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How we boosted our marketing email open rate

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Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#11

Post by remram »

balderdash wrote: post #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?

This 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.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#12

Post by mnw21cam »

bdw5204 wrote: post #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 i…

> ... collecting data on past customer purchases is ...

illegal, unless you have obtained informed consent to collect and use that information for that purpose.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#13

Post by chrisdbanks »

lpapez wrote: 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%.

1.5% 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.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#14

Post by hammock »

Email 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."

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#15

Post by hammock »

mnw21cam wrote: post #12
bdw5204 wrote: post #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 i…

> ... collecting data on past customer purchases is ... illegal, unless you have obtained informed consent to collect and use that information for that purpose.

Your credit card is selling purchase data. So are most of the national retailers you visit.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#16

Post by dazc »

mnw21cam wrote: post #12
bdw5204 wrote: post #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 i…

> ... collecting data on past customer purchases is ... illegal, unless you have obtained informed consent to collect and use that information for that purpose.

That'll be one of the boxes he/she ticked or unticked that expressly gives that consent.

Admittedly, he/she probably didn't read it that way.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#18

Post by celestialcheese »

hammock wrote: post #14

Email 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…

This.

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.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#20

Post by dazc »

remram wrote: post #11
balderdash wrote: post #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?

This 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…

'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.

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