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How we boosted our marketing email open rate
- Alifatisk 4y agoLove it, short and straight to the point.
- lpapez 4y agoWill suggest this to my manager, he loves seeing percentages very much. So much in fact that our OKR for next quarter is to boost our email open rate by 50%. That means from 1% to 1.5%.
- chrisdbanks 4y ago1.5% is seriously low. We're up over 15% and sometimes over 30%. I think this is a not even great for SaaS. I suggest a serious audit by a consultant.
- boplicity 4y agoIf your open rate is that low, you probably should do a very thorough list cleansing. You're probably sending to many, many people who haven't opened your emails in years. You should stop sending to them, which will improve your metrics, in terms of spam filtering. I would also look at the open rates for new subscribers during their first month on the list -- these should be quite high. If not, then you have much deeper problems to address than the timing of when you send the emails.
- chihuahua 4y agoBut don't do the list cleaning all at once. Instead, do it a little bit every quarter, so you can constantly claim credit for improving email open rates by a moderate amount.
- bdw5204 4y agoAnother way you can probably increase the effectiveness of marketing emails is to send less of them. If you're sending daily emails or worse multiple emails a day, your emails are spam and people will start auto-deleting them. This trains the spam filter to identify them as spam which means you will probably be identified as spam for other users with the same email provider. If you're a clothing store, you can also increase the effectiveness of your marketing emails by only sending emails that are relevant to that customer. If I've never bought children's clothes at your store, that probably means I don't have any kids and am not interested in hearing about a sale on clothes for kids. Likewise, if I only buy men's clothes that means I'm probably not interested in hearing about sales on women's clothes. In the case of Amazon, they have a bad habit of sending marketing emails if you've ever bought anything in a specific category. Buy a vinyl album for somebody as a Christmas gift once? That means you must be interested in hearing about similar vinyl albums on a regular basis. The common thread between those 2 is that retailers collecting data on past customer purchases is a good practice for both the retailer and the customer but only if the data is used intelligently to send relevant marketing emails when they're going to be genuinely of interest to the customer.
- mnw21cam 4y ago> ... collecting data on past customer purchases is ... illegal, unless you have obtained informed consent to collect and use that information for that purpose.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- johnea 4y ago[flagged]
- balderdash 4y agoOff topic rant, but in my personal experience brands destroy more value/goodwill on their email marketing campaigns than any incremental sales they generate. Why even give me the option to not sign up for your email marketing list when I check out if you’re going to spam me anyway?
- remram 4y agoThis is extremely on topic. If a company thinks "marketing email open rate" is a target, it has lost track of what marketing is. The point is to drive business to the company and that is what should be measured. If people click on your email but don't do any purchase they were already about to make, they are useless. If your spam also alienate your customers, stop what you're doing, no matter your open rate! I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing department get away with this.
- dazc 4y ago'I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing department get away with this.' Probably because their marketing people are highly skilled at marketing themselves.
- paulcole 4y agoIt surely couldn't have anything to do with non-marketers overestimating their knowledge of marketing. You wouldn't trust a marketer to give input on the job of computer programming. Why would you trust a programmer to give input on the job of marketing?
- badwolf 4y agoor... because marketing works. Something folks here are rare to ever admit. HN is populated with amazing people who see thru all facades and are completely incapable of ever being a 'victim' of advertising, because we all know better!
- dazc 4y ago
- troysk 4y agoGenius! I have scheduled emails to be sent exactly 1 day, 2 day... later so that it goes at similar times, never did I think to separate out the time part and generalise it for the user. Blindspot removed, thanks.
- SunghoYahng 4y agoI read the title and felt the aura of SEO shit, but this is the best writing style I've ever seen.
- dazc 4y agoYes, getting straight to the point; it will never catch on.
- sam0x17 4y agoI can't believe people are still sending email marketing. I report spam and unsubscribe on literally anything marketing related even from services I use and all my friends do this as well and have for nearly a decade.
- celestialcheese 4y agoWhen done right, it works. It's the hubspot/marketo approach of slamming inboxes with daily/weekly, non-specific garbage that needs to go. And buying lists or using lists from conferences - fuck that, it's just spam. Following up with someone who explicitly gave you permission to send them emails after signing up for your service is reasonable and expected IMO. It's the only channel that isn't owned by a walled-garden, so investing in it and treating it with respect is essential since it's the only way to communicate to customers and potential-customers without a middle-man extracting rent.
- unpopular42 4y agoExcept that people don't actually want that, if they did, they would read it. They just got confused by the signup form and accidentally left the checkbox checked
- dazc 4y agoSpeaking as someone who often recovers a friend's laptop from near oblivion, you'll be surprised how much some people will click any link that is presented to them.
- 4y ago
- hammock 4y agoEmail marketer here. Open rates would have naturally trended from 20% to 60% naturally when iOS added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in the last two years, because Apple "opens" the emails itself before you do so that the sender cannot track the metadata associated with the pings to the image servers. Without a timeframe listed on this "trick" I would suspect that MPP was a great contributor to their increase in open rate. Another thing to note is that most of the big email platforms now offer some kind of automated send-time optimization, which looks at an individual's open behavior over time and adjusts the send time individually for a given campaign to a time that person tends to be most responsive. In Salesforce this is called Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO). STO really only boosts open rates by 5-10% at most on average (i.e., from 20% to 21-22%), which is another reason why I am skeptical of this "trick."
- celestialcheese 4y agoThis. Additionally, many enterprise email security providers doing automated phishing checks that click every link in the email and screen scrape the landing page to verify it's not an attack vector. If your market is the govt, schools, or large enterprises, this is absolutely juicing your CTRs. Vanity email metrics are incredibly broken right now - the only numbers that mean anything are frictioned conversions like sign-ups, payments, session duration etc.
- snowwrestler 4y agoHard to mitigate MPP, and enterprise opens were unreliable to begin with due to preview panes and image blocking. But auto-clicks seem pretty easy to filter out of reporting data because they happen essentially instantaneously. Just drop clicks that happen within like 10 seconds of delivery.
- jwrx 4y agoCompletely agree. People care too much about vanity metrics because they don't know how to measure what really matters.
- Mojmalik 4y ago
- queuebert 4y agoGlad so much thought and energy is going into the industry that ruined email.
- m3kw9 4y agoFinally a blog that doesn’t write a 3 paragraph filler to get to the point.
- unpopular42 4y agoI'm curious. Isn't low open rate pointing to the fact that people don't want to read what you send them? How is this marketing email different from spam?
- blep_ 4y agoWell, you see, I think it's valuable informational content, and therefore anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.
- mindslight 4y agoSpamming and surveillance. What's not to like?
- ploum 4y agoI feel that the most successful con the spamming industry managed to do was to rename themselves "marketing email" or "mailing". Could we just go back to "spam" which it is and has always be.
- asdff 4y agoAt least the plain text nigerian prince emails don't have a tracking pixel
- ploum 4y agoI was completely astonished that this submission as nearly as much vote in a few hours than another, a lot more interesting, about trying to go to disney world without being spied. It took me a while to remember that, despite its very light and cool interface, HN has been built by a subculture whose focus is to enrich itself by making companies that lure users then spy on them and try to extract as much profit as it could from them. So you and I are probably the outsiders here…
- that_courtney 4y agoUnless you are looking over my shoulder, you won't know if I opened your email. And regardless of whether you are looking over my shoulder or you are instrumenting messages with intrusive surveillance, you're being creepy. Cut it out.
- ploum 4y ago[flagged]
- rd 4y agoDead link
- ploum 4y agoCorrected. It was a youtube frontend I use to make youtube lighter and less invasive.
- corbulo 4y agoI share your sentiment, but at the same time what channels should be used for marketing? Exclusively social media ads? Snail Mail? When I think about it on the flipside for small business marketing it's really a tragic scenario of which ad mediums are not perceived as 'spammy'.
- lapsis_beeftech 4y agoA reasonable and safe default is to use the same channel for sending me marketing information that I used to request it. Unsolicited marketing is never acceptable.
- corbulo 4y agoWhat about for specialized services that you may not already be aware of? The ideal of advertising is to inform and educate the consumer. Should non-megacorp specialized services simply not exist? How should they get the word out? The approved channels you speak of are very expensive and highly competitive.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago> I share your sentiment, but at the same time what channels should be used for marketing? None. Marketing is an objective blight on human society.
- TheCaptain4815 4y agoI manage an ecom with nearly 50k subscribers. Open rate is dead since the recent IOS update completely skews the numbers, so most of us have switched to click rate. Nonetheless, the strategy discussed in the link sounds pretty interesting. The thought process being people generally check emails around the same time? Might test it out.
- marc 4y agoIf you don’t want to keep track of when your users are visiting your site, you can instead use their time of signup as an approximation when they are likely to be online.
- ecf 4y ago> This trick was to start sending the emails at the same hour the user last visited our website. > For example, if a user was last on our website at 3:43pm, then now we send the marketing emails to this user at around 3pm. There’s 0 chance that this has any real effect on the click rate.