How You Can Increase Email Marketing Engagement
Size Isn’t Everything
You might already know that building your email list is important by now. More and more popular business thought leaders are coming out and stressing the importance of building your email list every day.
Before, email marketing was kind of an area for hardcore nerds. (That, and landing pages.)
Now, even popular business thought leaders like Pat Flynn are not just talking about building a list being important, but they’re even putting out instructional content in that area.
This trend is important, so pay attention.
In the mid 2000’s email marketing was a little geeky, and most popular figures wouldn’t touch that topic with a ten foot pole.
So maybe you already know that building your list is an incredible way to create exponential growth in your business.
Don’t get me wrong, anywhere you can build an audience is great.
But when you build an audience on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or on any of these platforms you’re playing in their sandbox.
At any moment they can change the search algorithms and you’re sunk.
You’re not making any money today.
What would happen to your audience if Facebook ever went out of business for some reason?
That’s the risk you’re always taking every single time you’re building your audience on these platforms.
The platforms can be incredibly helpful for getting people’s initial attention, but to mitigate that risk of Facebook or whoever taking away the fruits of your labor you need to focus on moving that audience somewhere else.
That’s where email marketing comes in.
Taking your audience to email is taking them to your sandbox.
When you take your audience to email you can learn more about them. You can learn how to better severe them. You can learn who they even are!
But it’s not enough to just have a list.
You could buy a list of 20,000 email addresses for $1 a piece from somebody today, and still have wasted every single penny if these people don’t engage with you at all.
It’s normal for open rate to go down as the list size goes up, but of 0 out of 20,000 people open your email then you’re sunk.
You’re not making any money today either.
So we’re going to go over a couple of thoughts on how you can turn your focus towards building an engaged email list, instead of just a large one.
You’ve GOT to send them more emails!
Sending your list more emails increases their engagement because of something called attentional bias. Our decisions have a tendency to be affected by recurring thoughts.
Imagine you’re at the grocery store and you’re shopping for orange juice.
You’re in the refrigerated section and you’re looking at Brand A (OJ) and Brand B (Orange Burst).
Maybe you’ve seen a lot of Orange Burst’s advertising over the years, say they’re a larger locally based company.
If you’ve seen Orange Burst’s brand 20 times and OJ’s brand only 5 times, then you’re more likely to buy Orange Burst.
Oh, and you’ll never even consider Brand Z (Oringina) because you’ve never seen it before.
I think some business owners are afraid of “bothering” their email lists.
“Won’t they get annoyed if I email them too much?”
Yes they will, but you’d be surprised how often you can email them before it’s too much.
What maybe freaks you out is that there’s an inverse relationship between sending more emails and open rates.
It’s really scary to see those open rates go down!
But if you have a list of, say, 2,000 people and doubling your send rates only causes your open rates to go down by 15%, then you’re still wayyy better off!
So don’t let a decrease in open rates scare you.
What you need to be looking for is an increase in sales.
How can sending more emails grow my business?
This graph comes from AlchemyWorx and tracks all donations over $250 made during the 2012 US Presidential Elections to both the Obama and Romney campaigns. It’s plotted out against the corresponding weekly email send volumes for the 29 weeks leading up to the election.
The graphs tells the whole story.
You’d be surprised how often you can email your list until it actually bothers them.
The data is incredibly interesting when you look deeper into it too.
Here is another graph that plots the Obama campaign’s send volumes and open rates against the annual donations:
The correlation between send volume and $$$ donated is unquestionable.
Surprisingly, the relationships between open rates and donations is an inverse one!
The more emails you send, the lower your open rate is going to be.
Instead of thinking of it as an “email”, think of each email you send as an “opportunity to buy”.
“People can’t engage with an email they don’t receive. [So sending] ‘an extra email send to 1 million people’ becomes, ‘let’s send another 1 million opportunities to donate’.” — AlchemyWorx
For the complete picture, look at this third graph that compares the send volumes and open rates for both campaigns in the two month run-up during the elections:
Take special note of the correlation between send volumes and probability to win.
Attentional bias, how we choose orange juice and presidents.
So frequency had the most impact on donations.
That sweet spot for email send frequency seems to be between 16 to 30 emails.
How can I make sending 16–30 emails easier?
It can be hard to find the time to find the time to write 16–30 emails every month. That’s why a lot of business owners hire a copywriter to handle that for them.
One tip that makes creating that much content easier is to batch process it.
Instead of trying to write 1 email every other day, or every day, you should plan a month of emails at once.
So when you’re getting to the end of, say, July you should brainstorm 16–30 topics to write on.
You can divide up the work however you like, but I like to tackle it in weekly chunks.
Then on Sunday (or whenever you want really) you would just sit down for a couple of hours and bang out all of the emails for that week.
I find that more manageable than trying to leave it until the last minute, and I try to do something similar with my blogs.
Don’t feel pressure to send 30 emails unless you need to, but some people are trying to increase engagement by 25% in 1 month when you’re only SENDING 1 email per month!
If you want to increase click throughs and opens you’re going to have to start with emailing them more first.
Something else that can help is to create an autoresponder, which I go into A LOT more detail about doing here.
What You Absolutely Need to Know About Email Marketing
Business Strategies, Email Marketing / 2024-12-08 / by Jamie THE MARKETING NERD
To create an engaged audience, it’s particularly important to have a high email frequency when someone first joins your list.
It’s difficult to re-engage people who have dropped off, so an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Always Be Testing
Messaging is what sells products, or generates donations.
An important part of messaging is delivering the right one to the right group.
Here’s an example of a real live client-facing email that escaped from Starbucks’ marketing team’s grasp:
This was an email that went out to Starbucks Loyalty Card holders.
… Do you see the problem here?
Read the underlined section. Heck, read all of it really!
Our “brand identity” reflects wanting to “serve and connect with our customers”?
Does that make you feel served and connected to?
No!
You have to figure out what messaging works best for your list. (And it’s definitely not this corporate speak.)
That’s where split testing comes in.
The key to the Obama campaign’s success in generating donations came from a rigorous regimen of testing content and subject lines day after day on a national scale.
They wrote 4–6 drafts (well, whittled it down to 4–6) of the email content and 12–18 subject lines. Per email!
Now, of course you need a really huge list to justify that level of multivariate testing.
But I want you to appreciate these numbers.
These were created every day, and sometimes several times a day by a team of only 20 writers.
A list with literally MILLIONS of subscribers shoots for 4–6 drafts and 12–18 subject lines.
That may sound overwhelming to you, of course because you’re only one person... But I want it to give you hope.
Winning a national election only involves 12–18 subject lines. So you can comfortably shoot for 1–2 ideas, even 3 if you’re feeling fancy and want to pick the best.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of what your audience wants to hear try split testing the content. Even 2 versions is plenty, especially for a list under 1,000.
If you have a list with tens of thousands of people you may want to focus more on split testing content rather than subject lines.
Why Am I Testing?
Ultimately you want to segment your list into different groups of people by their characteristics.
The data clearly shows that the delivery of customized messages through segmentation was another clear driver of the Obama campaign’s email marketing success.
The major segments of their list were:
Previous donors — The team sent unique messages to people who donated previously in the 2012 election.
Quick donors — This was a sub-group of the previous donors. These people saved their payment information and received quick-donation links in their emails.
Non-donors — A large chunk of the audience received the campaign’s emails but they had never donated.
Lapsed donors — The team also tailored messages to people who had donated to Obama for America in 2008 but who had not yet donated in 2012.
What does that mean for you and your business?
Again, I want it to inspire hope and confidence in you.
I want you to see that even a national email marketing campaign only used 4 segments consistently.
Some people get nervous about segmenting their groups, and you shouldn’t!
You can get by just fine by focusing your segmentation on a few categories:
- Previous Customers
- Non-Customers
- Lapsed Customers
Unless you have a list of tens of thousands, it really doesn’t need to be more complicated than this.
The lapsed customer bucket will mean different things to different industries. If you’re TOTALLY not sure, then a good rule of thumb is that if they haven’t purchased from you in over a year they’re lapsed.
If your company is a product that gets used over time, like coffee or shampoo, then you may want to shorten that to a cycle of a few months. Or even only 2.
If your company is something like an app, you may want to base lapse determinations off of the last time they’ve logged into your product — and that would be a matter of 3 weeks at most, if not an even shorter window.
Customizing messaging to even these 3 simple groups has been proven to increase email engagement all day long.