time. If you have some in mind that would like for us to “de-myth-ify,” then simply leave a comment and share this post if you liked it!

How Purchased Email Lists Are Hurting Your Marketing Efforts

E-Marketing! We have to do more e-Marketing! It’s the key to our whole sales effort this month/quarter/year!

Sound familiar? E-mail based marketing has become a cornerstone of sales and branding efforts both large and small. It’s estimated that 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based solely on a promotional email. That’s nearly half the market. If you were to earn at least one additional sale from approximately every other person you emailed, that’d be well worth the time and effort, right?

The unfortunate truth is that it’s not quite so simple. Figures like the above are typically based on those consumers that have either opted-in to e-mail marketing, or have made previous purchases (thus setting up an account and providing an email), or have been targeted based on actual search and/or buying patterns. This is why marketing from a purchased email list often delivers lackluster performance and can even hinder the effectiveness of future e-marketing efforts.

Consider the following statistics gathered from a number of email subscriber studies conducted by ReturnPath, Ipost, and a number of other business experts.

17% of Americans create a new email account every 6 months
21% of recipients report email as Spam, even if they know it isn’t
80% of social network members report receiving unsolicited emails and offers

Why Does it Matter for Purchased Lists?

Let’s start at the beginning. Would you purchase anything for your business that had 17% missing? That’s essentially what happens with email lists containing outdated email addresses. And even for those emails that are current, one of the top reasons people change email addresses so frequently is to try and eliminate or avoid unsolicited marketing efforts. Even cautiously estimating another 8% drop off for such reasons means that you’re only getting three-quarters of the deliveries you’d want… and that assumes each recipient is an ideal prospect.

Which leads to the next two figures – if people aren’t carefully, organically added to your e-marketing lists, the odds are you’ll be spending a lot of time, money, and resources in the wrong direction. There is not a single product in the world that every person must have… that goes for food, clothing, home refinancing, entertainment, and even water. If your email list is assembled at random, then you have no way of honing in on what makes your customers tick, and more importantly, what makes them buy.

But I’ve been promise this list was compiled based on my specifications!
Yes, it’s true email list providers may promise such things, and they may even make an honest attempt at doing so. However, if culled from social media, search engines, and free-product-or-service sign-ups, the validity of that data is questionable at best.

I Need New Customers Now! I Can’t Wait to Grow a List!

Everyone can relate to being in a critical business situation where new sales are vital. Ask yourself though – at what cost? Spam has become such a divisive issue for email account holders that they’ve pushed ISPs and others to regulate e-mail marketing more strictly than you’d expect.

Did you know that email lists with 10% or more unknown users get only 44% of their email delivered? Were you aware that IP addresses appearing on just one of the 12 major email blacklists had email deliverability that was 25 points lower than IP addresses not on the blacklists?

Getting blacklisted means that your server has been digitally tagged for numerous reports of spam. Purchased email lists are one of the most common causes for blacklisting. And it’s not entirely simple to resolve. You may have to move to a new email server. You could be blocked from using email resources in a shared server environment. And you could get “released” from an email clearing house such as MailChimp or Constant Contact for failing to meet user guidelines regarding list validity.

Your internet reputation is at stake every time you use a purchased email list – and the results could mean substantial setbacks for future efforts. What happens the next time you need to make a push for more customers and your hands have been tied because you’re not able to access as many email resources for sending your campaigns and making sure they’re received.

So What Do I Do? You Kompani That

E-mail marketing is one of the essential components we suggest for businesses of all types and sizes. However, we take the approach of building your list through a variety of reliable, sustainable methods which include:

Opt-in pushes on your website and social-media outlets
Digital “switch” opportunities for moving paper/direct-mail communications to email
Drip campaign marketing for growing and expanding your list
Creating search engine optimized content for attracting new prospects to relevant subject matter and then encouraging opt-in sign up for future communications
“Share” campaigns and components included as part of all e-marketing efforts

It’s not the instant gratification that purchased lists promise, but rarely deliver. Rather, Kompani Group’s e-marketing approach is infinitely more satisfying in both the short-term and long-term with better results from day 1 onward.

Six email marketing myths we need to “de-myth-tify”