Are high open rates holding you back?

Posted by: | 3 May 2013

Our findings last month on the Obama campaign caused a lot of debate but the bare facts of our analysis still stand – had Obama’s team optimized for improved open rates, their send volumes would have dropped and their all-important donations would have followed.

Open rates remain a widely used and hugely misleading measure of performance and engagement in the email industry. At best they give you an idea of a campaign’s performance in isolation but at worst they lead email marketers to focus on optimizing the wrong strategies for their email program.

Here we discuss how to identify if maximizing open rates is holding you back and how to go about identifying the strategies that will have the biggest impact on your results.

The open rate paradox

Using EDS Analyst we examined the relationship between open rates and total unique opens for the top 200 email senders by list size in the US for 2012.

We were confident that, like the Obama campaign, there would be an inverse relationship between rates and totals – so as rates increase, totals decrease and vice versa. We call this the open rate paradox or to paraphrase a popular sports trusim: rates are for show, totals are for dough.

Each dot on the graph below represents a single sender and we picked out some well-known brands as reference points.

 

Sure enough, the graph shows that for most large senders, there is an inverse relationship between open rates and the total number of opens – the higher the open rate, the lower the number of total opens. Rates are for show.

It’s also no coincidence that nearly all of the brands with the biggest lists (orange dots) also have highest number of total opens because they are sending more opportunities to open.

Although opens don’t directly correlate to revenue, even the most avid fans of open rate maximization would agree that the more people that actually open your emails, the more engaged your database and the more revenue or conversions you are likely to generate. Totals are for dough.

Keep it simple – focus on just three strategies

If your goal is only to improve open rates, then your strategy is simple: halve your list by suppressing your less active subscribers and watch those rates soar… and those total opens plummet! But if your goal is to increase total opens, then the bell curve in the graph above helps define three clear strategies:

  1. List size:
    Has the biggest impact on totals and can be improved independently of the other two.
  2. Increase send volume:
    Significantly increases total opens for relatively little effort (low effort to gain ratio).
  3. Optimize for rates
    Increases total opens but requires the biggest effort (high effort to gain ratio).

Most brands are clustered towards the lower middle of the curve because it’s the easy place to be. By and large, they all put a similar amount of effort into their program and use the same undefined strategies.

The outliers, however, go above and beyond in one of three ways – those to the right have very high open rates, those to the left have high send volumes and those at the top are combining high send frequency with very big lists to produce massive send volumes.

In effect, this is the three different strategies implemented to their extremes.

 

Of course, there are limits to the effectiveness of each strategy and these are defined in the graph above by the orange line to the left (frequency cap) and green line to the right (optimization cap).

These boundaries exist because for any given list size there is point at which diminishing returns kick in for both frequency and open rate. And, as the big empty space to the right of the green optimization cap shows, it’s very hard to send a large volume of email while still achieving a high open rate.

So the basis of a successful email program is to continually grow your list while finding a balance between increasing send volume and maximizing open rates with better offers, targeting, subject lines, etc.

And you find that balance by ignoring your open rates…

Define your strategy by ignoring open rates

To illustrate the effect these strategies have on an email program, we have created a simple optimization chart, below. The green curves represent the impact of send volume on total opens and the brown lines represent the impact of open rate on total opens.

Each intersection represents a hypothetical 10-hour unit of resource, as a means of comparing the effort required to implement each strategy. As you get closer to each cap, the effort required to improve your totals with your chosen strategy increases exponentially.

Imagine your brand is the star in the middle of the curve and you want to take on your leading competitor, the lightning bolt.

If you use open rates to define your strategy, then you focus your resource on maximizing those, route A. Your open rate may now be much better than your competitor’s but they are out-mailing you, so they are still creating twice as many opportunities to buy or convert.

If you choose to increase your send volume, ‘route B’, then your open rate drops but your total opens more than double. However, as you approach the frequency cap, the impact of your strategy diminishes and you still trail your competitor.

If you use totals to define your strategy, then you take ‘route C’, which balances resource between increasing send volume and maximizing open rates. Your open rate drops but you are finally creating more opportunities to buy than your competitor.

Smart email marketing is not just a case of increasing send volume indiscriminately or of only focusing on ever tighter targeting. There is a balance that exists for each brand, you just have to find your own sweet spot.

Want our help optimizing your program?

In this instance, we have highlighted the open rate paradox using total opens because that was the data available. However, we’re confident you will find the same inverse relationship in your own campaigns with total clicks and, more importantly, revenue. And in the end that’s the only metric that matters!

So if you’d like us to help you optimize your email program to beat your competitors, then get in touch.

Dela QuistDela Quist
CEO, Alchemy Worx

How the Obama campaign succeeded with low open rates

Posted by: | 18 Mar 2013

There is little doubt in my mind that email was the No.1 non-political contributor to Obama’s win in the 2012 US Presidential race.  75% of the $934 million raised by Obama was attributed to digital and nearly all of that $700 million was raised through email1.  That fact alone is phenomenal.

But it’s not until you start to drill down into the data to find out why Obama’s email campaign was significantly more effective than Romney’s that the exciting insights start to appear.

Marketing pundits from all channels have offered their opinions. Just look at the word cloud based on the top 15 blogs about Obama’s email strategy – targeting, testing, creative, subject lines – everything but the two biggest contributing factors: list size and mailing frequency.

Why have these been missed? Because it is relatively easy to get a sense of a campaign’s creative, subject line strategy, frequency and, to some extent, personalization by simply subscribing to a list. What you can’t find out is how large that list is or how much segmentation is being done. That makes it almost impossible to know how many emails are actually being sent. Enter eDataSource …

Scratching below the surface with eDataSource

So, we recently took out a subscription to eDataSource and let our analytics team loose on their web-based tool that combines active monitoring of over 800,000 consumer inboxes with a library of millions of digital marketing messages from thousands of brands. This impressive breadth and depth of reporting gave us everything we needed to find out what really made Obama’s email strategy so effective.

First up was to prove my prediction back in October that Obama would win because he was sending significantly more email to more people. Using the Federal Election Commission, we were able to attribute all donations over $250 to each campaign for the 79 weeks running up to the election. We then plotted this against the corresponding weekly send volumes taken from eDataSource in graph 1.

Graph1

 

The trend lines tell the story more succinctly than any blog: the more emails each campaign sent, the more donations each campaign received. If the purpose of each campaign was to generate revenue, then it was frequency and list size that had the biggest impact on performance.

What I couldn’t predict was what we found when we dug deeper into the data – the send volumes for each campaign had a striking correlation with the probability of each campaign winning based on the opinion polls …

Obama – the President who ignored open rates

On graph 2 below, we pulled the send volumes and open rates for both campaigns in the two month run-up to the election and compared these to Nate Silver’s Poll aggregator for the 2012 election. His algorithm has correctly predicted the winner of 99 out of 100 states in the last two elections, so it gave us a highly accurate winning probability at each point during the campaign.

Graph2

As Obama ramps up his send volumes early in the race, his probability of winning increases. Romney also increases his frequency at a similar rate but, because his list size is 15 times smaller, his growth has little effect on the polls. List size matters.

When Obama reduces his send volumes by 38% his probability of winning drops by 42%. By contrast Romney’s campaign grows by 180% and his chances of winning increase by 160%.

In the final push, Romney reduces his send volumes and with it his probability of winning. But his open rates improve by an impressive 14%. Obama takes the opposite approach and aggressively increases his send volumes, which improves his probability of winning.

And Obama’s open rates? They plummet by 14% to a campaign low … and he wins the election.

Obama’s email strategy? Send more, raise more

Had Obama chased open rates would he have lost the election? Well, what we do know is the best way to achieve that goal, as shown by Romney, is to reduce send volumes. Of course, send volumes don’t win elections, donations do. So we set about finding a correlation between send volumes and donations to add weight to our theory.

 Graph3

Graph 3 plots annual donations against annual send volumes and open rates for the Obama campaign. The correlation between send volume and donations is undeniable – in fact, they are close to an exact match. The general trend is for a steady increase over the year until a drop off at election time.

But more interestingly – and this may surprise some people – the relationship between open rates and donations is an inverse one! Or, to put it another way, the higher the open rate, the lower the number of donations.

Why?

Because, broadly speaking, there is an inverse relationship between send volumes and open rates. The more email you send, the lower your open rate is likely to be. But if doubling your send volume only results in a 15% fall in your open rates, then you will be significantly better off.

So why is revenue so closely linked to send volumes? Because people cannot engage with an email they do not receive. Replace the word ‘email’ with ‘opportunity to donate’, and “an extra email send to 1 million people” becomes, “let’s send another 1 million opportunities to donate”.

While relevance, engagement, creative, subject lines, testing and targeting all played a part in Obama’s success, they pale into insignificance when compared to the impact of reach, frequency and list size. And best of all? With email, you can optimize all of these at near-zero marginal cost.

But does it work in retail? Hell yeah!

Obama’s campaign is one of the few examples of a noted sender admitting that increasing frequency works. The data backs it up, too. But does it work outside of the rarefied world of political fundraising? The answer is “hell yeah!”

With the help of EDS Analyst, you too can find out if you are being out-mailed by your competitors. If the answer is “yes”, then they are probably out-selling you as well – and we shall be digging down into the data for that particular topic in next month’s blog. Keep your eyes peeled.

If you’d like to know more about how we use EDS Analyst to optimize email strategy, then get in touch.  And if you want to replicate Obama’s success for your own email program, then feel free to use these strategy ideas from this post from our blog: FIVE reasons why open reach will revolutionize your email marketing.

More next month …

Dela QuistDela Quist
CEO, Alchemy Worx

Our favorite emails of Q4

Posted by: | 24 Jan 2013

What better way to kick off 2013 than a look back at some of the best emails of Q4.There were plenty to choose from at this busy time of year but we’ve decided not to include anything seasonal – it can be a little depressing looking back at jolly, full-fat Christmas campaigns in the middle of an abstemious January!

So it’s over to you to help us choose an overall winner by voting in our Subscribers’ Choice Awards. There are four categories – ‘Best Design’, ‘Best Copy’, ‘Best Strategy’ and new for this year, ‘Best Subject Line’. See if you agree with our rationale then simply choose the email you think is strongest in the voting box at the bottom of the page

Your Q2, 2012 winner
Brooks Brothers mailing won the Subscribers’ Choice Award for Q2, with a 73% of the vote. For more sparks of email inspiration, check out the Q2 shortlist.

BEST DESIGN
Simple = powerful
Winner: ASOS – Like it, Click it
Subject Line: Top to toe. Automatically gorgeous

Why we chose it
Every creative area in this email has been well thought out, well executed and works together to produce a strong, on-brand marketing message. The design is simple and the flipbook-style animation is engaging while also displaying multiple products. In essence, it is a portal to ASOS’ world of online fashion retail, designed to make customers click and to leave a positive brand impression.

Why it’s great

WHO: The logo is front and center – but remove it and the clean styling, pastel colors and quirky shapes still identify this as ASOS.

WHAT: So what should I do in this email? Quite simply – Like it, Click it! The product is the star and the action of mixing, matching and choosing is what clothes shopping is all about. There is no clutter – all secondary messages, indexes, nav bars, roundels, flashes and sub-heads have been stripped out. The focus is a single core proposition: find something you like. A clear and concise headline summarizes the content and simple CTAs tell you what to do.

WHY: The design of the flipbook is very tactile, it’s begging to be clicked, even without the animation. The first frame of the animation is the strongest, so should it fail to work in some browsers, the strength of the message is undiminished. The panels and quirky pastel triangles look clickable and the big text-only CTA uses ‘like’ and ‘click’ – two of the most powerful digital action words. And even on such an uncomplicated email, there are multiple CTAs and areas to click. These take you through to a dedicated landing page with a fully interactive flipbook that links to the individual sales pages.

 

BEST COPY
Less is more
Winner: RNIB – can’t view this email properly
Subject Line: ##name##, imagine if every email looked like this

Why we chose it
You may already be familiar with this email by Elvis Communications, as it has been doing the rounds since March in many “Best Email Creative” blogs and votes. However, we have chosen it for its copy. At first glance that might seem odd as there are only 25 words but having the confidence and talent to write just a few words to convey a powerful message is what great digital and charity copywriting is all about. It is also a good example of copy and design working together to create a message that is greater than the sum of its parts. Finally, it shows that email creative, particularly for charities, can be approached in a similar style to above-the-line brand advertising.

Why it’s great

WHO: Interestingly and unusually the branding for this email has been placed at the bottom of the page, much like a printed poster. That goes against email best practice but the trick with all best-in-class creative is knowing when to break the rules to achieve standout. Having the branding at the bottom allows the power of the message to sink in before you know who it is from.

WHAT: The strength of this email is in the simplicity of the idea and the simplicity of the execution. Charities rely heavily on emotional triggers but are at their most effective when they place their subscribers in the shoes of the people they are aiming to help. So the use of personalization in the subject line is very effective – we want YOU to imagine how this would affect YOU.

WHY: The copy gets straight to the point by placing the recipient in a familiar situation – “Can’t view this email properly?” before delivering the emotional punch, “If only everyone could see with the click of a mouse”. This simple line changes the emotional pull of the message. It’s no longer about sympathy for the plight of people who face this problem every day, but about the guilt that all YOU have to do to conquer this problem is a click a mouse. Guilt is a much more powerful emotional trigger than sympathy. And the final line offers an action to assuage that guilt – “Click here to help blind and partially sighted children”.

 

BEST STRATEGY
Sell & harvest with 1st contact
Winner: Caribou Coffee – welcome email

Why we chose it
Welcome emails can be wordy, functional affairs designed to make sure a real person is behind the request or so brands can talk about themselves. However, welcome emails arrive in a customer’s inbox at probably the most engaged they will ever be, so they are an opportunity to get a sale/conversion or extra piece of data straight off the bat. Caribou Coffee’s bright, engaging welcome email does just this. (Although our production team marked it down because of the image break on the milkshake. Sorry guys – but it’s still a good strategy idea!)

Why it’s great

WHO: The pastel colors, hand-drawn typography and subtle watermark are all instantly recognizable as the distinctive style of Caribou Coffee.

WHAT: Apply the ‘1 second test’ to this email and you come away with two clear messages – “THANK YOU!” and “TODAY’S OFFERS”. One is signposting you to the reason why you have received this email, while the other is directing you straight to the actions that you should take. In addition, each offer has a dual purpose – the birthday offer gathers birth dates and promotes brand, the $1 OFF encourages a shop sale and collects an address with the coupon, and the free shipping promotes online sales as well as increasing AOV. There is also a ‘click here’ for preferences to gather information that will be useful for segmentation and frequency. So even in an email that is often perceived as transactional – Caribou Coffee is collecting useful data, promoting brand and potentially making money. And isn’t that what email marketing is all about?

WHY: There are multiple opportunities to click and engage – from the bullets, to the offers, to the preferences, to the nav at the top. More importantly, incentives are used in exchange for information. If you want useful data points from your customers, then give them incentives to dos so when they are at their most engaged. It’s likely to be the best opportunity you ever have.

 

BEST SUBJECT LINE
A clever twist on an old message
NEW CATEGORY!
Best Subject Line

Winner: Astley Clarke – Charming Christmas
Subject Line: A rather peculiar 21% off

Why we chose it
We’ve introduced ‘Best Subject Line’ as a category for two reasons: firstly, because we believe subject lines are very important and secondly, because Astley Clarke’s “A rather peculiar 21% off” is one of the best we have seen for a while. What got us talking was the choice of a 21% saving. Why not 20% or 25%? Because 21% is unusual and allows for an intriguing subject line that delivers on its promise. We even checked our own database of half a billion subject lines and couldn’t find a single use of the word ‘peculiar’! In all likelihood, this subject line is unique and not many can claim to have produced one of these that is also so intriguing and effective. Not so peculiar after all.

Why it’s great

WHO: Nice, big, smart looking logo is beautifully complimented by an elegant design style and high-quality product photography. Everything about this email has a luxury feel so even if you don’t take any further action you connect that elegance with Astley Clarke.

WHAT: It’s a sale that doesn’t mention savings. Heavy discounts can cheapen a brand, particularly in the luxury sector. So Astley Clarke entices you through the ‘shop door’ with a juicy and intriguing offer before dazzling you with their gorgeous jewelry rather than garish savings. The quality of their photography assets has allowed them to design a beautiful email that pulls you down the page through the product. There is also a ‘Men’s Cheat Sheet’ CTA that takes you to a landing page designed to help men make the right choice. Any clickers on the CTA are likely to be male subscribers and could be targeted later.

WHY: Selling jewelry is all about making the product look stunning. This email does this superbly by making the product the star of the show – you just want to reach out and click on them, which of course, you can do.




The truth behind the buzz: what really made the difference in Obama’s re-election

Posted by: | 19 Dec 2012

Obama campaign team send 6 fundraising emails a day

One of the big stories in digital marketing in recent months has been about a campaign whose results have a major impact on people around the world – the US Presidential Election. Marketing pundits representing all channels have had an opinion on how Obama’s campaign led to his re-election but I would argue none was more significant than the use of email.

Let me start by saying there is no doubt this election was won by email. Here is a direct quote from an article published by Business Week; “Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails”. And by the way, $690 million represents nearly 75% of the $934 million raised in what ended up being the most expensive Presidential election in US history. This makes email, by far and away the No1 non-political contributor to the drubbing of Mitt Romney.

So why has there been so little said about this incredible achievement by email marketing pundits, ESP’s or their PR machines? When you look at the fuss made over the 2008 campaign – allegedly won by social media – the silence from the email industry has been deafening. When anyone does mention it, there has been a tendency to attribute the success of Obama’s email fundraising activities to anything other than email.

Some may suggest that without the “age old lessons [and presumably wisdom]” passed down from wise-old DM to rather awkward, gauche and somewhat unattractive email marketing the story would have been very different.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is what really happened. Obama won because he sent more email to more people more often than Romney period!

According to numbers put out by eDataSource and Return Path, Obama mailed a staggering 40+M subscribers compared with Romney’s 4M, on some days they sent 350M compared with 26M from Romney. So while relevance, engagement, creative – ugly or otherwise, Subject Line testing etc. did play some part in his success, they pale into insignificance compared to the impact reach and frequency had in his success.

What seasoned email marketers might find surprising (I see this as further proof of the fact that frequency drives engagement) is that the Obama database was more engaged and less likely to view the emails they received as spam. The figures below which I extrapolated from numbers published by eDataSource and Return Path illustrate this clearly:

Obama Read 15.85% Total 6,340,000
Romney Read 7.94% Total 317,600
Obama Delete Unread 9.01% Total 3,604,000
Romney Delete Unread 5.11% Total 204,400
Obama ISP Spam 17.95% Total 7,180,000
Romney ISP Spam 52.51% Total 2,100,400
Obama User-Marked Spam 0.02% Total 800,000
Romney User-Marked Spam 0.03% Total 120,000

The Obama campaign raised an average of $17.25 per subscriber, if you assume Romney was able to do the same, he would have generated $69M from email compared to Obama’s $690M. So if you were Romney what would you have learned from this, A) Segment and test your way to $172.50 per subscriber or B) Send email to a lot more people more often?

Email delivers something DM cannot. Broadcast reach at near zero marginal cost.

If you don’t want to leverage that, stop sending email!

I have read lots of peoples’ take on the article and what they found most interesting and would like to share mine – something Bloomberg Business Week chose to call a counterintuitive. I don’t and I think it is an awesome admission: “Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and won’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent”. Now read the comments made by the very people who made the campaign successful. Note how few said they enjoyed the blitz yet on average they donated $17.25 each.

Now that’s an insight!

I know for certain that they are not the first people to have worked this out, but they are the first significant entity to come out and say it.

Let’s give credit where credit is due in the 2012 presidential election; segmentation, targeting and testing techniques were the tail, reach and frequency were the DOG!

FIVE reasons why open reach will revolutionise your email marketing

Posted by: | 19 Nov 2012

Pretty big claim! But we’ve been measuring open reach across a range of clients and industries for seven years and have unearthed a wealth of valuable insights that underline why this metric should become the lynchpin of your marketing strategy.

So what is open reach?
It’s a customer engagement metric that measures the proportion of your base who have opened at least one message over a period of time. You can apply reach to all standard metrics, like click or purchase, but here we are focusing on open reach.

And how do you measure it?
Open reach is calculated by counting the number of subscribers on your list that have opened at least once and dividing that by the number of subscribers that have received at least one email from you over a given time period. This could be a quarter or a year, depending on your send frequency and specific goals.


Now to the juicy bit, those five reasons why open reach will revolutionise your email marketing:

1. Forget “what are my campaigns doing” – learn “what are my customers doing”
How often do you ask “what are my customers doing?” And yet, nearly all email metrics answer something different – “what are my campaigns doing?” So why is this disconnect in our industry? Because conventional email metrics, like open and click, only measure the performance of individual campaigns. They do not give you any insight into customer behaviour. However, open reach doesn’t just assess the value of the content and creative of your individual mailings, it also builds a clear picture of the overall performance of your campaigns and the health of your database.

Consider this example: if your newsletter has an average open rate of 21%, does that mean that after sending out 5 messages, every subscriber has opened at least one message? Maybe, maybe not.  It is far more likely that there is a group of subscribers that open every email as well as a group that never open. But that is just an educated guess. There is no way of gaining this valuable learning about your customers by looking at open rate. You have to use open reach to find the answer.

2. Want to improve your revenue? Just improve your open reach
We’ve noticed that a significant chunk of total revenue is generated when customers who have never opened or haven’t opened for ages, open one of your emails for the first time (graph 1). Although multiple openers have a much higher response rate than first time openers, they account for only a small percentage of total revenue over a given period because they are a much smaller group. First time openers generate significantly more total revenue in the same period because they are a much larger group.

Although it’s easy (and common) to focus on the small group with the best response rate because the open and clicks look great, it’s the much larger lower-responding group that will give you the biggest increase in your total revenue.  So the short term goal of increasing open and click rates is replaced by the longer term strategy of converting non-openers into first time openers, and then those first time openers into the higher-responding  multiple openers group. All you have to do is unearth the different ways to move your customers up the engagement chain. And guess what, open reach shows you the best way to do that …

Graph 1
Graph 1

3. Customers and prospects behave differently – so treat them differently
So, how do you move your customers up the chain? First, you have to understand how first time openers and multiple openers respond to your emails in comparison to each other. Let’s say you send out a free delivery offer to your entire base. Open rates and revenue for that campaign are both above average. You send out a SAVE 20% offer and both metrics are again above average. They are both a success, right? So based on those metrics you would keep sending these two different types of offer to your entire base.

But look at the open reach for these offers and you’d see that the free delivery had very little effect on cumulative first time opens, whereas the discount offer had significantly more. A free delivery offer has less interest to someone who isn’t buying regularly but does appeal to someone who is. Likewise, a juicy discount is far more likely to engage someone who has been inactive for a while. By analysing open reach you can identify what appeals to these different groups and target them with the appropriate offer and message. Your customers are telling you how they want to engage with your brand, so use open reach to listen, learn and lift your response.

4. Isn’t reactivation an expensive chore? Then start doing it with every email you send
Now you’ve identified your different groups in the engagement chain and how to press their buttons, you’ll notice that the first step in the chain – non-opener to first time openers – is actually the same as reactivating inactives. So you can stop thinking of them as inactives and start thinking of them as opted-in prospects (graph 2). You’ll rarely have to bother with a one-off, low-margin reactivation campaign because every email you send will be a reactivation opportunity.

And it doesn’t just stop there. The insights you gain from analysing what motivates your non-openers to become first time openers will inform your new reactivation strategy. There’s no need to send pleading “we miss you emails” when your open reach analysis is telling you that a SAVE 20% offer has significantly increased first time openers. That’s a measurable trigger for this group, so use it and all the other customer insights open reach will drop in your lap.

Graph 2
Graph 2

5. Learn what really drives engagement
Open reach will also show you that new subscribers to your list are the most likely to become first time openers. Sounds obvious, so why is it important? Well, in essence this is saying that one of the best ways to increase your revenue is to grow your list. New subscribers = increased first time openers = more revenue. But, while growing your list is an important part of any email strategy, it is an expensive way to increase revenue.

There is a more cost effective way and, you’ve guessed it, it can be identified and optimised using open reach. It’s frequency. Periodically increasing the frequency of your emails increases your first time openers. In graph 3 below, a client who was sending a monthly email changed to a weekly. Result? The monthly had an open rate of 17%, while the weekly emails averaged just 10%. However, when the open reach was measured the weekly emails were found to have significantly increased the number of first time openers. Total opens for monthly = 9,008, total opens for weekly over the same period = 21,006 (unsubscribes were statistically insignificant). Inactives were engaged by extra sends because, to state the obvious, they had three more opportunities to do so.  Had only conventional metrics been used to measure this test, then it would have been seen as a failure. Increased frequency = more opportunities to engage = better open reach = more revenue in the long run. And which one of your stakeholders could argue with that?

Graph 3
Graph 3

 Your 5-step plan:

1)      Start measuring your open reach and see what your customers are doing
2)      Identify your non-openers, first time openers and multiple openers
3)      Compare the behaviour of each group and use that knowledge to target them
4)      Treat your non-openers as opted in prospects and reactivate them with every email
5)      Increase your revenue by increasing  your open reach by increasing your frequency

Key stats from the DMA’s UK Email Tracking Report

Posted by: | 31 Oct 2012

“These insights explain why email is still the primary driver of commerce on the web.”
Dela Quist, Alchemy Worx CEO

The DMA/fast.MAP Email Tracking Study is one of the most valuable pieces of consumer research available to email marketers because it is the only one of its kind that focuses on what consumers actually think of and do with email.

Once again it shows consumers actively choosing to receive more email from an increasing number of brands. Consumers have long acknowledged that email is their preferred method of hearing from brands and these findings show that marketers are responding to this preference by delivering more valuable and engaging content.

This infographic provides a convenient, at at-a-glance resource for the headline figures. The insights from this study are of great value to the industry and Alchemy Worx is proud to support the DMA and the work of the Email Marketing Council.

View the infographic now >

The myth of inbox overload

Posted by: | 11 Oct 2012

This is the third instalment of Fear and Self-loathing in Email Marketing, Dela Quist’s iconoclastic take on the industry to which he’s devoted over 20 years of his career.

Read it now: The myth of inbox overload

In the last chapter, Dela lamented the corrosive effect that unfounded fears about being seen as a spammer have had on the legitimate email marketing industry. An excessively cautious attitude has led to unnecessarily stringent self-policing about send frequencies – and many missed opportunities in terms of revenue and campaign development.Hand in hand with spam paranoia goes the myth of inbox overload, subject of this month’s chapter.

Dela argues that those who predict that the world’s citizens are about to riot because they’re being bombarded with too much email, fail to notice that an inbox is made up of many different kinds of mail. Subscribers see these different categories of email very differently, and are remarkably proficient at sorting their electronic mail. Much of that mail is essential to recipients, most of the unwanted stuff never gets seen, and legitimate marketing emails are only a tiny fraction of the whole.

Given all that, why do email marketers feel the need to take the blame for a crisis that isn’t their doing – and isn’t even going to happen?

Also in this chapter:

  • How marketers don’t send nearly as many emails as people think
  • The art of email triage
  • Why ‘inbox overload’ is nothing compared to ‘search overload’

Are your emails s***?

Posted by: | 24 Aug 2012

Welcome to another chapter of Fear and Self-loathing in Email Marketing, Dela Quist’s iconoclastic take on the industry he’s devoted over 20 years of his career to.

Read it now: Are your emails s***?

Are your emails s***? is likely to ruffle a few feathers. In it, Dela argues that spam is primarily a problem of perception and not reality.

It is time, he says, for legitimate email marketers – who bend over backwards not to be seen as spammers – to stop feeling so guilty about something they don’t even do. And to get on and see what happens if they send an extra email.

No one would send spam if it didn’t get results, after all, and regular marketers can get results using the same techniques that work for spammers.

Also in this chapter:

  • Why it’s not the end of the world if teenagers don’t open your emails
  • What to say when someone tells you ‘spam is anything someone thinks is spam’
  • Why spam wouldn’t have caught on if IT departments weren’t such big Monty Python fans

Read part 1 of Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing now:
Unlocking the brand potential of email marketing

Extra chapter – read about Dela’s journey in email marketing, and why he’s uniquely placed to write this series:
Why should you listen to me?

Are you getting the most out of testing?

Posted by: | 8 Aug 2012

When you run an email test, do you test for the right reasons and in a way that will deliver real results?

At Alchemy Worx, we’d be the first to agree that testing can be an extremely valuable investment of time – we certainly see it as an essential element of any long-term email marketing strategy. But the most valuable tests require a significant amount of resource across all elements – from planning, design and HTML production, to deployment and analysis of the results.

This poses a challenge to email marketers, who for years have been told that testing is the ‘responsible’ way to make changes to their email marketing programme. Because the channel allows it, the received wisdom goes, email marketers are expected to prove a concept before implementing any new idea.

Unfortunately, with the sort of time and resource constraints that marketing departments are experiencing in these times of austerity, any significant investment in testing is seen as a luxury that the business can’t afford, or at least not on any ongoing, consistent basis.

The result: an attitude of extreme caution to trying new approaches without first testing them that may be counter-productive. Companies that don’t have time to plan and execute a proper test miss opportunities and tread water instead of diving in and making a change.

In this way, the mantra of ‘Test, Test, Test’ can hold back real results and is another symptom of Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing, a condition that Dela Quist, Alchemy Worx CEO, explores in his new book of the same name. Fear and Self-Loathing – the misplaced anxiety that we are emailing too much or overloading inboxes, for instance – can have an adverse impact on a wide variety of strategic decisions, from permission and opt-ins to frequency, content – and testing.

Go with your gut instinct
We’re all agreed: done right, testing can uncover unexpected opportunities and, where possible, should be an integral part of your long-term email marketing strategy. BUT: don’t let it stop you from trying new things.

Testing minimizes risk and certainly helps to optimize elements of your campaigns. But no matter how well-planned and executed, no test will be 100% accurate. External influences such as the weather and the economic climate cannot be controlled, for instance, and can have significant impact on campaign performance; running a test on a single campaign will not uncover the long-term impact of that test.

If you don’t have the time to run a statistically significant test, why not take a risk instead? You know your subscribers, and you have valuable instincts about what will and won’t work. So go with your gut and try something different. Making excuses about the lack of resources to run the perfect test will likely cost you more in the long-term than the risk in trying something new.

What, after all, is the worst that could happen? Most of the uplifts seen by testing are small and steady, and even running a test that has a positive uplift means that you will have to keep deploying a less effective campaign for a period of time. The potential benefits of trying something different are likely to outweigh any possible losses – if you can bring yourself to just take a risk.

Work that test plan
When you do get the opportunity to do some proper testing, here’s how to develop an email test plan in 5 easy steps:

  1. Define your hypothesis
    Clearly defining what you’re hoping to achieve through testing will help focus your efforts and keep you on track throughout the process.
  2. Mine your historical data
    To pinpoint the areas that are likely to have the biggest impact – and minimize the number of tests you need to do – take a look at what’s been done before.
  3. Design your test plan
    Take a long-term view and develop a test plan that involves making small, regular changes to your campaign – but remember to build in an element of flexibility to take into account the results that emerge.
  4. Deploy your campaigns
    Remember to allow for the extra resource that testing will require.
  5. Analyze your results
    Wait as long as you can to assess the results – then update your hypothesis and start the whole cycle again.

Introducing Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing…

Posted by: | 25 Jul 2012

A new book by Alchemy Worx CEO Dela Quist – available as a series of essays, free to Email-Worx subscribers every month

Every business – every brand – believes email has a place in its marketing activity. When did you last hear of a company saying, “We’ve decided to stop sending email”? But all the current books on email marketing make the subject seem unnecessarily complex and technical, and they inject a lot of anxiety about inbox overload, over-mailing, wastage and spam.

The inconvenient truth about email marketing, of course, is that spam works: most of the time, nothing is likely to make you more money than sending another email. But legitimate email marketers – who work with permission and are nothing like spammers – fail to maximise the huge commercial opportunities of frequent, branded email contact because they’re terrified of being accused of filling inboxes with junk.

This attitude of fear and self-loathing is holding email marketing back from achieving the profile and share of budget that it so richly deserves.

Unlocking the brand potential of email

In this book published as a series of essays, Dela Quist looks at how to unlock the brand potential of email in terms of the key issues of concern to email marketers, such as spam, deliverability, inbox overload, subject lines, testing and measuring success.

In each essay, the author – founder and CEO of the UK’s only dedicated email agency, with over 20,000 hours devoted to the subject already – shows how much of received industry wisdom about email marketing is motivated by misplaced fear and a misunderstanding of how email works as a marketing medium.

In Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing, Dela proposes a new approach that combines insights gleaned from long experience with practical techniques that any email marketer can start applying to their own campaigns. He offers simple, cost-effective ways that businesses large and small can use email to transform their commercial success.

And he develops a simple but rarely heard argument about how you can use email to boost your bottom line by tapping into its potential as a brand-building broadcast medium.

It’s a message any business can tap into to deliver real returns, from the neighbourhood restaurant to the global insurance provider. The book will appeal to anyone who markets a business, from professional marketers to sole traders to consultants, whether B2B or B2C. And it’s all yours, free.

Read part 1 of Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing now:
Unlocking the brand potential of email marketing

Extra chapter – read about Dela’s journey in email marketing, and why he’s uniquely placed to write this series:
Why should you listen to me?