Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:58 pm
I am sure that like me you get dozens of unsolicited emails over the course of the day / week and this lead me to do a little bit of thinking and reading up on effective email marketing,
Almost everyone seems to think of emails as being like TV or radio ads in that you just broadcast your message to the masses. It seems that email bureaux send millions of emails every month to addresses that are in their databases (some of which are hopelessly out of date or not targeted at all), The thing that amazes me is that very few seem to expect a reply – with many firms even going to the effort of sending the emails from a non-existent or “no-reply” email address.
What ever happened to the original idea of emails – you know, you send a message out to a contact or friend and they reply when they get a chance or feel like it and you can then respond back to them – a proper conversation that can go across timezones or even allow for holidays, week-ends or the need to research your answer.
The problem with using emails as advertising (apart from the risk of upsetting your audience as they get yet another spam mail from you) is that the response rate is so low that it’s almost a surprise when someone does actually respond or buy your product or service.
One way to improve this response rate is by targeting your mailshots carefully and making sure that your email marketing campaign is correct and uses effective subject lines.
If you think about it you can send out an email to, say, 2000 contacts on your email list, This email contains three offers – the first for red widgets, the second for green widgets and the third for blue widgets. We can assume that not everyone will read all three offer but that everyone will start at the top of the email. How many people that are interested in blue widgets will actually get all the way down to the third offer? If you work on everyone that gets the email opening it (something that is unlikely anyway) you might also work on every one reading the 1st offer, only 2/3rd reading the second offer and 1/3rd reading the third offer. This immediately reduces the audience for the third offer to 1/3rd of 2,000 or 666 people as a maximum. Now, as I said earlier not everyone opens email (this report says that in the second half of 2011 the average opening rate across all industries was 10.8% – and this changes according to the industry) This means that using the 10.8% only about 67 people will see your 3rd offer. This is despite that maybe 50% of your contacts would have been interested in the 3rd offer.
If you sent out targeted emails, you would send out three emails, each of them to the people that are interested in the widget you will improve the response rate. Of course this does depend on you knowing the interests of the people you are emailing – you don’t just buy 10,000 email addresses of business owners do you? How do you know that they are interested in GPS tracking of their vehicles, leasing cars or what ever it is you are trying to sell them? If you take the time and spend the effort to build your own email list you will know what product or service the contacts are interested in.