Download to read offline
![Page 19© Marketo, Inc. 9/5/2017
SL: [New] The Definitive Guide to Digital Advertising
Our First Reactivation Test
VS](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3hackstooptimizeemailopenrates-170905195613/75/Mike-Madden-3-Hacks-to-Boost-Email-Open-Rates-19-2048.jpg)
More Related Content
Similar to Mike Madden - 3 Hacks to Boost Email Open Rates
Mike Madden - 3 Hacks to Boost Email Open Rates
- 1. 3 Hacks toBoost Email Open Rates Mike Madden Sr. Marketing Manager Marketo
- 2. Page 2© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Agenda • Why focus on open rate optimization? • What opt-in method produces the best long term results? • Segmentation strategies to reactivate unengaged subscribers and boost open rates • How to write subject lines that beg to be opened
- 3. Page 3© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Why Focus on Open Rate Optimization? If no one opens your email, all other email metrics will suffer… Say goodbye to high: • Open rates • Click to open rates • Click through rates
- 4. Page 4© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Does This Look Familiar?
- 5. Page 5© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 1 BOUNCE MANAGEMENT
- 6. Page 6© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-In Vs
- 7. Page 7© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Head to Head Match Up Pros Cons Bigger list Fake emails Bigger list looks better to senior management Incorrect emails Instantly gratify the subscriber Higher bounce rates Lower sender reputation Less email engagement Less qualified names Pros Cons Healthier email list Smaller List Lower bounce rates Small list looks worse to senior management Great sender reputation Users may forget to confirm subscription Start a welcome email Miss out on customers Increased email engagement More qualified names Single opt-in Double opt-in
- 8. Page 8© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Soft Bounce Management Campaigns We had emails that would repeatedly soft bounce in our database. We needed better bounce management to help manage business risk and increase open rates. We created two campaigns: • Batch Clean Up: For any email that has soft bounced a minimum number of 10 times in the past 90 days, mark it as invalid. • Trigger Clean Up: For any email that soft bounces a minimum number of 6 times in the past 30 days, mark it as invalid.
- 9. Page 9© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Bounce Type Audit
- 10. Page 10© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Bounce Category Management Campaigns We built campaigns to clean up specific soft bounce categories that could be detrimental to our sender reputation in the future. We built two campaigns: • Batch clean up to scrub all existing emails that have poor soft bounce categories (3,4 and 9) • Trigger clean up campaign to catch them as we go
- 11. Page 11© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Deliverability & Open Rates Before Bounce Management 10% 11% 12% 13% 14% 15% 16% 17% 18% 90% 91% 92% 93% 94% 95% 96% 97% 98% 99% 100% % Delivered % Opened Deliverability Rate Open Rate
- 12. Page 12© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Deliverability & Open Rates After Bounce Management 10% 11% 12% 13% 14% 15% 16% 17% 18% 90% 91% 92% 93% 94% 95% 96% 97% 98% 99% 100% % Delivered % Opened Introduced Bounce Management Deliverability Rate Open Rate
- 13. Page 13© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Sender Reputation Sender Reputation Unique Clicks Open Rate Positive Engagements Spam Complaints & Spam Trap Hits Hard Bounces Blacklists Negative Engagements
- 14. Page 14© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 2 SEGMENT AND REACTIVATE
- 15. Page 15© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 You Are Sending Emails to Sleepers A reactivation campaign is an email campaign or multiple campaigns specifically targeted towards “sleeping subscribers”, or subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long period of time.
- 16. Page 16© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 The #1 Thing Internet Service Providers Love?
- 17. Page 17© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Why Use Reactivation Campaigns? 1. Determine who wants to hear from you 2. Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you 3. Clean out your email lists 4. If the cost of acquiring a new customer is more than keeping an existing one, you should do everything you can to re-engage inactive customers or subscribers
- 18. Page 18© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 So We Went Out to Grab Their Attention
- 19. Page 19© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 SL: [New] The Definitive Guide to Digital Advertising Our First Reactivation Test VS
- 20. Page 20© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 People Love Dogs! The Results: • 70% higher open rate • 325% higher click to open rate • 621% higher click through rate This email reactivated 238% more subscribers than our control! SL: We really miss you, {{First_Name}}
- 21. Page 21© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Reactivation Series 1 Reactivation Series 2 Reactivation Series 3 Think Beyond One and Done Campaigns Remove email from normal campaigns
- 22. Page 22© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Progressively Be More To the Point Reactivation Tier 1 • Series Length: 3 emails • Key Message: We Miss You • Cadence: Bi-weekly Reactivation Tier 2 • Series Length: 3 emails • Key Message: Moving On? • Cadence: Bi-weekly Reactivation Tier 3 • Series Length: 3 emails • Key Message: Re-subscribe or Else • Cadence: Bi-weekly
- 23. Page 23© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 SL: We really miss you, {{First_Name}} Reactivation Campaign – Tier #1 Reactivation Rate: 49.7% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 47.6% Reactivation Rate: 44.8% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 51.3% Reactivation Rate: 36.1% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 61.4% 1 2 3 SL: Still friends, {{First_Name}}? SL: Was it something we said, {{First_Name}}?
- 24. Page 24© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 “Really stupid email” – Andrew Feedback After Tier #1 Was Full of Love “This email made me laugh – thank you I needed it!” – Jeanny “Really compelling” – Joel “I love this email – absolutely love it.” – Chris
- 25. Page 25© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Reactivation Campaign – Tier #2 Reactivation Rate: 29.0% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 68.3% Reactivation Rate: 27.0% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 68.7% Reactivation Rate: 35.9% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 61.6% 4 5 6 SL: Moving on is hard, {{First_Name}} SL: Moving on is easy, {{First_Name}} SL: We miss you {{First_Name}} and…
- 26. Page 26© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Reactivation Campaign – Tier #3 Reactivation Rate: 43.2% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 50.2% Reactivation Rate: 41.8% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 49.5% Reactivation Rate: 37.9% Pref. Ctr. Rate: 57.1% 7 8 9 SL: Don’t Leave Us, {{First_Name}} SL: Time to Decide, {{First_Name}} SL: We Need to Hear From You, {{First_Name}}
- 27. Page 27© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Reactivated Leads Avg. Email Performance 25% higher open rates 131% higher CTR 85% higher CTO
- 28. Page 28© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Reactivation Results • 10% of sleepy subscribers were reactivated • Average spam complaint rate across the series was 0.002% • Open rates increased across all business units and geographic regions • Millions of dollars generated in sales pipeline and closed won • Reactivation campaigns scaled successfully across regions globally
- 29. Page 29© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 3 WRITE SUBJECT LINES THAT BEG TO BE OPENED
- 30. Page 30© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Front-Load the Important Words
- 31. Page 31© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Get Personal
- 32. Page 32© Marketo,Inc. 9/5/2017 Rhymes, Alliteration, and Puns • “Social Music Marketing: Bands, Brands and Fans” • “An Unusual Arsenal: Tech Tools to Topple a Tyrant”
- 33.
Editor's Notes
- #5 And in today’s email heavy world, your subscribers are inundated with messages every day. In fact, people see up to 2,900 marketing messages a day. So how are you going to stand out in the inbox and increase your open rates? Let’s get into the first hack.
- #6 BOUNCE MANAGEMENT
- #7 I know what you’re thinking. This presentation is about open rates, right? Why are we talking about opt-in processes? Well in a few moments, I’m going to show you some very interesting data that shows why bounce management campaigns can increase your open rates and improve email marketing ROI. But first, let’s review the two opt-in processes: the single opt-in and the double opt-in. Single opt-in: A new name fills out a web form and is automatically added to your subscription list. Double opt-in: A new name fills out a web form and then a confirmation email is triggered with a link to confirm the email address.
- #8 In this head to head match up, let’s look at the pros and cons of each method. For the single opt-in method, the pros are a bigger list, which looks better to senior management. You’re capturing more names without having new subscribers jump through hoops. And lastly, you can instantly gratify a new subscriber with new content. For the single opt-in cons, you may get fake emails or emails with syntax errors, which results in higher soft and hard bounce rates, a lower sender reputation, less email engagement, and ultimately less qualified names. Jeez, that sounds pretty bad now that I read it out loud. It’s not as dramatic as I’m making it sound. For double opt-ins, the pros are a healthier email list, lower bounce rates, better sender reputation, gives you a chance to start with a warm fuzzy message to build your brand (possibly through a welcome email), increase email engagement, and overall more qualified names. The cons are that you will have a somewhat smaller list (which may look worse to senior management), users may not complete the subscription process by never clicking the confirmation email link, and since you’ve added an extra step in your process, you’ll have less sign ups and potentially less customers. At Marketo, we use the single opt-in process, which based on the length of the cons, may seem shocking. But we use smart campaigns within Marketo to help us manage soft bounces, hard bounces, and undelivered emails for maximum deliverability and sender reputation. Let’s take a look.
- #9 So within our database, we had emails that would repeatedly soft bounce. We needed better bounce management to help manage business risk of these soft bounces become something worse like a hard bounce or a spam trap, which at the same time would also help our open rates. We created two campaigns: Batch Clean Up: For any email that has soft bounced a minimum number of 10 times in the past 90 days, we marked it as invalid. Triggered Clean Up: For any email that soft bounces a minimum number of 6 times in the past 30 days, we mark it as invalid. Thanks to this trigger campaign, the more we email, the cleaner our database becomes. That means we are emailing addresses that we know are more likely to receive and open our emails.
- #10 Then we took it one step further and looked into the types of hard and soft bounces we were seeing in our system. If we could determine which types of bounces we see the most by bounce code, we could run additional clean up campaigns to catch the ones that are the most harmful to our sender reputation.
- #11 What we found was that there was a set of bounce codes that could be categorized into three different categories within Marketo. So, we built campaigns to clean up those specific soft bounce categories that could be detrimental to our sender reputation if we continued to email them. We created two campaigns: Batch clean up campaign to scrub all existing emails that have poor soft bounce categories (3,4 and 9), then mark it as invalid. Trigger clean up campaign to catch them as we go We saw really great success with these campaigns. It gave us a way to ensure our deliverability would remain high and open rates would climb. Let’s look at a case study. One of our customers reached out to us asking for help with their email deliverability. They are a high volume email sender and were worried that their dropping deliverability rate was impacting their open rates. So we took a look.
- #12 Here we have that customer’s deliverability rate in orange and their open rate in purple. From January 2015-September 2015, both deliverability rates and open rates have steadily declined. Remember that open rate is defined as emails opened/emails delivered. So not only are they delivering fewer emails, but also seeing a lower percentage of those delivered emails being opened. We took the same types of smart campaigns that we use at Marketo to introduce bounce management for this customer. The results are very telling.
- #13 The bounce management campaigns were introduced at the very end of September 2015. Since that point in September, deliverability rates went from 93% to 99% and open rates climbed from 13.5% to 17.3%, which is a 28% increase! Needless to say, this data is awesome. With all of the same email marketing creative, meaning same subject lines and copy, open rates increased nearly 30%. If you didn’t think deliverability rates and open rates had any correlation to each other, think again. And not only did the percentage of opens increase but so did the raw number of opens. Why? Two words: Sender Reputation.
- #14 A sender reputation is the reputation you have as an email sender. The reputation you have as a sender is the #1 reason why you should implement bounce management campaigns. Due to many recent filtering tactics of ISPs, one thing is very clear; consistently sending emails to a dirty subscriber list with questionable email addresses will have adverse effects on both inbox placement and your sender reputation. There are many factors that affect your sender reputation, but the most common ones are subscriber engagement like opens and clicks, positive and negative engagement signals like whitelisting an email addresses or marking an email as spam, hard bounces, if you are listed on a blacklist, spam trap hits, and spam complaints. So being able to manage all of those and keep them to a minimum will help keep your reputation high! If you have a cleaner list and lower bounce rates, you’ll have a much higher ratio of positive engagements to negative engagements. This will help your sender reputation, which means better email deliverability, inboxing rates, and of course, open rates!
- #15 SEGMENT AND REACTIVATE
- #16 You know that one friend that can sleep anywhere? On a cramped airplane, in the car, on a stool, on the floor, or even standing up? Once they knock out, it seems almost impossible to wake them up. If I had to bet, it’s likely that there are some email subscribers in your database that are out cold just Michael Scott here. And that’s a problem, because you spent time and money getting people to subscribe. Not only that, these sleepy, unengaged subscribers are bringing down your open rates, click to open rates, email deliverability and sender reputation.
- #17 So why exactly do these unengaged subscribers bring down your email deliverability and sender reputation? And why might you see lower inboxing rates? Well, that’s because getting an ISP to love you is no easy task. The #1 thing ISPs love to see is high levels of engagement. That means lots of people opening, clicking, reading, scrolling, and engaging with your emails on a regular basis. When you have high engagement, ISPs will let the majority of your emails hit the primary inbox. Why? Because your email recipients want them and the demand is high! So sending to both highly engaged subscribers and highly unengaged subscribers at the same time can actually hurt you…and your open rates! If you can start to segment out campaigns based on engagement, your campaigns to engaged subscribers and campaigns to unengaged subscribers will perform much better! So, how do you do that?
- #18 Why use reactivation campaigns? Awaken the sleeping subscribers that still want to hear from you Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you Clean out your email lists – the older emails become, meaning the longer it’s been since they have engaged with you, the higher the likelihood they could become a hard bounce or a spam trap And most importantly, if the cost of acquiring a new customer is more than keeping an existing one, you should do everything you can to re-engage inactive customers or subscribers. Reactivation campaigns build upon a brand’s previous investments in acquiring and targeting new customers who already are aware of and have previously engaged with your brand. Re-engaging customers just makes good economic sense. The BIG idea here is that whatever normal campaigns you are running to these inactive subscribers isn’t working. The language or the offers just isn’t enough to keep them engaged. And if it’s been a long while since their last engagement, they get tired of receiving your emails and mark you as spam or stop engaging all together. Rather than let that happen, you are proactively asking if they still want to receive communications from you.
- #20 To begin our testing, we defined our audience as anyone who hasn’t engaged with our emails in the past year, which cut our database in half. Then, we took a standard Definitive Guide to Digital Marketing as a control email against our four tests. In our test emails, we needed to use uncommon language, imagery, and writing tone to stand out and grab their attention. The goal here was to identify which types of copy and email elements were most likely to capture the attention of sleepy subscribers.
- #21 We had a very clear winner here and it was our reactivation email! We saw a 70% higher open rate, a 325% higher click to open rate, and a 621% higher click through rate. I should also add that we called out the link to our subscription center in this email as well, so about half of the clicks we received were to update email preferences., which is a very positive result for this test. Overall, this email reactivated 238% more subscribers than our control email. That means that we now have a way to engage our sleepy subscribers in a way that is 238% better than our normal marketing efforts! Even better, we now have determined that there is a strategy where we can email our unengaged leads independent of our engaged leads, which leads to higher engagement, better sender reputation, better email deliverability, and higher open rates for both audiences!
- #22 So after this success, we realized that running a reactivation campaign once doesn’t really do it for you. Picture this…every day, better yet, every hour, an email in your database becomes inactive. The moment that email becomes inactive, they should run through a reactivation series. Marketers need to make reactivation campaigns an ongoing part of their marketing programs instead of a one-off activity. Think about ways you can be proactive too. The moment you let an email slip into an inactive state, it becomes more dangerous to your email health and reputation. If you can start your reactivation campaigns sooner rather than later, you can catch many of those business risks before they occur. With Marketo, you can listen for that inactivity window to be met, automatically flagging that email to remove them from normal marketing campaigns, and then drip them into the very top of a reactivation series.
- #23 So after this success, we realized that running a reactivation campaign once doesn’t really do it for you. Picture this…every day, better yet, every hour, an email in your database becomes inactive. The moment that email becomes inactive, they should run through a reactivation series. Marketers need to make reactivation campaigns an ongoing part of their marketing programs instead of a one-off activity. Think about ways you can be proactive too. The moment you let an email slip into an inactive state, it becomes more dangerous to your email health and reputation. If you can start your reactivation campaigns sooner rather than later, you can catch many of those business risks before they occur. With Marketo, you can listen for that inactivity window to be met, automatically flagging that email to remove them from normal marketing campaigns, and then drip them into the very top of a reactivation series.
- #24 With all the learning we had from our first reactivation test, we expanded those into our tier 1. Every week, we’d isolate our inactive audience and send them 3-4 test emails using the underlying theme of “we miss you and need to hear from you to know that you still want our emails.” There are two important data points for us: the reactivation rate and the preference center click rate. In all the tests, I’m looking for the highest reactivation rate. But if I see an email with a much higher unsubscribe rate, I’m not necessarily afraid of that because I’d much rather have folks opt-out than mark us as spam in the furture.
- #25 Feedback after tier 1 was positive!
- #26 In tier 2, we became a little more direct and gave subscribers a yes/no button using green for yes and red for no. We found the reactivation rate drop and preference center click rate increase, which made sense since these subscribers had already received tier 1 before this.
- #27 In final tier, we let subscribers know that this is it. If you don’t let us know you still want to hear from us, we may unsubscribe you.
- #28 We also wanted to know how reactivated leads were doing compared to our engaged audience. So, we build an email performance report showing email performance for the last 6 months for both audiences: those that reactivated through one of our 9 emails and those that didn’t and have been active within the past 1 year. Compared to our control group, we found that reactivated leads had 25% higher open rates, 131% higher click through rates, and 85% higher click to open rates. The unsubscribe rates for the reactivated group were 0.003%, which is miniscule compared to the control group.
- #30 FAILURE TO MEASURE EMAIL INBOXING
- #31 You know that one friend who’s horrible at telling stories? You know, where 15 minutes into telling their story, you begin thinking “Where is this even going? Are we ever going to hear the good part?” And by the time they finally get to the good part, you’ve already checked out. Yeah, some subject lines are just like that—don’t let it be yours. People want to know why your email is more important than the thousands of others in their inbox, so put all the important, actionable words in the front of your subject line to entice opens. In other words, get to the point! In my experience, changing the structure of the sentence line to front-load the important keywords has increased open rates by 10-20%. Let’s take a look at a recent email from eMarketer. “9 Clever, Must-Try Emails” catches the eye and leaves you begging for more.
- #32 There’s usually at least one person in every office who can’t seem to remember anyone’s first name. Mike is Matt, Joe is John, and Stacy is Stephanie. They might try to get around it by using nicknames like sport, bud, pal, dude, man, bro, and fella. For the record, no one likes that, especially not your email subscribers. Address your subscribers by their name or insert pronouns like “you” or “your” to give your subject lines a personalized touch. According to Experian, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened (although it varies by industry), yet 70% of brands are not personalizing emails sent to subscribers. That’s a huge opportunity for your brand to stand out! SiriusXM recently sent me this email about my free trial. Just by adding my name to the subject line, it made me feel like they see me as a person, not just a potential conversion, and that they’re truly interested in helping me achieve the best experience.
- #33 This might seem weird, but I have always seen subject lines that use rhymes, alliteration, or puns do really well. Have you ever read a word or name over and over again until it either sounds weird or gets funnier each time? My word is “hullabaloo,” which means a great noise or excitement. Or have you ever read a subject line that was so clever it deserved to be opened? If you can write a subject line that rolls off the tongue, you will get a higher open rate. It’s like music to the ears! It’s not easy to come up with these but when you do, they will perform exceedingly well. In fact, I’ve seen extraordinary subject line performance where I’ve beaten the control by 30-40%! For some inspiration, just take a look at some of the session names from SXSW. Some of my favorites from previous years? “Social Music Marketing: Bands, Brands and Fans” and “An Unusual Arsenal: Tech Tools to Topple a Tyrant.”
- #34 And that’s it! Thank you all so much for joining me today. I hope you learn some valuable, actionable takeaways for boosting your open rates sky high. Let’s get into some questions! Does Marketo have any deliverability tools to help me measure the results of my reactivation campaigns? The answer is yes! Marketo has 250ok, which is a deliverability and inboxing tool that helps give visibility into everything you could care about. There is a section of the tool called inbox informant, which shows you inbox placement across all email providers and regions. You’ll see an inbox rate, a spam rate, and a missing rate. And the tool using a seedlist that you would load into Marketo that can be weighted, so if half of your email database is comprised of AOL domains, you can weight the seedlist to give an accurate representation of inboxing. There’s even a report that shows you how you inbox in Gmail’s tab system. So it shows you what percentage of emails hit the primary tab vs. the social tab or the promotions tab. And one of the most helpful parts of 250ok is the design information section, which gives you screen shots and rendering of your emails across all browsers, clients and devices. I regularly use 250ok to check email rendering before I hit send. Overall, it’s a really great product. And if you were interested in other options, Return Path has an excellent inboxing product as well. What do you think of welcome emails? I am a big proponent of welcome emails! When it comes to database cleanliness, most of the issues occur at the email acquisition stage. Welcome emails or a welcome series is a great way to accomplish a few different things. You can: Set expectations for email frequency and offer types Ask new subscribers to whitelist your email domain, which increases email inboxing over the long-term. Even better, for Gmail specific addresses, ask them to drag your email from the promotions tab to the primary tab. This ensures inbox placement in the primary tab. Build trust and branding with a warm, personalized message (I’ve heard than using a welcome email or welcome series can increase long-term email engagement by over 30%) Monitor soft bounces and hard bounces because you can clean out your lists if there are obvious junk values. Some people may sign up with a junk email address just to get an offer or deal. Other may have undesirable bounce types. You can catch these in a welcome email campaign and scrub them out before they make it into your long-term email strategy. What are some best practices for a/b testing? Single vs. multi-variate tests Look for statistical significance (use significance calculator) Look at whole email performance, not just single metric performance