So almost 1 million emails later, what lessons have we learned that you can apply to your email marketing to maximise results?

Email remains an important channel for marketing, but as the amount of emails people receive continues to increase(1) getting recipients to open and react to your message will become increasingly difficult.

Over the last 12 months we’ve sent almost 1 million emails, while also managing to increase our average monthly open and clickthrough rates from a low of 23% and 1.2%, to a peak of 30% and 6% respectively.

Not only does this help our short term marketing activity, but by increasing our open and clickthrough rates we are also improving our sender reputation, which reduces our chances of being mistakenly blocked by people’s spam filters.

What Really Works?

The Planon Guide to Makingthe Most of Marketing Emails

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Using A/B testing on your subject lines is quick and simple, and can more than double the open rate of your email.

What do our results to date suggest? • The UK and US are more likely to open

emails with short subject lines that aren’t overly detailed.

• In Germany a more detailed subject line is preferred.

• In the Netherlands mentioning Planon in the subject line increases open rates.

If you need inspiration for subject line ideas to test, take a look at this blog post ‘What you can learn from 1.159bn B2B subject lines’ https://econsultancy.com/blog/11094-what-you-can-learn-from-1-159bn-b2b-subject-lines/ or this comprehensive subject line report from Adestra http://blog.thestudio4.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Adestra_Subject_Line_Analysis_Report_2013.pdf

As well as subject lines you can test email design (plain text versus the use of graphics) and different messages to see which works best to increase clicks and content downloads.

TesT TesT TesT

A clear call to action within your email message increases response rates. Don’t expect recipients have several minutes to read your email.

Avoid being overly repetitive, using too many links and multiple calls to action, and keep your text short and succinct for maximum clickthrough rates.

To date we haven’t conducted as many A/B tests on body text as we have for subject lines, so when you’re preparing your next email marketing campaign create two or three text versions to test which one works best to increase clickthrough rate and conversion/download.

GeT To The poinT

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When planning email campaigns you can use personalisation to significantly improve response rates. If you know the person downloaded a specific content asset, then say so. For example:

Dear [first name] [last name],

As you recently downloaded the Gartner IWMS Magic Quadrant report,we wanted to let you know we have a new guide for you - Building the Business Case for IWMS.

Download your copy now >

Creating email flows based on people’s previous behaviours is a great way to nurture people through our lead scoring process to qualify them to pass to sales. If you have a number of related assets then map out a simple personalised nurture flow to increase your email marketing performance.

Make iT personal

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Sending to more people doesn’t mean a bigger response. Our best performing emails are the ones sent to smaller targeted lists. This also has the added advantage of not emailing our database too often and risking them unsubscribing.

When building your list to send an email to, using the following techniques can significantly improve your response rate and avoid wasted emails:

When building your mailing list:

• Recency – choose ‘Engagement sector’ is ‘Month’, ‘Quarter’ and/or ‘Half’ to send your message only to people who have opened or clicked on one of our emails in the last month, quarter or half-year.

• Frequency – choose the ‘Clicked Link in Email’ filter, select ‘Email: is any’, then ‘Add Constraint’ and tick ‘Minimum Number of Times’ to only send your email to people who have previously clicked on multiple email campaigns.

• Interest – use ‘Job Title’ contains ‘estate’ as a way to target only real estate managers.

less is More

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Follow your local planon office

for Twitter updates:

http://twitter.com/planon_asiahttp://twitter.com/planon_behttp://twitter.com/planon_dehttp://twitter.com/planon_frhttp://twitter.com/planon_nlhttp://twitter.com/planon_ukhttp://twitter.com/planon_us

Is your prospect at pipeline stage L1, L2 or L3?

• Prospects in ‘L1 – Marketing Accepted’ stage are generally less familiar with the Planon brand and much earlier in the buying process, meaning ‘top of the funnel’ content such as ‘What is IWMS?’ is more likely to be relevant.

• Prospects in ‘L2 – Marketing Information Gathering’ stage have interacted with Planon on at least two or three occasions, meaning they’re more familiar with the brand and maybe considering a possible purchase. ‘Middle of the funnel’ content such ‘Building a Business Case for IWMS’ are generally more relevant to this pipeline stage.

• Prospects in ‘L3 – Marketing Qualified’ have interacted with Planon on several occasions and therefore more likely to be open to receiving sales materials, such as product information, demos or case studies.

Using nurture streams in Marketo means we can control how often we communicate with each contact and send them more relevant content. If you haven’t launched nurture streams for your business unit then speak to someone in the central marketing team for help.

pipeline besT pracTice

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References:

1 http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2014-2018-Executive-Summary.pdf

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