Mining eMail Gold
By Jeffrey Jordan, Copyright 2002
Ther's gold in them thar hills... or more likely, in the good
graces of your prospects and customers.
We are out of the dog days of summer and the holiday season
is quickly approaching. Now is the time to make sure that
you are maximizing the impact of your sales/marketing
process, specifically your communications with your opt-in
email base of prospects and customers.
Your opt-in email can be a lot of things including your
newsletter, order acknowledgements, customer service
follow-ups and so on.
If we approach our customer's right, using one of our most
power tools our opt-in email communications, we can
significantly improve our sales.
The October 2002 Consumer Email Study by DoubleClick
revealed some customer preferences that can help you improve
your results.
First, getting your prospect/customer to open the email can
be no small task. No matter what you say in your email, if
they never open it, it's a lost cause.
In the study, 60% of the respondents said that the most
important factor in opening their email was who the email
was from, while 35% said the subject line was most
important. So treat your opt-in base like gold and you have
addressed 60%.
Remember, every message that you send to your list will be
evaluated by your customers and THEY will make the decision
if your email will be worthy of a look in the future. If
you have blown their trust in the past they may never open
what you send them or may permanently route you to the
trash folder.
Still the subject line is most important to a significant
portion of email users. Some interesting gender based
results came out of the study.
Compelling Information/News
69% Male 46% Female
Discount offer
50% Male 64% Female
New Product Announcement
37% Male 39% Female
Free Shipping
28% Male 43% Female
If you are selling primarily to one gender you can make a
significant difference in open rates by using a subject line
theme which will get a larger response from that group such
as discounts for female and compelling news for males. Perhaps
you combine a discount with compelling news in the subject
line. When you think about it, getting a 64-69% open rate is
pretty significant considering the busy world in which
we live.
Once someone has opened your email, the most important
motivational factor for an immediate online purchase
(cited by 70%) is the discount, followed by merchant
recognition (60%). It is also interesting to note that 78%
of the permission-based email subscribers have purchased
through an e-mail link. As you can see these are some
significant numbers!
What can do to improve our results?
Long-term, Continually Build Trust.
1) Strive to provide information and offers that are useful
to your subscribers, So that they WANT to open messages
from you.
2) Do not abuse your list, too many messages sent to your e-
mail base no matter how useful will overload those
subscribers.
3) Try to step into the shoes of you audience and think how
they will react to your message.
Short-term, review and analyze your e-mail communications
tactics.
1) Review and test the subject line of your emails (offers,
newsletters, acknowledgements, etc.) to make sure that it
is appropriate, compelling and targeted for your
audience.
2) Look for appropriate cross-sell, up-sell opportunities
within e-mail communications that would be appropriate.
Suggest a complementary product with a discount in
your order acknowledgement e-mail. When done with tack,
can be very compelling and gives your customer a
special deal.
3) Provide a free "something" as a thank you. It should be
complementary to your customer base so that they find
it of value. Periodic useful freebies can do wonders for
your open rate.
There where a number of other interesting facts in the
survey. You can get the whole survey at:
http://www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge/documents/research/d
cconsumeremail0210.pdf
Start today mining gold and building the trust of your
best and most significant source of sales, your permission
based email communications.
Jeffrey Jordan, President of Net Marketing Results.
He has 20 years experience enhancing profits of Fortune 500
mid and small businesses. Subscribe free to Net Marketing
Results Newsletter at
http://netmarketingresults.com/signup2.htm
Contact Jeff at mailto:jdj@netmarketingresults.com
http://www.netmarketingresults.com
http://www.instantprofitpower.com
About the Author
Jeffrey Jordan, President of Net Marketing Results.
He has 20 years experience enhancing profits of Fortune 500
mid and small businesses. Subscribe free to Net Marketing
Results Newsletter at
http://netmarketingresults.com/signup2.htm
Contact Jeff at mailto:jdj@netmarketingresults.com
http://www.netmarketingresults.com
http://www.instantprofitpower.com