Informz, an email service provider for associations and non-profits, has published their annual association email marketing benchmark report. One of the key findings is that relevancy, not timing, is key (for this industry). The report contains data from 700 assocations using their platform, and those are located in the US, Canda, UK, New Zealand and Australia. Email volume sent over 2011 amounts to about 600 million.
Key findings of the report as noted in the press release: (more…)
Just a few days ago, Anna Yeaman of Style Campaign posted an update on their blog about DIS tech, or Dynamic Image Server tech. This technology displays dynamic (video) imagery on the fly in a user’s email client. After viewing the demo video (available below for watching) I was highly impressed, so I got in touch with Anna and requested some more information. Below the video are some questions and answers about this new technology.
How does it work?
The technology works based on time of day, location, device used and other variables. With these factors taken into account the images are generated on opening the message in real-time accordingly. The countdown to Xmas was a nice example: each day (of 5 days in total) the imagery in the received email was dynamically generated to include a new one. Take note that the receiver’s time zone is taken into account in this example. The streaming technology is DRM compliant. There is in-built copy protection, as the video content is never cached on the client device.
Is it difficult to use or make content for?
Using it is simple and content can be created in a normal fashion. The actual sending is not done by Style Campaign, just the dynamic imagery hosting part. After the content creation, the dynamic image urls are sent to the sender who can use them in their message(s).
Info for the tech geeks
DIS is a proprietary HTTP server. It’s written in C and built specifically to serve dynamically generated images quickly and efficiently. All drawing routines are written in highly optimized C code for maximum performance (100xPHP or 10xJava) minimizing concurrency when under load. With a relatively small memory footprint it allows for maximum scalability.
More info on the technology, with extra examples can be found on the Style Campaign website here. I’d like to thank Anna Yeaman for providing the info and the imagery!
Back in the days when I was running a pirate radio station, still in high school and talked mostly about games, hardware and anything-but-pop-music, email was not my first weapon of choice in online communication. It was about 1997 when I got my first email address at Hotmail (see a 1997 introduction video of Hotmail as webmail here) and I didn’t actually use it much: I was 18 back then. What was I using for online communications? Mostly forums and chatrooms, and for personal stuff ICQ and MSN. Email was for when my aunt in Australia wanted to send me something or for when I needed to setup a reminder for myself (no Google Calendar back then, the company didn’t exist yet). It wasn’t essential nor added enough value for me to use extensively back then.
The point I’m getting at is this: even with all the growth in email services these days (and what you can actually use those services for), not all age groups love it. The post at DM News pointing out the fact that current youth has an aversion to email but that they will grow to appreciate it at a later stage in life is simply more evidence towards the key point that the youth values other means of online communications besides email. Now this is not 1997 anymore: Facebook and Twitter have arrived, smartphones have arrived en masse with apps like Ping on BlackBerry and also WhatsApp on other platforms and therefor the use of chat and IM like ICQ / MSN has been declining with the youth, but the love for email is small or non-existent as well.
Where does this leave email marketing? How do you sell your products and services to people who are between the age of 12 to 23, for instance? Email should not be the only channel you’re doing your marketing with, so when the youth is your target find out where they hang out and what communications platforms they use. Advertise on there, get their (email) optin from there. Andrew Lipsman of comScore noted in the DM News article that there is a new range of options for marketers: I beg to differ and will just say that the options have always been there online, just with other platforms and channels. 14 years ago those platforms were forums, ICQ, MSN and some early bird social media sites (like Lycos, Orkut or here in the Netherlands CU2): these days it is the previously noted heavyweights Facebook, and Twitter but also BB Ping and WhatsApp. Catch them where they are: email will follow as a channel later on, don’t worry.
Scott Cohen has his own take on the youth and email called Email marketing quick take: teen adoption of email, worth a read.
Yesterday Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist of Hubspot, presented the webinar called ‘The Science of Email Marketing‘. He normally digs into social media data, but this time he got his hands on quite some nice email marketing data: the data consists of results of no less than 9,536,510,424 emails sent with the Mailchimp email platform (read about their Email Genome Project here).
Dan had with a specific focus group on email usage topics: one of the results of a survey done by that focus group is that 12% separates their work and personal inboxes, but 88% don’t: businesses = consumers seems to be the result of this, whereas previously marketing done for B2B was seen as very different from marketing done for B2C.
Here’s the takeaways from the webinar which contained info on both the stats and an interview
Timing
- Email is like homework: people get into a habit, a set of rituals. Try to find that set of rituals in
your subscriber group and stick to their rituals: email results will improve.
- Weekends are best to get highest clickthroughs (9% compared to Monday to Friday 4% ~ 5%).
- Highest rate of unsubscribes happen on Monday and Tuesday, lowest happens on Thursday.
Dan notes that you as a sender should not pile your email on subscriber’s ‘homework’: send on times and days they have the least email pressure. An example is to try to send email on weekends when people have more time available, less of the daily work hassle.
- When do users read email: morning highest rate, then afternoon, evening and night the lowest.
- The effect of time-of-day on unsubscribe rates: 6AM ~ 8AM highest, 4PM ~ 6PM lowest, but again a rise at 11PM.
- The effect of time-of-day of sending on click through rate: 6AM ~ 8AM highest CTR, and 3PM ~
5PM lowest CTR.
Content
- most users report reading email on mobile, no less than 80%. Takeaway: optimize email for mobile (Remy: generally, the mobile opens account for about 13% in email channel, so 80% is on the high side)
- effect of number of links on CTR: highest around 17 links and 9 links. 4 links has lowest CTR. More links = more CTR
- effect of number of links on unsub rate: least links, highest unsubs. More links, less unsubs. Takeaway: use lots of links in your emails.
Archiving
- GMail will outpace outlook and other email clients soon.
- inbox is used as archive by people, will be searched for info. Takeaway: use reference
information in your emails. Dates, events, downloadable content, etc.
- Filtering is mostly done on subject lines
- most clicked subject line words: posts, jobs, survey, week’s, e-newsletter. Worst clicked: latest,
updates, headlines, news. Takeaway: serialize and label your email subject lines
- most abuse reported subject line words: confirm, features, upgrade, magic, raffle, rewards, requested, 10%
- least abuse reported subject line: offer, savings, discount, coupon
What do I get? (what’s in it for me, WIIFM)
- focus group survey results: exclusivity, an email message has to deliver extras, value: make subscribers feel special. Takeaway: give your subscribers special access, exclusive offers.
Sending
- using sender name that audience recognizes is best. Takeaway: send email from someone they’ve heard of
- effect of sending frequency on CTR: best freq: 1, 9, 21 ~ 27 per month (5 ~ 6%). Worst freq = 12, 19,20 per month.
- Effect of sending frequency on unsubscribe rate: worst: 1 ~2 per month. Lowest: 12, 21 ~30 per
month. Takeaway: don’t be afraid to send too much email
Expectations
-when email is expected, it is best valued
- effect of subscriber recency on unsubscribe rate: unsubscribes are highest when people have just subscribed (3 days or less)
- effect on subscriber recency on clickthrough: most recent members will do best clicks Takeaway: your newest subscribers are best)
Focus group survey question: how much of your email do you read?Answers: most of it – 50%, all of it 20%, about half 25%, very little 4%
Multiple inboxes
-Do you use separate junk inbox? Answers: No 42% yes 58% takeaway: make them want to get your emails
- Focus group survey question: Do you generally believe unsub links will work? 28% no, 72% yes
-How often do you forward commercial emails? almost never = biggest group of respondents
- how often do you tweet about commercial emails? almost never = biggest group of respondents
takeaway: ask people to follow you, not share your emails (Remy: I’m not so sure about this: when you provide value in the sharing of your content, people will do it)
Metrics
- If it don’t make dollars it don’t make sense: where are customers coming from? What’s making the actual money?
takeaway: link to pages that make money and are on a closed loop marketing system.
Some important things to note with the above takeaways, percentages and metrics are the following:
- most of Mailchimp’s user base are small companies, 70% of their users are 1-10 employees (the nearly 10 billion emails were sent by their 600,000 users)
- most of Mailchimp’s user base is located in the USA: results may vary per region
- the results posted above are, even though the data group is large, specific for this type of users and subscribers. As said with mobile engagement, your own results can be quite different.
Update 4PM CET:
The slides and webinar recording are now available here.
Nielsen Norman Group has recently posted its Email Newsletter Usability Report. In the report they note several key findings, of which a summary is posted below:
The people over at Campaign Monitor have also looked into the report and focused on the usability of an email newsletter. Below is a heatmap depicting where people look when viewing a newsletter:
Campaign Monitor notes that to get maximum effect a newsletter should be short and sweet: however not everyone agrees. A discussion emerged on Twitter in which some participants noted that short and sweet is nice, but that quality and completeness of an email newsletter should not be neglected. Otherwise a newsletter might look awfully short and ‘fast foodish’.
The summary of the report can be found here.
A new chart by MarketingSherpa shows the current chief challenges on email marketing success. One that jumps out as the biggest challenge is sending messages with relevant content to subscribers: all others are smaller challenges comparatively. Those should not be underestimated though: they include improving deliverability, quantifying email marketing ROI and lacking an actual email marketing strategy.
The six biggest challenges in statistical overview per channel:
One other challenge that stands out is getting people to opt-in to email lists: this is one of the primary processes in an email marketing program and should be covered as far ahead as possible. The breadth of channels for people where they can opt-in should be as big as possible too: be it in stores, on one or several websites, via social media or otherwise: every channel and contact moment should give the option to opt-in, therefor maximizing the opt-in results.