Obtain an 18% site conversion rate using conversion driven email marketing campaigns

A large, well known online retailer recently appointed Webexpectations as their Email Service Provider (ESP) to plan and deliver effective email marketing campaigns with revenue as the Key Performance Indicator (KPI).   However, email marketing isn’t only about driving conversions and sales.  Email marketing is also used for:

• Awareness – making your recipients aware of your products and your company
• Consideration – promoting tangible benefits and accelerating interests in your products and company
• Cross selling – stimulating interest in additional products or services you provide using cross selling
• Loyalty – enhancing the relationship with your recipients and extending your customer lifetime value

Wow! 90% of readers use email to engage in and determine the value of a relationship with a company*

Using recognised email marketing and Google Analytics techniques, we produced conversion driven email marketing campaigns resulting in an 18% site conversion rate, generating tens-of-thousands of pounds in revenue and an additional revenue stream to the business.

Email Marketing Techniques

Open rates, open rates, open rates (using Split Testing)

Email marketing is all about getting your message to be read.  If your message isn’t read, it won’t convert.  Split testing was used to maximise the marketing reach directly impacting product revenue and our client’s bottom line. Factors including time of day and what day to send email were also taken into account – these directly affect open rates and revenue.

In a nutshell, email split testing works by testing a percentage of your mailing list, setting a timeout to gather results (based on set criteria) and sending the winning version to your remaining contacts.

Wow! 21 percent of all emails are accessed up to three months after they are received!**

Follow-up campaigns are key to success.  By combining commercial leverage (special offer) and urgency (limited time offer), our client’s email marketing benefited immensely using structured follow-up campaigns.  Check out the graph below demonstrating a second spike in both revenue (higher than the initial send!) and visits.

Designing, building and testing a conversion driven email

Designing and building a conversion driven email is very different to that of a standard website build.  Most email client’s block images, so the build of HTML websites compared to HTML emails is already very different.  Consider the following: should you really put your main call to action and selling points in an image if most email client’s block images by default?  If you really need to do this – are you using ALT text as an image fallback?

Understanding the importance of testing in all the major email client’s instantly reinforces brand image and identity.  If your email looks broken, the impact of your campaign is reduced dramatically.  Who is going to take you serious if you can’t even get an email to look correct?  That’s pretty basic, right?

Bounce processing

Bounce processing is extremely important for any email marketing campaign.  Maintaining a high level of data integrity will allow you to analyse data with far greater accuracy and spot trends and insights you might not necessarily get with an inflated data list.  Periodic bounced email processing was carried out for our client contributing towards greater email deliverability. Various Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) regard repeated emails to non-existent addresses as spamming or harvesting.  As a result, you could get banned from sending mail!

Google Analytics Integration

As Google Analytics authorised consultants, Webexpectations integrated Google Analytics with our client’s email marketing campaign to analyse the performance of traffic throughout the site.

Wow! The use of web analytics to target email campaigns improves revenue by nine times***

The technical setup

Using Google’s URL builder you can configure Google Analytics to track aggregated email traffic.  By combining this with advanced segmentation and custom reporting, KPI’s including revenue and user engagement metrics could be reported on and delivered within seconds of logging into Google Analytics.

Results

Email marketing is still regarded as one of the best online marketing methods around (if carried out, planned and dispatched correctly).  In one particular instance, check out how much better it was!

• Ecommerce Conversion Rate: 389% better than the website average.
• Average Order Value: 20.95% higher than the website average.
• Per Visit Value: 492.22% higher than the website average.

If you would like to add an additional revenue stream to your business or enhance your relationship with your customers using email marketing, contact us today and we will be happy to help.

Credits; book resource: Email Marketing – An Hour A day.

* Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels

** Zinio

*** JupiterResearch