Five Techwe are
Sep 11, 2008

Email Marketing Case Study On Our Web Design E-letters

email marketing e-letterWant to see what someone else gets for open rates and click thru’s on their email marketing? OK, I’ll share with you what we’ve experienced this summer with our small start to email marketing for our web design and Internet marketing services.

Five Technology’s Email Marketing Facts:

  • With Five Technology as a new brand/company to start 2008 we inherited a small list from our parent company Intrcomm.
  • Our first e-letter went out to 149 contacts, over 80% we’re existing clients that had received an announcement letter of Five’s launch about a month earlier.
  • We have increased our email list to 195 contacts in just by verbally asking or telling potential / new clients we will add them as a way to keep in touch with them.
  • We are experimenting with content, value and calls to action. The whole point is to research, refine, report and review.
  • We send out a monthly e-letter on a Tuesday morning (10am or so), mid month.

I’ve talked before about the value of email marketing. The ability to get “inbox time” with a client or prospect is the top benefit. The secondary benefit of email marketing for me is the tracking and reporting. You can actually see what your audience does with your message and apply measurement to it.

+ Open Rate: How Many People Are Opening Your E-letter
You can see that we have had a consistent open rate with 36%, 38% and 41% range on our campaigns after a low of 29% to start. Not a surprise that our first broadcast had a lower number, it was unexpected by our audience to a certain degree. We’re encouraged by our recent high of 41% on our last campaign. We hope to hit a 50% open rate in the next two months.

email marketing stats

Keys To A Successful Open Rate:

1. A subject title that is concise and states the value or benefit clearly.

2. Picking a content/subject that has value and relevance to your audience.

3. Feature great content. To get improvement on your opens, you must get those who do open to find it valuable (that’s value for a third time). This builds a following of openers and allows your “newbies” to help increase your open rate.

+ Click-Thrus: Getting Your Readers To Take Action
After you get your audience to open your e-letter, your next goal should be to get them to take action. For some, just getting their name or message to a reader is fine, but a truly good email marketing campaign has goals to be achieved. Clicking a link to buy, fill out a request form, set-up a meeting or get a free report are all examples of a goal for an email campaign. We have had both success and failure with our click-thrus, but we have learned a lot.

Keys To Successful Click-Thrus

  • Clearly state, show and offer a call to action
  • Test and learn what your audience responds to:
    • Money saving offers
    • Free reports
    • Urgency or time sensitive offers
    • Limited quantity offers

Here is our best campaign for click-thrus. It was where our call to action combined a money saving offer and limited availability. Offering half priced video production to only 3 customers was a success. We generated interest beyond the offer.

email click thrus

+ Success Past One Open & One Week
A great thing we have noticed is how our recipients go back and open our e-letters multiple times, even weeks or months after getting it. While we have yet to make any determinations on why we can only speculate that they found the content/information of value and revisited it to review, get a link or grab our contact info. Having some “shelf-life” to our email communication is great and we look forward to building upon this as well. It caused you to think about your message and how to make it one that has longevity past one read or click.

email open reports month to month

Summary Of Our Email Marketing Campaign
So as you can see, we have had some successes and some challenges lie ahead. Each time we have sent out our monthly e-letter it has generated opens, clicks, contact forms and phone calls. That’s the goal and we love watching it happen (and tracking it).

We also have some challenges ahead in continuing to deliver valuable content to a growing list. I hope that the next blog post on our email marketing program covers how we have implemented and succeeded at list building and nudged our open rate over the 50% mark.

If you have anything to offer or would even share a few of your email marketing numbers or findings, we’d love a comment from you or your business.

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