I am a sucker for an email blog post with helpful tips on how to improve my marketing prowess, so when I got an opportunity to co-present a webinar for evolving email strategy I jumped at the chance. On June 4, 2014 I joined Daniel Barnett from Bluewolf to present "Tips to Measure & Evolve Your Email Strategy". We had a lot of information to share in a short window, so I wanted to expand on the tips I shared during the webinar around benchmarking and disengaged contacts.
Benchmarking
So why benchmark? The benefit of benchmarking is that it provides valuable insight into what drives performance. Benchmarks are the catalyst that move an organization to higher levels of performance. Frequent and regular benchmarking enables you to measure changes in your performance relative to an external reference or your historical performance.
Where to start benchmarking? There are many benchmark studies created today you can look to as a general guide for relative performance, but often times the best benchmark you have is yourself. The reason is each organization is unique and only comparing your performance against industry standards may not be as relevant or meaningful as establishing your own benchmarks and measuring improvements against those metrics.
Recommended Areas to Benchmark:
Email Engagement - These metrics identify the areas where you can best understand if your content and message are resonating with your target audience. If results are low look to test different areas to improve performance:
- Open Rate - if low test your subject line
- Click to Open Rate - if low test your call to action. Is it unclear what you want the reader to do? Is the CTA buried too deep in the email or do you have too many CTAs?
Also consider setting up A/B test scenarios and keep a log of your tests and results for future reference.
Conversion Rates - if low see if your form is asking for too much information at once or relative to the perceived value of the content.
- Form submits - if this is low look at your call to action and information you are asking them to complete. Consider progressive profiling or data appending to capture the additional information
Deliverability - Monitoring the health of your reputation is just as critical as the design and content of your email. If you have a poor reputation more than likely your email isn't getting to the inbox.
- Monitor the number of hard bouncebacks in your database, understand the cause and have a plan to clean them out regularly.
- Keep a careful eye on the number of unsubscribes you have, not only by email but overall in your database and understand the source of the unsubscribes. If you have a high number of unsubscribes that means your content may not be resonating. Evaluate your targeting and segmentation strategy along with your content strategy.
- Spam Complaints should be monitored closely. If seeing a spike, look to your targeting and content strategy, as well as email frequency - something is not resonating, causing contacts to flag your email as spam.
- Sender Scores - know your score and monitor it regularly. Be consistent in your email sending patterns - a large spike in volume or long periods of inactivity can negatively impact your score
Contact Management - understand the overall health of your database. By knowing the state of your database you can take action to make improvements.
- Total Contacts - know your overall database size, is it growing or shrinking and why? Keep note of large data projects (imports, cleanup, etc)
- New Contacts - are you actively growing your database each month? By how much? By segment?
- Reachable Contacts - how many contacts are not marked as a hard bounceback or unsubscribed?
- Total Active Contacts - what percent of your database is engaged? How many contacts in the last 6 months have opened or clicked an email, submitted a form or visited the website?
- Contact Profile Completeness - how many of the key profile fields on your contact records are complete? This impacts how well you can segment your database, personalize your messages and score your leads.
Lead Management - Understanding how well leads flow through your sales and marketing funnel is important. Benchmarking leads by stage helps you identify where you may need to put extra focus to keep contacts moving forward. Or determine where you may have leaks in the funnel.
How to Address Disengaged Contacts
As marketers we strive to increase engagement with our contacts, but if you take a close look at your database you may find only a small percentage of your contacts fall into the "Active" category. This is why addressing the disengaged or inactive portion of your database is important. The key here is to identify your disengaged contacts, understand the type of disengagement and develop campaigns to address each unique audience. Not only will you have a better chance in converting them, you also separate them from your active audience and campaigns. As a benefit you can now more accurately measure the performance of those campaigns because you have removed the inactive portion that may be dragging down your results (this is not cheating, it is smart marketing).
Disengagement - The Symptoms and the Treatment
| The Symptom | The Treatment |
|---|---|
| Inactive - contact hasn't shown any recent digital body language - no email engagement, not web visits, etc. Depending on your business this could be defined by 6 to 12 months of no activity. Typically these are contacts who showed an initial interest but went cold. These contacts are also probably still a good fit in terms of your key segments so re-engaging these contacts can be very valuable. | Create a special offer to entice them to come back and try your product or service again. By creating a valuable offer for the customer you are able to entice them to re-engage. When developing a re-engagement campaign for inactive customers be sincere, honest and provide a valuable offer. |
| Emotionally Disengaged - these contacts never engaged in your campaigns but don't actively unsubscribe. They have a valid email address, fit your target profile but aren't interested in your brand or your content. Putting programs in place to weed out these contacts is important. It will help you maintain a better database to target from as well as reduce unwanted spend and other resource drain. | Consider sending this group a message to ask them to update their preferences or to even possibly unsubscribe (in a tactful, helpful tone of course). You want to share the benefit of receiving communications from your company but also give them and easy way to opt out. This tactic often works well and helps you quickly weed out those contacts who will never convert. |
| Stuck or Fallen Out of the Funnel - these contacts have show interest, engaged with your campaign but don't convert to an opportunity. The trick here is to understand why. Do they require further qualification? Did their project get put on hold or did they lose their budget? Sales and marketing alignment plays a crucial role here - work with your sales and ops teams to understand why contacts don't convert and determine the best way to address each scenario. | Work closely with sales to understand the different scenarios contact can fall into and create an appropriate campaign. Contacts that need further qualification may be treated differently than contacts that lost budget or their project was put on hold. Establishing the feedback loops between your Eloqua and your CRM will help automate this process. |
For more ideas on ways to re-engage your contacts, read this recent blog post.
I really enjoyed sharing these tips with our audience and I hope you find them helpful as well. If you have any tips or success stories to share please add a comment below.