March 2009

Boost Your Email Marketing Conversion Rates in 5 Quick Steps

The Proven Secret For Higher Open and Conversion Rates

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about putting banks through a “stress test” before the government gives them any more bail-out money.

Ironically, that’s what successful email marketers have been doing for years with their email campaigns. In the process, they’ve produced double-digit increases in their open rates and conversion ratios.

Best of all, this not-so-secret strategy can be boiled down to 5 simple steps that you can use to boost your email marketing results right away.

1. Believe in ESPs

By ESP, I mean email service providers.

Unless you have no plans to grow your mailing list to more than a few dozen prospects, you should never use your Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo or Gmail to handle your email marketing. Yes, these platforms have effective features for business communication. But they’re not really built for email marketing … at least on a large scale.

In fact, these personal email accounts intentionally make it difficult for businesses to send email blasts.

If you’re serious about email marketing, you need to sign up with an effective email service provider. The most popular ESPs for many organizations and small businesses are Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) and iContact (www.icontact.com).

They provide a range of tools that makes it easy to create and send marketing email blasts to thousands of people:

Easy-to-use templates. You can create professional-looking announcements, newsletters, e-cards and other email marketing pieces in a few minutes.

CAN-SPAM compliance. ESPs handle much of the legal requirements that all email marketers must follow, as well as grade your proposed email for spaminess.

Tracking and reporting. They’re able to provide you with detailed reports on who opened and acted on your emails.

List management. Maintaining an effective and legitimate mailing list is crucial for any direct marketing campaign … and easier with ESPs.

Lastly, ESPs also integrates with your website and emails to help increase your mailing lists with genuine prospects. Their subscription panels can be inserted into your website and email code for quick sign-ups.

2. Clean lists

Before you launch your next email campaign, take the time to use your ESP’s list management tool to clean your mailing list.

Although ESPs will automatically remove subscribers who opt out of your mailing list, they usually leave it up to you to delete bad email addresses and duplicates. Fortunately, their list management systems will tell you which addresses are not functioning.

If you don’t take the time to clean out the non-functioning email addresses in your list, you really won’t be able to know how effective your emails really are.

Don’t just delete all email address that “bounce”! Some bounces are due to an over-the-limit email account that may start accepting more emails at a later date. You also may want to identify those bouncing email addresses and see if you can contact that person by phone or mail to get an updated address.

3. Establish your benchmarks

People who embark on a serious fitness or weight-loss program usually start with a check-up to see how much they weigh or how strong they currently are. Those initial measurements provide a benchmark that can be used to measure progress.

The same goes with marketers looking to improve their email marketing performance.

If you’ve been using your ESP for a while, you should already have a long list of email campaigns that can be used to establish your benchmark. Start by calculating the average open and click-through rates for various types of campaigns. You’ll want to focus on these rates as you look for ways to improve your emails.

If you haven’t been using an ESP and have no benchmark, I recommend running a handful of typical email marketing campaigns over the next couple of months. This will provide you with the results you need to establish a preliminary benchmark.

4. Test, test, test for success!

Now it’s time to put your emails through a little stress test to make sure that you’re sending the most effective email available.

This method involves sending at least two variations of your emails to a small percentage of your mailing list. The email that delivers the best open and conversion rates will then be the one you’ll send to the rest of your mailing list.

For example, let’s say you have a mailing list of 2,000 prospects.

Take a random sampling of 200 prospects.
Divide that sample into two groups of 100 recipients each.
Send proposed email “A” to one group of 100 recipients.
Then send competing email “B” to the other group of 100 recipients.
If “B” outperforms “A,” then you should send email “B” to the remaining 1,800 prospects in your mailing list.

For this strategy to succeed, you need large lists. The absolute minimum would be a list size of at least 500. The larger the better!

Then start testing different elements such as…

Subject lines
Email designs
Calls to action
Longer “detailed” emails vs. shorter “teaser” emails
Personalized (with recipient’s name) or not

The emails don’t have to be that different from each other. In fact, it’s best to compare emails that are exactly alike except for the one or two features that you’re testing.

Note that when you’re only testing two variations of an email, marketers call that “A/B” testing. If you have a much larger list, you can actual run what they call “multivariate testing,” which involves testing at least three variations of the same email blast.

It’s important to remember, however, that you’re testing for a purpose. You’re trying to find the best email available.

Think of it as a try-out for a baseball team. You want the best players available for certain positions. You make them run scrimmages and skills tests to see who does the best. Then you send them out to try to win games.

The same applies for testing email campaigns. Your tests are try-outs that will help you determine which email will bring you the most clients.

5. Keep testing the champ

The email that wins your tests is your champion. It becomes your benchmark.

But it’s only your champion if it keeps producing results.

You also never want to stop testing. As successful agents and brokers know, there’s always room to improve.

Still, your testing does change once you find a champion email. Your future tests will all probably be run against that champion. As long as that winning email keeps generating better or even similar results than all other competing email variations, you should stick with it.

But you should never stop looking for your next champ!

Silverback Strategy

Test Your Landing Page Too!

Successful web marketers don’t just test their emails. They also test their email landing pages.

If you don’t use landing pages, it’s time you started. You rarely want your email marketing blasts to send prospects to your home page. Instead, you want to direct them to a landing page that’s specifically designed to convert the people who decided to follow the links in your email.

The simplest way to test landing pages is to divide your email link between two competing landing pages.

For example, let’s say you’ve tested your emails and determined your winning message. Now make two versions of that email and run another round of tests. The only difference between these two new emails is the hyperlink address that sends click-throughs to separate landing pages:

Landing page “A”: one test email will point all links to landing page “A.”
Landing page “B”: the other test email will point all links to landing page “B.”

As with your email tests, look for the landing page that converts a higher percentage of its visitors.

This winning landing page should then be paired with your winning email — and be sent to the rest of your mailing list.

Jeremiah Desmarais is vice president of marketing at Norvax, a company whose web-based tools help insurance agents consistently increase productivity by 2500%. He is the recipient of 10 awards for his marketing and design initiatives online. He is also editor of the Norvax Newsletter, which delivers helpful sales articles, tips and marketing strategies to 15,000+ insurance agents monthly. Author of several white papers, Jeremiah is a contributor to the Agent’s Sales Journal, Health Insurance Underwriter and Broker World, as well as a guest speaker at various carrier events and workshops. He is a member of the Society of Industry Leaders. Learn more at www.norvax.com

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