Live data from Hacker News

How we boosted our marketing email open rate

catonmat.net

1–10 of 81 posts

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#4
Another 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.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#5
post #3

Will 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%.

If 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.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#7
Off 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?

Post reply on HN