Secrets to improve your email marketing success rate

On Thursday, 19 February 2015, Backström presented a workshop at the Colosseum Luxury hotel in Century City, focused on practical tips and techniques that guarantee responses from email marketing, based on neuroscience.

Email marketing trumps social media mentions

Backström spoke of the email marketing good news and bad news. A Marketing Sherpa report from 2014 defines adults as starting at just 16 years of age, and shows that almost 77% of 'adults' in this age group prefer to get their company news through email, compared to just 6% who prefer to read about it on social media. Added to this, despite all the social media hype, there are a billion more email accounts than social media profiles, which makes email marketing the most effective format for ROI. The bad news then is that your message is likely to not be opened or even read due to inbox clutter, and only 1% of sales lately are traced back to social media.

© JR Bale – 123RF.com

That said, email marketing shouldn't be taken for granted or used to simply fire messages out into the ether. It's such an intimate way to speak to clients that it's really easy to annoy them if you do it the wrong way.

Best practice email campaigns

So how does this translate into the realm of email marketing? Backström shared lessons learned from some of the world's most successful e-campaigns, which all have in common the fact that they must be beautiful and make people smile.

The one judged as the best global email campaign was Obama's email campaign asking for donations to change legislation. Click on the ad embedded below to see why it was so effective:

Backström also shared a game-changing toolkit, but said the first thing to realise is that nothing will happen until your email is opened.

Subject line simplifiers

Rather start your campaign with a subject line than strategise the whole campaign first and then finalise the subject line. The absolute best would be one that states "Buy my product, it's awesome," as that's what we want to say, but there are more tactful ways to do so, based on formulas, techniques and templates.

Among these is the fact that using odd numbers appears to be a more accurate report so seems more truthful - use this, don't round up or down, and keep it simple - three is a good number to use as it's small and most people don't have time for more.

Backström also recommends keeping just one word of the subject line in capitals as this breaks the pattern of the inbox. It's also an idea to shorten as much as possible, to 52 characters or less, and use brackets and other symbols to get your email to stand out from the crowd. Also remember that 'free' is not a spam word anymore, as it was a few years ago.

Fill in the blanks for your consumers and offer them useful information, along the lines of 'how to', 'simple formula', and 'step by step for beginners'. Using negatives is also powerful as it's similar to rubbernecking at an accident scene and is a primitive survival tool. Also remember that you don't impress people with long words.

Segment, segment, segment to avoid the database dilemma

Backström says to segment the email lists you send to - have a main database but send out tailored messages to more specific segments, such as CEOs or mothers, and use that word in the subject line as your eye will pick up if it's something you relate to as it's personal.

This is also important because the open percentage drops the bigger the list - no one can figure out why. Backström suspects it's because the bigger the list, the less clean it is and the more server bounces it faces.

Backström also warned that marketers need to ensure their databases are in order before POPI comes into effect in the next two years, and said the best way to do so is to segment your database. Start by Googling the industries that need your product or service, then phone each company and ask for the relevant person and ask if you can email them the information, unless they've already opted in to your communication and you include an opt out or unsubscribe option. The "spray and pray to the masses" approach no longer works.

Know when to email so people open your message

With the subject line sorted, you'll need to know when to send your email message so more people are likely to open it. Most workers are sitting at their computers between 8am and 10am and spend an average of 13 minutes opening emails, while in the afternoons we tend to dip in and out of our inboxes for 5 minute sessions. That's why so many emails scheduled at this time, but that means yours is more likely to just be instantly deleted so test what times work best. For lead generation and impulse buys, Sundays are actually the best day to send.

Why do people buy?

Before you structure your email message, you need to know why people buy what they do. Need, desire and status are all important, but the top reason is pain. You need to structure your message in such a way as to fix something or improve it for your customers, and use that to sell. Fear also plays a role, often used by insurers, and logic is the worst aspect to appeal to as there's a 'so what' aspect. Backström says to start every campaign message with 'what's in it for me' from your consumers' perspective, so that when you start to write to really make the message pop and avoid going off track.

The perfect email structure - the big fat 'F' shape

© Gloria Rosazza – 123RF.com

We know things must be beautiful to attract readers but often the ugly, badly designed websites still work because they promote a product or service people need. But this can always be improved by doing some research. Onscreen, people read differently to how they read print. We can use eyetracking to find out exactly what to put where in your email message, as the heat of the eye shows where people look on screen. It's shown that the bottom right is corner of death in online design and that a "big fat F" design works best, with shorter columns.

You have just three seconds to make the person scrolling and read your message, and once you've pulled them in, you've got 12 seconds to make your compelling argument and get them to read further. This means you need to ensure you including your call to action in the right places, which also translates to website design - there should already be contact information on the first page, even if it's a 'keep me informed' or 'contact me later' button. 'Send me your price list', 'tell me more', and 'add me to your mailing list' are all essentially the same thing said in three different ways.

"It's all about me, and I want me-mail", says Backström. That's why it's all about what the client is getting.

The power of the product persona means you must have pictures of people on your website, as the right picture increases stickiness by up to 120%, and the fewer clicks needed to get to what your consumer wants, the better. We get so overloaded by stats and detail that your message will have more impact if you keep it short and sweet, using shorter paragraphs and images and only sell one thing - be careful of giving people too much choice as it makes us indecisive and turns us off. So rather send out six separate emails than putting it all into one message as you won't necessarily get better response from putting too much information into one spot.

Backstrom says you can't necessarily translate what's beautiful in print online, you'll definitely need to redesign something specific.

Emails are not just about selling...

Backström's final point was to keep in mind that you can't always have your selling hat on when communication to consumers, or they will unsubscribe as they're no longer getting value from you. Connect with them, offer advice and tips to help simplify their lives, which don't always relate back to the product or service you're selling. It's a good idea to use view-track selling technologies to see how many times a person has opened your mailer in a set timeframe, as you can track it over repeat sends and see that they're ready for you to contact them, whether they contact you or not.

Lastly, remember that email marketing is not a quick fix, you'll need to give it about a year of sending twice-monthly mailers before you see real results. All in all a wonderfully informative day. Backström's next workshop will be in Johannesburg on 19 March, click here for more.