How did we double our email marketing results?

We got such awesome results from a recent email marketing campaign, that I wanted to share them with you. By tweaking our email content, we achieved a 52% open rate...

The original post event email campaign

As any other email marketer, we send the usual post event ‘thank you for visiting’ email to all the people who took out the time to talk to us on our stand. Now we used to get fairly decent results by keeping the tone light and friendly, offering them further info on our products or a free trial if it suited them. We also kept the length short by getting straight to the point – after all we’re marketing to marketers, you know from experience that we’re a tough bunch and don’t appreciate waffle or corporate spiel.

Time for a change in thinking

So there we were happily doing our thing when, for TFM&A, we decided it was time to stop with the pure marketing message and start giving some assistance to people with useful content that, shock horror, wasn’t hidden behind a data capture form.

Now I’m all for capturing data from people so that we can send related and relevant future content, and start building a relationship with them, but I don’t understand why all useful content should be used for this purpose. The saying ‘nothing in life is free’ is just wrong – content is free all over the internet and the fact that the people at TFM&A made the effort to talk to us and ask for help with their email marketing means that we should be helping them from the word go, not just once they become a customer.

So we responded to these people with a genuinely free whitepaper, no strings just a thank you for popping by and hope this will help. And what a response...

The improved email campaign results

A whopping 52% open rate by adding the fact that we were giving them a whitepaper to the subject line and a very nice 31% click through to download it.

This tells me three things:

1)    There is a serious thirst for knowledge out there, marketers really want to up their game in email marketing and it’s up to us (the ESP) to not just give them the tools but to help them figure out why they should be using them and how

2)    Everything we keep saying about testing subject lines is so true and should be used in conjunction with the content as well – have a play with your content and see what happens

3)    Matching content and channel is vital and if you can plan around an integrated campaign (because it’s relevant not just because you want to use your marketing mix) then you’ll reap the rewards of the results

I’m now halfway through my Doves album and happy to wrap this up so i can continue planning my content for the next couple of months! None of what I’ve said is rocket science but then most advice we take on marketing isn’t - it’s a nudge for us to do what we know we should be already.

If you found this helpful and think others will then please share it via whatever channels you play on and if you want to add to the conversation then feel free in the comments below.

Have a good week

Abi