3 Hacks to Boost Email Open Rates
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As Seth Godin put it, why waste a sentence saying nothing? If you want content opened, read, and clicked, it all starts with the subject line. Join Mike Madden, Sr. Demand Generation Programs Manager at Marketo, for our on-demand webinar, 3 Hacks to Boost Email Open Rates, to learn three simple and surprising tips to launch your open rates sky high!
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3 Hacks to Boost Email Open Rates
- 1. 3 Hacks to Boost Email Open Rates Mike Madden Sr. Demand Generation Program Manager Marketo
- 2. • This webinar is being recorded! Slides and recording will be sent to you after the webinar concludes. • Have a question? Use the chat box and I’ll get to your questions after the webinar. • Posting to social? Use our hashtag - #mktgnation • There is a brief survey after the webinar Housekeeping
- 3. Page 3© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Agenda • Why focus on open rate optimization? • What opt-in method produces the best long term results? • Segmentation strategies to reactivate unengaged subscribers • How to write subject lines that beg to be opened
- 4. Page 4© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Why Focus on Open Rate Optimization? If no one opens your email, all other email metrics will suffer… Say goodbye to high: • Open rates • Click to open rates • Click through rates
- 5. Page 5© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Does This Look Familiar?
- 6. Page 6© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 1 BOUNCE MANAGEMENT
- 7. Page 7© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-In Vs
- 8. Page 8© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Head to Head Match Up Pros Cons Bigger list Fake emails Bigger list looks better to senior management Incorrect emails Instantly gratify the subscriber Higher bounce rates Lower sender reputation Less email engagement Less qualified names Pros Cons Healthier email list Smaller List Lower bounce rates Small list looks worse to senior management Great sender reputation Users may forget to confirm subscription Start a welcome email Miss out on customers Increased email engagement More qualified names Single opt-in Double opt-in
- 9. Page 9© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Soft Bounce Management Campaigns We had emails that would repeatedly soft bounce in our database. We needed better bounce management to help manage business risk and increase open rates. We created two campaigns: • Batch Clean Up: For any email that has soft bounced a minimum number of 10 times in the past 90 days, mark it as invalid. • Trigger Clean Up: For any email that soft bounces a minimum number of 6 times in the past 30 days, mark it as invalid.
- 10. Page 10© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Bounce Type Audit
- 11. Page 11© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Bounce Category Management Campaigns We built campaigns to clean up specific soft bounce categories that could be detrimental to our sender reputation in the future. We built two campaigns: • Batch clean up to scrub all existing emails that have poor soft bounce categories (3,4 and 9) • Trigger clean up campaign to catch them as we go
- 12. Page 12© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Deliverability & Open Rates Before Bounce Management 10% 11% 12% 13% 14% 15% 16% 17% 18% 90% 91% 92% 93% 94% 95% 96% 97% 98% 99% 100% % Delivered % Opened Deliverability Rate Open Rate
- 13. Page 13© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Deliverability & Open Rates After Bounce Management 10% 11% 12% 13% 14% 15% 16% 17% 18% 90% 91% 92% 93% 94% 95% 96% 97% 98% 99% 100% % Delivered % Opened Introduced Bounce Management Deliverability Rate Open Rate
- 14. Page 14© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Sender Reputation Sender Reputation Unique Clicks Open Rate Positive Engagements Spam Complaints & Spam Trap Hits Hard Bounces Blacklists Negative Engagements
- 15. Page 15© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 2 SEGMENT AND REACTIVATE
- 16. Page 16© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 You Are Sending Emails to Sleepers Regardless of your subscriber list size, one thing is for certain… A population of your list has not engaged in a very, very, very long time!
- 17. Page 17© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 The #1 Thing Internet Service Providers Love?
- 18. Page 18© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Wake Up Sleepers with Reactivation Campaigns A reactivation campaign is an email campaign or multiple campaigns specifically targeted towards “sleeping subscribers”, or subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long period of time.
- 19. Why Use Reactivation Campaigns? 1. Determine who wants to hear from you 2. Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you 3. Clean out your email lists 4. If the cost of acquiring a new customer is more than keeping an existing one, you should do everything you can to re-engage inactive customers or subscribers
- 20. Page 20© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Reactivation Campaign Marketo VS
- 21. Page 21© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 The Winner Was The Reactivation Email! The Results: • 70% higher open rate • 325% higher click to open rate • 621% higher click through rate This email reactivated 238% more subscribers than our control!
- 22. Page 22© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 3 WRITE SUBJECT LINES THAT BEG TO BE OPENED
- 23. Page 23© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Front-Load the Important Words
- 24. Page 24© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Get Personal
- 25. Page 25© Marketo, Inc. 4/20/2017 Rhymes, Alliteration, and Puns • “Social Music Marketing: Bands, Brands and Fans” • “An Unusual Arsenal: Tech Tools to Topple a Tyrant”
Notas del editor
- And with that let’s get going!
- And in today’s email heavy world, your subscribers are inundated with messages every day. In fact, people see up to 2,900 marketing messages a day. So how are you going to stand out in the inbox and increase your open rates? Let’s get into the first hack.
- BOUNCE MANAGEMENT
- I know what you’re thinking. This presentation is about open rates, right? Why are we talking about opt-in processes? Well in a few moments, I’m going to show you some very interesting data that shows why bounce management campaigns can increase your open rates and improve email marketing ROI. But first, let’s review the two opt-in processes: the single opt-in and the double opt-in. Single opt-in: A new name fills out a web form and is automatically added to your subscription list. Double opt-in: A new name fills out a web form and then a confirmation email is triggered with a link to confirm the email address.
- In this head to head match up, let’s look at the pros and cons of each method. For the single opt-in method, the pros are a bigger list, which looks better to senior management. You’re capturing more names without having new subscribers jump through hoops. And lastly, you can instantly gratify a new subscriber with new content. For the single opt-in cons, you may get fake emails or emails with syntax errors, which results in higher soft and hard bounce rates, a lower sender reputation, less email engagement, and ultimately less qualified names. Jeez, that sounds pretty bad now that I read it out loud. It’s not as dramatic as I’m making it sound. For double opt-ins, the pros are a healthier email list, lower bounce rates, better sender reputation, gives you a chance to start with a warm fuzzy message to build your brand (possibly through a welcome email), increase email engagement, and overall more qualified names. The cons are that you will have a somewhat smaller list (which may look worse to senior management), users may not complete the subscription process by never clicking the confirmation email link, and since you’ve added an extra step in your process, you’ll have less sign ups and potentially less customers. At Marketo, we use the single opt-in process, which based on the length of the cons, may seem shocking. But we use smart campaigns within Marketo to help us manage soft bounces, hard bounces, and undelivered emails for maximum deliverability and sender reputation. Let’s take a look.
- So within our database, we had emails that would repeatedly soft bounce. We needed better bounce management to help manage business risk of these soft bounces become something worse like a hard bounce or a spam trap, which at the same time would also help our open rates. We created two campaigns: Batch Clean Up: For any email that has soft bounced a minimum number of 10 times in the past 90 days, we marked it as invalid. Triggered Clean Up: For any email that soft bounces a minimum number of 6 times in the past 30 days, we mark it as invalid. Thanks to this trigger campaign, the more we email, the cleaner our database becomes. That means we are emailing addresses that we know are more likely to receive and open our emails.
- Then we took it one step further and looked into the types of hard and soft bounces we were seeing in our system. If we could determine which types of bounces we see the most by bounce code, we could run additional clean up campaigns to catch the ones that are the most harmful to our sender reputation.
- What we found was that there was a set of bounce codes that could be categorized into three different categories within Marketo. So, we built campaigns to clean up those specific soft bounce categories that could be detrimental to our sender reputation if we continued to email them. We created two campaigns: Batch clean up campaign to scrub all existing emails that have poor soft bounce categories (3,4 and 9), then mark it as invalid. Trigger clean up campaign to catch them as we go We saw really great success with these campaigns. It gave us a way to ensure our deliverability would remain high and open rates would climb. Let’s look at a case study. One of our customers reached out to us asking for help with their email deliverability. They are a high volume email sender and were worried that their dropping deliverability rate was impacting their open rates. So we took a look.
- Here we have that customer’s deliverability rate in orange and their open rate in purple. From January 2015-September 2015, both deliverability rates and open rates have steadily declined. Remember that open rate is defined as emails opened/emails delivered. So not only are they delivering fewer emails, but also seeing a lower percentage of those delivered emails being opened. We took the same types of smart campaigns that we use at Marketo to introduce bounce management for this customer. The results are very telling.
- The bounce management campaigns were introduced at the very end of September 2015. Since that point in September, deliverability rates went from 93% to 99% and open rates climbed from 13.5% to 17.3%, which is a 28% increase! Needless to say, this data is awesome. With all of the same email marketing creative, meaning same subject lines and copy, open rates increased nearly 30%. If you didn’t think deliverability rates and open rates had any correlation to each other, think again. And not only did the percentage of opens increase but so did the raw number of opens. Why? Two words: Sender Reputation.
- A sender reputation is the reputation you have as an email sender. The reputation you have as a sender is the #1 reason why you should implement bounce management campaigns. Due to many recent filtering tactics of ISPs, one thing is very clear; consistently sending emails to a dirty subscriber list with questionable email addresses will have adverse effects on both inbox placement and your sender reputation. There are many factors that affect your sender reputation, but the most common ones are subscriber engagement like opens and clicks, positive and negative engagement signals like whitelisting an email addresses or marking an email as spam, hard bounces, if you are listed on a blacklist, spam trap hits, and spam complaints. So being able to manage all of those and keep them to a minimum will help keep your reputation high! If you have a cleaner list and lower bounce rates, you’ll have a much higher ratio of positive engagements to negative engagements. This will help your sender reputation, which means better email deliverability, inboxing rates, and of course, open rates!
- SEGMENT AND REACTIVATE
- You know that one friend that can sleep anywhere? On a cramped airplane, in the car, on a stool, on the floor, or even standing up? Once they knock out, it seems almost impossible to wake them up. If I had to bet, it’s likely that there are some email subscribers in your database that are out cold just like this sleeping puppy. And that’s a problem, because you spent time and money getting people to subscribe. Not only that, these sleepy, unengaged subscribers are bringing down your open rates, click to open rates, email deliverability and sender reputation.
- So why exactly do these unengaged subscribers bring down your email deliverability and sender reputation? And why might you see lower inboxing rates? Well, that’s because getting an ISP to love you is no easy task. The #1 thing ISPs love to see is high levels of engagement. That means lots of people opening, clicking, reading, scrolling, and engaging with your emails on a regular basis. When you have high engagement, ISPs will let the majority of your emails hit the primary inbox. Why? Because your email recipients want them and the demand is high! So sending to both highly engaged subscribers and highly unengaged subscribers at the same time can actually hurt you…and your open rates! If you can start to segment out campaigns based on engagement, your campaigns to engaged subscribers and campaigns to unengaged subscribers will perform much better! So, how do you do that?
- Wake them up with reactivation campaigns! A reactivation campaign is an email campaign or multiple campaigns specifically targeted towards “sleeping subscribers”, or subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long period of time. A marketer typically has a list of customers or subscribers, with as many as 25-50% of these people classified as “inactive”. How you define inactive emails depends entirely on your email cadence. If you regularly email your database 2-3 times a week, an inactive email might be one that hasn’t engaged in the past 90 days. For those that only send out emails on monthly or quarterly schedules, inactive emails might be defined as no engagement in the past year. These people have raised their hand in the past, either through showing intent, engagement, or making a prior purchase. Therefore you have spent valuable time and not to mention probably a good amount of money on grabbing their attention in the first place. So, I ask, why not try to get the most value out of your efforts and re-engage those folks?
- Why use reactivation campaigns? Awaken the sleeping subscribers that still want to hear from you Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you Clean out your email lists – the older emails become, meaning the longer it’s been since they have engaged with you, the higher the likelihood they could become a hard bounce or a spam trap And most importantly, if the cost of acquiring a new customer is more than keeping an existing one, you should do everything you can to re-engage inactive customers or subscribers. Reactivation campaigns build upon a brand’s previous investments in acquiring and targeting new customers who already are aware of and have previously engaged with your brand. Re-engaging customers just makes good economic sense. The BIG idea here is that whatever normal campaigns you are running to these inactive subscribers isn’t working. The language or the offers just isn’t enough to keep them engaged. And if it’s been a long while since their last engagement, they get tired of receiving your emails and mark you as spam or stop engaging all together. Rather than let that happen, you are proactively asking if they still want to receive communications from you.
- Here’s a Marketo example. We run reactivation campaigns and this was our very first test. Our audience was subscribers who had not engaged with our digital campaigns in 1 year or more. On the left, you’ll see our control, which was for the Definitive Guide to Digital Advertising. There is nothing different about this email in terms of messaging or content for a subscriber that hasn’t engaged in a while. On the right, you’ll see our test. The subject line for our test email was “First Name, We Really Miss You”. The banner reads “We Really Miss Hearing From You” and we use a sad looking dog to get the emotions going. And to use language that our email subscribers aren’t familiar with, we start with “Here’s the deal, Mike”. We let them know why we are reaching out. “At some point, you subscribed to Marketo emails. Ever since then, we’ve been emailing you our best ebooks, cheatsheets, definitive guides, and other marketing offers. But then we noticed something disturbing. You haven’t opened or clicked any of these emails in the past year!!!!” So far, we’ve provided context. This email then goes into saying how we don’t want to clutter your inbox with unwanted email and unless you click the big orange button (which you cannot see here), we won’t know it’s okay to keep sending you emails. Now let’s look at the results!
- We had a very clear winner here and it was our reactivation email! We saw a 70% higher open rate, a 325% higher click to open rate, and a 621% higher click through rate. I should also add that we called out the link to our subscription center in this email as well, so about half of the clicks we received were to update email preferences., which is a very positive result for this test. Overall, this email reactivated 238% more subscribers than our control email. That means that we now have a way to engage our sleepy subscribers in a way that is 238% better than our normal marketing efforts! Even better, we now have determined that there is a strategy where we can email our unengaged leads independent of our engaged leads, which leads to higher engagement, better sender reputation, better email deliverability, and higher open rates for both audiences!
- FAILURE TO MEASURE EMAIL INBOXING
- You know that one friend who’s horrible at telling stories? You know, where 15 minutes into telling their story, you begin thinking “Where is this even going? Are we ever going to hear the good part?” And by the time they finally get to the good part, you’ve already checked out. Yeah, some subject lines are just like that—don’t let it be yours. People want to know why your email is more important than the thousands of others in their inbox, so put all the important, actionable words in the front of your subject line to entice opens. In other words, get to the point! In my experience, changing the structure of the sentence line to front-load the important keywords has increased open rates by 10-20%. Let’s take a look at a recent email from eMarketer. “9 Clever, Must-Try Emails” catches the eye and leaves you begging for more.
- There’s usually at least one person in every office who can’t seem to remember anyone’s first name. Mike is Matt, Joe is John, and Stacy is Stephanie. They might try to get around it by using nicknames like sport, bud, pal, dude, man, bro, and fella. For the record, no one likes that, especially not your email subscribers. Address your subscribers by their name or insert pronouns like “you” or “your” to give your subject lines a personalized touch. According to Experian, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened (although it varies by industry), yet 70% of brands are not personalizing emails sent to subscribers. That’s a huge opportunity for your brand to stand out! SiriusXM recently sent me this email about my free trial. Just by adding my name to the subject line, it made me feel like they see me as a person, not just a potential conversion, and that they’re truly interested in helping me achieve the best experience.
- This might seem weird, but I have always seen subject lines that use rhymes, alliteration, or puns do really well. Have you ever read a word or name over and over again until it either sounds weird or gets funnier each time? My word is “hullabaloo,” which means a great noise or excitement. Or have you ever read a subject line that was so clever it deserved to be opened? If you can write a subject line that rolls off the tongue, you will get a higher open rate. It’s like music to the ears! It’s not easy to come up with these but when you do, they will perform exceedingly well. In fact, I’ve seen extraordinary subject line performance where I’ve beaten the control by 30-40%! For some inspiration, just take a look at some of the session names from SXSW. Some of my favorites from previous years? “Social Music Marketing: Bands, Brands and Fans” and “An Unusual Arsenal: Tech Tools to Topple a Tyrant.”
- And that’s it! Thank you all so much for joining me today. I hope you learn some valuable, actionable takeaways for boosting your open rates sky high. Let’s get into some questions! Does Marketo have any deliverability tools to help me measure the results of my reactivation campaigns? The answer is yes! Marketo has 250ok, which is a deliverability and inboxing tool that helps give visibility into everything you could care about. There is a section of the tool called inbox informant, which shows you inbox placement across all email providers and regions. You’ll see an inbox rate, a spam rate, and a missing rate. And the tool using a seedlist that you would load into Marketo that can be weighted, so if half of your email database is comprised of AOL domains, you can weight the seedlist to give an accurate representation of inboxing. There’s even a report that shows you how you inbox in Gmail’s tab system. So it shows you what percentage of emails hit the primary tab vs. the social tab or the promotions tab. And one of the most helpful parts of 250ok is the design information section, which gives you screen shots and rendering of your emails across all browsers, clients and devices. I regularly use 250ok to check email rendering before I hit send. Overall, it’s a really great product. And if you were interested in other options, Return Path has an excellent inboxing product as well. What do you think of welcome emails? I am a big proponent of welcome emails! When it comes to database cleanliness, most of the issues occur at the email acquisition stage. Welcome emails or a welcome series is a great way to accomplish a few different things. You can: Set expectations for email frequency and offer types Ask new subscribers to whitelist your email domain, which increases email inboxing over the long-term. Even better, for Gmail specific addresses, ask them to drag your email from the promotions tab to the primary tab. This ensures inbox placement in the primary tab. Build trust and branding with a warm, personalized message (I’ve heard than using a welcome email or welcome series can increase long-term email engagement by over 30%) Monitor soft bounces and hard bounces because you can clean out your lists if there are obvious junk values. Some people may sign up with a junk email address just to get an offer or deal. Other may have undesirable bounce types. You can catch these in a welcome email campaign and scrub them out before they make it into your long-term email strategy. What are some best practices for a/b testing? Single vs. multi-variate tests Look for statistical significance (use significance calculator) Look at whole email performance, not just single metric performance