8 biggest mistakes email marketers make & how to avoid them

8 Biggest Mistakes Email Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them

Lorna PurcellMarketing Program ManagerMarketo

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Welcome!

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1 UNCLEAR SUBJECT LINES

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Clear Subject Lines Beat Clever OnesIn a 2011 case study conducted by AWeber communications, clear subject lines received 541% more clicks than clever ones.

Clever subject line examples:

• “You’re Not Alone…”

• “It’s finally here!”

• “…this failed miserably”

• “Still doing it the old way?”

• “My Gift to You”

Clear subject line examples:

• “9 Must-Try Email Subject Lines”

• “5 Things Your Landing Pages Are Missing”

• “Your Winning Personalisation Strategy”

• “8 Biggest Mistakes Email Marketers Make”

• “3 Steps to Winning Customer Loyalty”

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Consistency All The Way ThroughSubject line test:

“Your Marketing Automation Checklist”

Vs.

“Are You Evaluating Marketing Automation?”

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Subject Line Test Results:

Subject Line Open Rate Unique Clicks CTR Click/Open Rate

"Your Marketing Automation Checklist" 16.9% 211 1.9% 11.1%

"Are You Evaluating Marketing Automation?" 14.8% 117 1.0% 7.0%

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‒ Tell your subscribers exactly what they’ll get‒ Front-load the important words‒ Focus on all metrics, not just open rate‒ When in doubt, test it out

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2 POOR EMAIL LIST HYGIENE

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Sender Reputation

Sender Reputation

Unique Clicks

Open Rate

Positive Engagements

Spam Complaints

& Spam Trap Hits

Hard Bounces

Blacklists

Negative Engagements

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2 Steps for Healthier Email Lists

1. Soft Bounce Management Campaigns

2. Re-engagement/Reactivation Campaigns

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Soft Bounce Management Campaigns

If email soft bounced 10x in past 60 days…

BATCH

TRIGGERIf email soft bounced 6x in past 30 days…

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‒ High bounce rates lower deliverability and reputation‒ A good sender reputation helps inboxing rate‒ Managing soft bounces and unengaged subscribers

makes for better list hygiene

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3 FAILURE TO MEASURE EMAIL INBOXING

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According to Return Path, just 79% of commercial emails

land in the inbox

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Beyond Deliverability, There’s InboxingDid you know that when an email goes to the spam folder or junk folder, it still counts as delivered?

There are tools that measure inboxing, which is the percentage of delivered emails that actually hit the primary inbox.

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Does This Look Familiar?

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What does Inboxing Look Like?

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‒ Introduce bounce management campaigns‒ Measure inboxing across ISPs‒ Analyse emails for common spam triggers

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4 NO ENGAGEMENT SEGMENTATION

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The #1 Thing Internet Service Providers Love?

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Use Engagement to Your AdvantageLast Engagement < 90 Days Last Engagement > 90 Days Total

Delivered 20,000 80,000 100,000

Open Rate 18.0% 3.0% 6.0%

CTR 3.0% 0.2% 0.76%

Unsubscribe Rate 0% 0.31% 0.25%

Inboxing 95% 55% 63%

Staggered Sends Inboxing 95% 70% 75%

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‒ If you are a high volume sender, consider separating out your email campaigns by engagement

‒ Staggering email campaigns by engagement increases email inboxing

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5 NO RE-ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

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You Are Sending Emails to SleepersRegardless 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!

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Why Do Subscribers Become Inactive?Subscribers become inactive for various reasons, including:

• Changed interests

• Expectations not set appropriately

• Too many emails

• Job change

• Irrelevant content

• Too busy

• Changed email address

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What is a Reactivation Campaign?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.

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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

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A Marketo Example

VS

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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!

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‒ Use reactivation campaigns to find out who still wants to hear from you…and who doesn’t

‒ Build out a reactivation series of emails, not just one

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6 USING IMAGE-BASED CTA BUTTONS

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Does this look familiar?

Button

Button Button Button

Button Button

Before images are downloaded, you see this.

Pros: Live Nation uses Alt Text! Hooray!

Cons: Live Nation’s CTA buttons are images, which means they don’t appear until images are downloaded.

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What is an HTML Button?

An HTML button is a coded CTA button that looks and feels like an image button but it is just HTML and CSS code.

Let’s look at an example from a Marketo email test…

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What’s Better? HTML Buttons or Images Buttons?Control: Image CTA Test: HTML Button

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Resources for HTML Buttons

Here’s a few simple, free websites for building HTML buttons:

• bestcssbuttongenerator.com

• dabuttonfactory.com

• css3buttongenerator.com

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What Mobile Needs

1. The right break-points using media queries

• Desktop (default)

• Tablet = @media only screen and (max-width: 640px)

• Mobile = @media only screen and (max-width: 479px)

2. Larger text on mobile devices

3. CTA above the fold

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‒ Mobile responsive is no longer a nice-to-have but an absolute must-have

‒ It’s not always about the copy or the creative images

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‒ Normalise send times‒ Make sure to have large enough sample sizes for

statistical significance (and test more than once)‒ Isolate your tests to single variables for clean testing

Questions?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lornapurcell@lornapurcell