Which email do you open? The one from an unknown sender or rather the one from a business colleague or private friend?
Email marketing: Become a millionaire in 10 minutes with one euro?
It was already clear in 1998 who the great loser was: the post office, also referred to mockingly as snail mail. Actually the post has lost an unbelievable amount of business. As an email only costs a bit of electricity, while a letter costs expensive postage. So the entire advertising industry has also plunged into email marketing. To reach 1,000 interested parties, people had grown used to a cost of more than 1,000 euros, including postage, print costs, envelopes, etc. And now only 35 euros for 1,000 recipients! Brilliant!
Or so we thought. And the first did enjoy splendid success.
And today? Honestly, which email do you open? The one from the unknown sender (suspected spam) or the one from your business colleague or private friend (do I know what he wants now)?
For an advertising email to actually arrive, it really has to struggle. Just sending out 50,000 emails makes the anti-spam server as cheerful as can be. A message with "suspicious" advertising words will already be filtered when it reaches the provider. In the end you decide in a fraction of a second whether it is spam or not. Assuming that your program hasn"t already got rid of the email completely automatically.
The purest war.
What are the basic rules for successful email marketing?
The subject line
Take note of your own behaviour. Does an advertising subject line look like something that doesn"t interest you? Then you will delete the email without having opened it, as you have more important things to do. So the subject line is the most important part of your email and you only have 60 characters to motivate a reader to open it.
The content
The goal of the content is to motivate the reader to an action, referred to in specialist jargon as the "Call to Action". Ideally to click on an order button, register or share their opinion. But the reader only does that if he, too, receives an incentive. That might be a price discount, participation in a contest, answer to a question. Preferably time-limited, as otherwise it will be deferred till later and later is often never. Top-Secret
The email records
Valid email addresses of consumers cannot be bought. They can be rented at best. Good email addresses are top secret!
You can certainly buy several million email addresses for a few euros. But these addresses are simply dead, because every spam server knows them. The recipients have long since changed their addresses. At the latest since the 200th commercial email since last Monday morning. The good, "top secret" addresses belong to a company. Very often these addresses are acquired through a sweepstake. The company offers a prize, e.g. an iPad, a trip or even a car. The participants register and in the process leave behind information about their areas of interest or also their age details. The details are often correct, but not always. It is also clear that participants in a sweepstake are not the ideal target group for high-grade investment goods.
Very rarely there are also customer addresses. However the legal data protection conditions are often so high that not many are available.
It should now be obvious that the company doesn"t just give away its "top secret" addresses. If it did, the addresses would be worthless within a few hours. Because nothing is easier than copying a file with 100,000 addresses.
For that reason only email campaigns or newsletter mailings are offered. The sender is the company the addresses belong to. It sends your emails. Not every day. Only as often as its customers can bear it without feeling annoyed.
You receive only a dispatch report after the broadcast. This reports provides information about the dispatch time, number of opened emails and the emails that triggered a "Call to Action", i.e. a link in the email was clicked.
The statistics: About opening and click rate
Now you wonder how high the opening rate is, that is the proportion of recipients who have actually opened the email? There we are back to point number one again. If your subject line is yawnworthily boring, no one opens the email. If you"ve done your homework and have got a very good list (= email addresses), you can now count on an opening rate of 3% to 10%. For technical reasons the opening rate may be higher, as if the recipient has turned images off, it cannot be counted. What would be happy to be left in the dark is the click rate. Because nothing can be clicked on unless the email was opened. That"s where the clickable points appear in the form of links. It is not very serious to make statements about the click rate. If the content of your email gives no reason to click, then no one will. E.G. "Click here for our newsletter" is one of the worst motivations imaginable. In short: you alone decide how high your click rate is by setting up your email successfully.
The master descended from the heavens
Successful email marketing costs lots of experience. Carry out different campaigns multiple times. First try out different subject lines for the best opening rate. Then different content for a better click rate. No campaign should fall below the minimum quantity of 25,000, as otherwise the results are statistically irrelevant. A good idea: Start two different campaigns of 25,000 each at the same time. As different weekdays and times also bring different results.
R.C.
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