Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.
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Email marketers are highly focused on campaign performance. As what was arguably the first digital performance marketing channel, email marketing has a long and well-established tradition as an effective marketing strategy. So, email marketers are already well-versed in evaluating performance metrics and identifying ways to optimize future campaigns.
However, they don't always consider email compliance and various email industry best practices to be part of performance optimization. Instead, they're sometimes viewed as foundational necessities to ensure the longevity of an email marketing program, but not areas that should be regularly evaluated and considered as a way to drive better performance.
While many of these practices (particularly compliance) are must-have components of your email program, they can also play a dynamic role in your optimization strategies and initiatives. Below are three elements of email compliance and overall best practices that can yield tremendous value if you also look at them through the lens of improving recipient engagement and response.
Look For Trends In Your Opt-Outs
I wrote about the value of a close analysis of your negative marketing signals in a previous article, and one key area to evaluate is your opt-out requests. It’s not uncommon for email marketers to think of those recipients who have opted out of future campaigns as contacts that should simply be added to a suppression list and forgotten about. Why would a marketer want to spend time thinking about people they aren’t allowed to market to anymore? While that’s an understandable response, it also precludes you from learning from those unsubscribe requests. Marketers are happy to measure audience engagement across a wide variety of metrics and tactics, but when the engagement in question is negative (i.e., they're asking you to stop emailing them), marketers don’t always delve into the details.
While this might be a natural reaction (put that rejection behind you and move on), there's a real opportunity to learn from the engagement metrics around opt-outs that can help optimize future campaigns. Depending on what level of transparency you have for your opt-out requests (beyond just an email address), you may be able to gather a great deal of information to look for trends and other data points that you can learn from. Just a few of these include:
• Geographic data: Where are opt-out requests coming from? Do you see any patterns that might indicate a particular geographic area opts out at a higher rate? Imagine a situation where you mistakenly send a marketing email with an offer that isn’t relevant or even available to recipients in a particular area. Geographic data can help you uncover these types of issues.
• Time and date data: When are recipients opting out from your campaigns? What days of the week or what times of day are most common? When you match this up with your campaign sending data, you may find that certain days and times of day naturally lead to higher opt-out rates. This might mean they are bad times to send your campaigns, or conversely, they may be great times if you can deliver more engaging content.
• Device information: We all know that mobile devices account for a large share of web traffic (nearly 51% as of quarter three of 2020). New York Times data (via CNBC) suggests that 2020 saw a shift back toward computers for some purposes, but long-term consumers will likely continue using mobile devices to surf the web and access their email. If you see a higher opt-out rate from mobile users than desktop ones, you might want to evaluate whether your email creative is rendering properly on mobile screens.
Listen To Your Non-Engagers
On top of typical positive key performance indicators (KPIs) and negative marketing signals, sometimes recipients send you a signal by not doing anything at all. In fact, I've found that the vast majority of recipients of a typical email marketing campaign “respond” by not opening or engaging with your campaign in any way. Email marketers come to expect this to be fairly normal for many of their campaigns. But when a recipient falls into the non-responder group for a longer period of time across multiple campaigns, then the signal they are sending is that your campaigns likely aren’t of any interest to them.
At this point, you have the option of segmenting these repeat non-responders and either removing them from future campaigns by adding them to a suppression file or testing different creative, marketing offers, email timing or other variables in an effort to get them to start actively opening, reading and engaging with your email content. If you aren’t actively evaluating your non-responders, you may miss the opportunity to re-engage with them.
Watch Your Frequency
Because the incremental cost of one more email — or often one more campaign — is somewhat negligible, email marketers haven’t always had to become truly disciplined around frequency optimization. But, much like any marketing channel, messaging your audience too often can eventually lead to diminishing returns and poorer campaign performance. Your email recipients only have so much attention for and interest in your messaging.
The key is finding the line where sending more often does not increase performance or ROI compared to the cost in opt-outs and non-responders it creates. This inflection point is likely to vary from one marketer to another. For example, a political campaign might email its subscriber list up to once per hour on a daily basis leading up to an election. Despite this massive spike in frequency, they might not identify a huge uptick in opt-outs or engagement. This doesn't mean you should start sending out hourly emails to your email list, but it means that the best frequency depends on the relationship you have with your recipients.
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