What to expect from your msp email campaigns (slideshare)

Editor's Notes

• #3: <read> If you’re not looking at email newsletters and marketing campaigns as part of your overall marketing strategy, you are missing a major opportunity. And you are creating an opportunity, probably unknowingly, for your competitors to sneak in and steal your clients. I’ll periodically hear someone say that they don’t read newsletters and that’s why they don’t think their clients would either. That’s all fine and good, but all of the data points to the fact that people read and respond to email campaigns – and they want highly relevant content. That makes all the difference in your messages getting read vs. deleted.
• #4: This webinar is going to reveal what we found after tracking about 1 billion email messages from 56,000 unique email campaigns sent through our software last year. This is a LOT of data and it will give you insights into how well your campaigns are doing compared industry averages – and if you’re not using email for marketing yet, you will learn what to expect from your campaigns. Again, if you’re not using email marketing, you really should consider it – all the research points to it being the highest return on investment of all forms of direct response marketing. Today, we’ll go into open rates, click rates, bounce rates, best time of the day and best day of the week to send your campaigns and a lot more. At the end of the webinar, I will show you how to access the full report for free. So, let’s get started.
• #5: We’ll begin by talking about open rates. The open rate measures the number of recipients who opened or viewed messages within a campaign. This is not an exact number, it’s a ballpark because of the way it is measured. A common way to determine open rate is to include a tracker inside each message. When the message is opened with images enabled, an open is recorded. If images are not enabled, the recipient may have read the message but it cannot be tracked as an open. That is a limitation with this technology. Let’s take a look at average open rates so you can see how well your campaigns are doing.
• #6: You can see from this chart that open rates started to decline a few years ago and then inched back up a little bit. Average open rates across all industries hover around 11-12%. This means that if you sent an email to 200 people, about 25 of them on average will be recorded as having opened the message. Now more people may very well have opened it. But as I noted with how the technology tracks opens, these are the numbers you’ll typically see in your dashboards if you’re using a marketing tool like Presstacular or MailerMailer.
• #7: We measured open rates based on industry as well. Museums and Galleries (24.9%) and Manufacturing and Distribution (24%) produced the highest average open rates — similar to their performance last year. Arts and Crafts (20.3%) also continued to perform well, keeping its third-place spot from 2013. The lowest average open rates occurred for Hobbies (3%), Accounting and Finance (5.2%), and Government and Politics (5.6%). While no longer in the bottom three, Recruitment and Staffing still scored one of the lowest average open rates of 7.8%. For IT services companies, the average open rate was a bit better than the overall average. MSPs and IT companies can expect an average open rate of around 18%.
• #8: This is a really interesting chart. It shows of all the opens that occur for a message, most occur within the first hour, then it tapers off. After the first 10 hours, you see a much slower rate of opens. If we look at this on a broader scale, we get this next chart…
• #9: This shows that 82% of the people who will eventually open your message will do so within the first 24 hours. And after the first 48 hours, the percentage of people that will open your message for the first time is really, really low. This is good insight to have. When you send your emails out, most of your response will occur within the first day and then 20% there after.
• #10: My earlier chart showed an uptick in the open rates over the last couple of years. We have some thoughts on why we’re seeing this trend. Mobile phone screen size and resolution has been getting bigger. These changes enabled more of an email's subject line and preheader text to be displayed, which could have encouraged additional opens because people are seeing more information in their email previews on their phones. Another possible reason for the rise in opens could be Gmail's decision to cache images and download them by default. This change took place at the end of 2013 and revealed that 43% of Gmail users had been reading emails without viewing images. And since open-tracking relies on image downloading, previous opens had not been registered for those users. Although Gmail only comprised somewhere between 6% and 16% of email opens last year, the newly registered opens would still have boosted average open rate. Another reason for the lift in open rates could be laws like CASL and others plus the gmail auto-unsubscribe link – all of these result in improvements to list quality, which in turn improves engagement from your contacts.
• #11: Let’s talk now about click rates. Click rate measures the number of recipients who clicked links within your campaign. MailerMailer bases this metric on unique clicks. This means that multiple clicks on a single link, or identical links within the same message, do not count when we calculate the click rate. To determine clicks, we add tracking information to each URL within a message. When a recipient clicks on a link, the tracking information redirects them through our servers and registers a click, before sending them to the destination URL. Click rate can be calculated using either the HTML or plain text version of a message.
• #12: You can see from this chart that the trend in click rates shows a decline over the last 5 years. In the second half of the year, it was hovering at about 1.5% for an overall click rate, which was a hairline lower than the first half. There are a lot of factors that influence click rate. Let’s talk about some of those.
• #13: This chart compares the average click rates among 33 industries. Transportation (3.4%) and Food, Beverage and Agriculture (3%) remained in the top three, as was the case for the previous years. However, in 2014, IT Services (3.4%) jumped to first place, replacing Arts and Crafts (2.6%), which decreased a whole percentage point since 2013. Restaurant, Bar and Night Club continued to have the lowest average click rate of only 0.4%. Government and Politics and Accounting and Finance were not far ahead, being tied for the second-lowest at 0.5%.
• #14: Factors that influence click rate. First one is relevance. This is important. If you send sales material over and over, people will tune out. Think about your own behavior when you get an sales email. People do respond to sales emails, I mean there’s a reason email marketing has amazing ROI. You have to build a relationship with the recipient first and keep that relationship going. The best thing you can send as an IT company looking to grow is educational material. For example, we’re coming up on the end of the year now so companies are planning their budgets for next year. A great thing to send right now is an article on things they should keep in mind when planning their IT budget. This is very timely and by sharing educational material that will help them, you make their job easier. By the way, this is an article that we just released to Presstacular clients, they just click and send and they’re done. Even if a recipient is not ready to buy right now, they’re going to remember you. Another major factor that influences click rates is a call to action. A call to action is a button, a link, something in your email that makes the reader want to take action. For example, you could offer an executive’s guide to IT terminology, or a white paper on understanding the true cost of your IT management options. These provide reasons for someone to click and reach out to you. This is a very smooth sales process. Think about what happens here: you’ve offered someone something of value, they accepted it. That most likely means they are a qualified lead. So after you send the guide, you can follow up with a call. Remember, marketing doesn’t work in isolation. That doesn’t mean you twiddle your thumbs and wait for the phone to ring. When you see people engaged with your material, follow up.
• #15: Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is a key metric in measuring campaign performance. It basically describes: of the people who opened a message, how many clicked links within it. This is different than the click rate, which is calculated over everyone who got the message, not just those who opened it. The reason that CTOR is a key metric is that it zeroes in on the message content. It provides a valuable indication of how well the message copy and creative performed. Since the calculation of CTOR relies on open rate, which is only an approximation, CTOR is also an approximation. In addition, like a message's click rate, CTOR depends on several variables, such as industry, segmentation, email type, and number of links. Given the nature of CTOR, there is no single benchmark for success. However, promotional emails may achieve CTORs of 20% or higher. If a campaign's CTOR drop far below this, then the email marketer should look at tweaking your audience segmentation and relevance of your content.
• #16: This graph shows a comparison of average CTOR across 33 different industries. Transportation produced the highest average CTOR of 22.7%. Recruitment and Staffing dropped down to second place with an average rate of 21.4% — nearly half of what it was in 2013. Hobbies remained in third place, earning an average CTOR of 20.2%. The industries which received the lowest average CTORs were Restaurant, Bar and Night Club (4.5%); Architecture and Construction (4.9%); and Healthcare (5.3%). Again, IT services is pretty high, over 18% CTOR. This is a good indication that when you send relevant content, people respond to it. This means that your messaging is on point.
• #17: Here’s how you can improve the click to open rate.
• #18: The time at which a message is scheduled to be sent is one of the many factors that email marketers should take into account when planning their campaigns. Based on our research, both the day of the week and time of day affect how recipients will respond. By choosing the right time, email marketers can improve their open and clicks rates, as well as the overall success of their campaigns.
• #19: We’ve seen this in prior years, Monday gets the highest average open rates. It hovers between 12-14%. Wednesday took second place. Average open rate then 11.5-12%. If you’re getting an open rate that’s higher than 10-13%, you are doing very well. Every now and then we’ll have a client reach out all disappointed saying their emails are only getting a 20% open rate. The reality is that 20% is an awesome open rate. Remember that this number is an approximation and that most likely you are getting higher opens than the stats you’ll see because of the limitations on how the tracking works. Keep in mind that if you’re doing better than 10-11%, you’re doing really well.
• #20: Now let’s look at open rate by time of day. I’m going to contrast this with click rates in a moment because there is some very interesting insight about when you should really send your emails. Average open rates increased steeply from 4 to 8 a.m., then more slowly from 8 to 10 a.m. Between 10 and 11 a.m., they peaked at 6.6%. Afterwards, they steadily declined, hitting a low of 0.6% at 2 a.m. This trend largely matches that of the 2013 data, where emails were most likely to be opened between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m.
• #21: As was the case for open rates, 2 a.m. was at the top for average click rates, leading H1 with 4.6% and ranking a close second in H2 at 3.7%. Six p.m. took second place in the first half of 2014, with an average click rate of 4.2% and first place in the second half of 2014, at 3.8%. Twelve and 1 a.m. tied for third highest in H1 at 4%, and 1 a.m. took third in H2 at 3.1%. The lowest average click rates occurred at 4 a.m. during H1, at 0.6%. In H2, there was a three-way tie for the lowest at 1.1% from 3 to 5 a.m. Based on the data, if messages are sent between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m., they will generally yield higher open and click rates. This conclusion reflects that from 2013, where messages sent during normal business hours received the lowest rates.
• #22: In past reports, Sunday has consistently experienced the highest click rates year-round, so this year's findings deviate slightly from that trend. Recipients may be starting to engage more meaningfully with email at slower times during the work week, which could be good news for email marketers. NOTE: you’ve got to test.
• #23: Bounce rate measures the number of emails that were not able to be delivered. High bounce rates can lead to poor sender reputations and impaired delivery rates.
• #24: Bounces are a natural part of sending messages. However, bounces per send can be decreased simply by sending more frequently. Sometimes, a client will tell me that they only want to email once a quarter, they don’t want to bombard their clients with emails. First of all, sending monthly isn’t bombarding. It’s a very good, healthy pace. More so, if you look at the data, sending less than once a month, meaning you forget to send something and skip a month, you send intermittently, another one I hear is that “I send only when there is news to send” which really means you forget about it or do it only a few times a year. Look at what happens to your bounce rate. It is 4 times more than people who email a few times a month. By not sending emails to your contacts, your list is withering away and you don’t know when people move. I’m not talking about your clients – you’ll probably know when they move – I’m talking about those contacts you’ve met over the years, people who could be your potential client if you just stayed in touch. Example: say you sent an email after 6 months, then noticed an address bounced. This is someone you were nurturing and was interested in buying your products and services. You look them up on LinkedIn and see that they’ve been with the new firm for a long time already. Contrast this to a more frequent sender, say once a month. You’ll know that an address bounced and if you want to reach out to them, you might find that they just landed a new job and are in charge of IT at the new company. This is the time you want to reach them. Have lunch, talk about ways you can help them be successful in their new position. It would be really hard to get this insight if you had to call everyone you ever met once a month. You can’t physically do that, plus you would annoy people. So by sending a regular newsletter, you solve that marketing and sales problem.
• #25: Message personalization refers to recipient-specific information that is included in the subject line and/or body of the message. Email marketers use personalization to make messages seem less generic and connect with their recipients. Personalized messages may contain the recipient's first name, job title, company, place of residence, or any other information that the recipient provided when they signed up for the list.
• #26: In 2014, personalization of only the message body continued to produce the highest average open rate (17.1%). Absence of personalization and subject-line-only personalization scored average open rates of 11.6% and 11.1% respectively — rankings which also mirrored those of last year. Messages that utilized both types of personalization continued to yield the lowest open rates by a significant margin. These messages had an average open rate of 4.9%, less than one-third of message-only personalization and less than one half of no personalization and subject-line-only personalization. Click rate reports are very similar, effectively showing consistency in the results. You can see the details in the full report that I’ll tell you about in a bit. You can personalize your message using a mail merge feature. Our products, MailerMailer and Presstacular, both have this feature built in and it works like a charm. It adds a warm personal touch to your emails.
• #27: Personalization of both the subject line and message content resulted in the lowest metrics, while personalization of only the message content led to the best metrics. Compared to a lack of any personalization, subject-line-only personalization negatively impacted both open and click rates.
• #28: Email subject lines can play a significant role in the performance of an email campaign. Uninteresting or otherwise unappealing subject lines can deter recipients from opening a message, even if the sender is known and trusted. On the other end of the spectrum, subject lines that are powerful, evocative, or otherwise pique the recipients' interest will result in more opened messages, and in turn, higher conversion rates.
• #29: This is a fun one. I always enjoy seeing this word chart. To reveal trends in word choice, we compared subject lines from over 56,000 campaigns sent last year. The 100 most popular words are depicted. For each word, size and shade correspond with popularity. So, larger, darker words were used more frequently, while the smaller, lighter words were used less frequently. As in years past, the most popularly used words relate to deals or events (free, sale, party, news, events, newsletter, update, coupons, report, special), or focus on timeliness (today, tonight, week, weekend).
• #30: How long should your subject line be? In contrast to last year's results, messages with shorter subject lines did not experience higher click rates. Instead, messages with subject lines of four to 15 characters yielded the lowest average click rate of 1.2%. Subject lines with 28 to 39 characters achieved the highest average click rate of 1.7%, and those with subject lines of 51 or more characters ranked second at 1.6%.
• #31: Overall, the standard deviation was much smaller than in past reports, suggesting a reduced impact of subject line length on open rate.
• #32: We’ll begin by talking about open rates. The open rate measures the number of recipients who opened or viewed messages within a campaign. This is not an exact number, it’s a ballpark because of the way it is measured. A common way to determine open rate is to include a tracker inside each message. When the message is opened with images enabled, an open is recorded. If images are not enabled, the recipient may have read the message but it cannot be tracked as an open. That is a limitation with this technology. Let’s take a look at average open rates so you can see how well your campaigns are doing.
• #36: Some more on things you should do… email consistently, once a month is a really good pace. It’s something you can probably handle and it won’t overwhelm your recipients. In fact, Presstacular has an automation option that allows you to pick the types of articles you want and then once a month we’ll automatically create your email newsletter using our rich library of articles, send you a preview and automatically schedule it to go out to your contacts. Our clients repeatedly tell us it is the easiest way to do your marketing – it gets your newsletter our, your blog out all without having to write any content. And we keep it very timely – we release new articles every month so you have fresh content for your web site, your newsletter. It makes you look like the IT experts that you are. And be sure to follow up with people who are engaging with your newsletter.
• #38: If haven’t downloaded it yet, my book will give you a roadmap on how to build your business. It’s a #1 bestseller on Amazon and one of the only books that goes into modern marketing strategies just for MSPs. It’s available in print and Kindle editions – you can get a free Kindle reader app for your iPad or PC. Just visit ITmarketingbook.com.
• #39: It’s important to warm up a prospect before you call and you can do that very effectively by using educational material. Our tool Presstacular empowers your IT company to create an email newsletter and blog instantly using a library of pre-written articles that you can edit. Live reports show you who’s reading, clicking and ready for a sales call. Get more IT clients by using Presstacular – it’s like having your own marketing department but at a tiny fraction of what it would cost you to hire staff.
• #40: We have a special offer from Presstacular for today’s attendees. Simply request a demo and get one free IT article to use on your web site, newsletter or to share with your clients and prospect. Just visit Presstacular.com and click on the green Request a Demo button. During your demo, mention the email metrics webinar to get your free article.