I received an email this morning from a colleague in which he responded to an email campaign with a simple question:
“How did this campaign perform?”
It got me thinking. What are the components that determine success/failure of an email campaign. So, on my bike ride to work this morning, I began listing the reasons in my head.
Top 4 Reasons Why Your Email Failed (in order):
- List and/or Segment: This is the single most critical criteria for success. If you have not set proper expectations for your subscribers (content, frequency, offer), they are less likely to respond. If you have not sent a Welcome Message immediately or missed out on proper segmentation…fail.
- From Name and Subject Line: We’ve preached the importance of this one in a past BrontoFire on From Names and the first taping - in one take - of Subject Lines (as you can see, we’ve come a long way with BrontoFire). These two components are the first things that the consumer sees. If they don’t recognize who you are (From Name) or care about what your email is about (Subject Line), they are less likely to open. Fail.
- Content / Copy: It has to be relevant to the subscriber (see #1), viewable with images on and off, and have a clear and compelling call-to-action. Otherwise, why do I care? Fail.
- Landing Page: So, you have the “right” list/segment, a recognizable From Name, a compelling Subject Line, content/copy that is relevant, a clear call-to-action, but…when I click on that call-to-action I’m taken to a landing page that is meaningless. This may mean that the offer is overpriced, the product/service is not what I expected, the landing page is not related to the email (homepage). Fail.
DJ Waldow
Director of Best Practices and Deliverability at Bronto
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And if all of the above were carefully thought out, tested and on target?
It’s the economy, stupid. I just learned to avoid sending emails on days when dire economic news is flooding all media: The conversion rate on our last email was down about 75%.
Unfortunately, dire economic news days are just about every day, at least this month. So as we head into the holidays, I’ll be looking for little breaks or parting-of-the clouds moments to send my emails!
@Kristen -
I respectfully disagree. While I certainly believe that our current economic situation has an impact on conversion rates for email marketing, I think that putting all of the blame on the economy is the easy way out.
Too often, marketers forget the simple aspects of email marketing. I’d challenge you to take a look at some of your campaigns and see if you can make some tweaks.
Thanks for reading and commenting on the blog.
I’ve just signed up for your email list (Yeah - Welcome/Confirm email!) and look forward to seeing good marketing in practice.
dj
Hi DJ,
Thanks for signing up for our newsletter! I agree that the economy can never take all of the blame. But if you already do take all of your listed factors into consideration, I suggest that in these rollercoaster times another consideration might be timing your message, or explicitly crafting your message to the day’s “mood.”
Interestingly, this weekend we started getting conversions from our 10/10 email. A weekend’s respite and a 400 pt uptick on the Dow may be contributing?
Nice list. I write a weekly Marketing Review, and this week ended up being about email, so I have linked to your post (and gave a thumbs up).