If you are an email marketer and you are fighting three skins for the indicators of mailings – open rate and click rate, you should know: it is easy to grow them. It is only necessary to figure out what they depend on and pull the correct strings.
OPEN RATE
Remember: “Opens” do not talk at all about the quality of the content of the letter. When people open the door, they only see the door itself and cannot know whether they will like it inside.
What says the open rate.
– 50% about how satisfied users are with previous letters,
– 50% of the coolness of the header, sender, and preheader.
The first 50% (satisfaction with previous letters) is an inheritance, it cannot be seated and changed. But if suddenly you were lucky to write the first letter for a new or highly updated database, remember that you are creating a story.
For example, you held an event for 300 people and are going to write them the first letter. He will have a record open rate (for example 50%), which you will never be able to repeat, no matter how hard you try. But how this indicator will be in the following letters (when it stops falling and comes to a plateau) – 35% or 15% depends on your work. On how much you get into the interests of users with the first letters.
Go to the second 50%. They depend on the coolness of the header. If the base has not been updated for a long time, this is your only leverage on the open rate.
A simple way to increase it is to mimic it under functional letters or letters “from your own” (For example FWD: Your order is ready for shipment) or indicating that the sender is a celebrity.
Such techniques work once, sometimes they raise not only open rates but also click rates and even sales.
But there is nothing to be proud of – they terribly enrage people. Soon the grass in this field will be burned.
Correctly make headlines problematic, include curiosity, but without overcoming.
Doubleheaders work well – the interesting part + the rational part. An example of a double headline: “What is being asked from Santa Claus in 2017 and how to save money on this?”
CLICK RATE
Click rate – speaks about the quality of the content of the letter about its benefits, but only by 30%.
The second 30% talk about the button-reference strategy inside the letter, how many buttons and links are in the letter, how close the first button is to the beginning, what is written on it (how motivated it is to press).
About 20% more – depends on brevity. The shorter the letter, the higher the click rate.
I write a lot on the medium and every time I observe such a dependence. The longer the post, the lower the percentage read it to the end. Fasting for 4 minutes read 60% of users. Fasting for 6 minutes is only 40%. We get such a relationship.
You extend a letter by a third – you lose a third of users.
The brevity of mailings can be achieved by squeezing water. How to calculate the return on investment in the book and mailing Illyakhov? That’s right, through the click rate of your letters.
The remaining 20%, which affects the click rate, depending on the price of the product and what affects it: discounts and promotions.
The free product gets more clicks. If you are the media and your mailing previews of the latest articles on the site, your click rate will be higher.
If you sell snowmakers for 200 rubles each, do not compare your click rate with a neighbor at the conference who sells wine in boxes of 2 thousand rubles per bottle. His click rate will be lower because it is more difficult to decide on an expensive purchase.
Discounts and promotions – if there is, great luck for the email marketer. In order not to miss happiness, do not hide them in the depths of the letter.
Harmful advice is to launch an action on a narrow Central Asian, but tell about the restriction by reference. For example: “The second toaster as a gift” – the link will turn out that the action is only for veterans of the Second World War. The user will be disappointed, but you have already raised the click rate. Further through a flood.
Another hack. If you need to raise a click rate – put in the mailing list cheaper goods. For example, your main product – sofas, but they are expensive and rarely buy them. Put in the first place in the mailing pillows and blankets. You drop the average check, raise the click rate. And what will happen to the “money from the list” indicator, I do not know. Perhaps 200 orders for pillows will bypass money for 2 orders for sofas from the same base. Only tests will be shown.
We generalize the second part. To explore the click rate – shorten the letter by several times, make twice as many buttons, put cheap items in the first place and write about stocks.
CONTENT CURSE
Above we talked mainly about mailing sales. Content mailing special. These are those in which text-text-text and benefit-benefit-benefit. The task is to be friends with a subscriber so that they remember us with love when the time comes.
The biggest pain of content mailing is the lack of a performance indicator. Like your text reader or not? About this, you are unlikely to find out.
Open rate – tells about the title. Click rate tells about the desire to go, not about the quality of the letter. There is nothing between them.
In the content mailing lists with buttons in general tight, because the buttons are about selling, and we are about trust and benefit. From despair usually put the button “Buy something”, which leads to the main site or in the section “All products”. This vagueness kills the effect. Because there is a request to buy diapers and there is no request to buy something from the Planet of Childhood company.
It is not difficult to add likes, but very few people click on the mailings. Somehow not accepted. You can write the answer – but it is very rare.
It turns out that if you are an email marketer and are craving to write content to your ezine, forget about performance indicators (and ask to forget the manager). To write long useful letters, even if it is the best content on the market, means to drop both indicators – both click rate and open rate. Plus, you have to write blindly, without feedback to subscribers.
WHAT TO DO TO THE HEAD
To prevent local optimization of mailings and not to be deceived by the beautiful indicators of email marketing, include more radars than open rate and click rate.
What to do:
1. To measure the “money from the list”. All links in letters hang UTM-tags. See how much money you earned, follow the dynamics.
2. Compare the dynamics of “money from the list” with the dynamics of “base growth”.
Our base this quarter has grown by 80%, and the “money from the mailing list” is only 20%. Are you sure that the growth that we have shown is sufficient?
3. Developing the previous point – do not expect a direct proportion between the growth of the base and the increase in money. Some users are constantly dying off, this is normal. Measure the “money from the newsletter / one email database” indicator and make sure that the fall does not accelerate. Expand the picture dynamics of the cohorts.
4. Read the letters. You will immediately see if the email marketer uses bad tips from this post or has come up with his own.
5. Monitor the long-term dynamics of the indicators – months and years.
– In May, you said that the drop in money from the list is within the margin of error. But already August and the fall continues.
– Really.
6. Set email marketing for medium and long-term goals so that it does not burn your base for the quarterly plan and bonus.
7. Ask email marketing to keep a calendar of experiments. A simple chronicle. For example, January 12, 2017 – changed the layout of letters. January 18, 2017 – added information about events … The calendar will help unearth the reason you all have already forgotten.
– Look, until mid-January we had a plateau on click rate. And from mid-January, the click rate began to decline smoothly and now it has been falling for six months. What have we done in January?
– Now I will look into the calendar of experiments and understand everything.
8. Teach an email marketer to monitor radars, find and correct their mistakes. Do not swear that he was not afraid to voice and correct them.
9. Formulate and voice actions that you do not go, even if it brings you more money. For example, a lie or a strong exaggeration, sending more than two letters a week and so on.
