Moneyball for email marketing: Using data to improve your sends

True UniversityElizabeth YinJune 17, 2014

Who am I?

● Elizabeth Yin● Co-founder LaunchBit ● BSEE Stanford● Product team at Google

Today's talk is on

● How to Improve Your ○ Open rate○ Click-through-rate

Open Rate

Letter from a YC founderHey guys,

We're a little concerned about some the stats on our open rates, how often people complain or unsubscribe, etc. So we'd love to talk to someone with about their experiences and maybe review our campaign performance stats with us.

Thanks![Founder]

A pretty good “open rate” is ~20%

(Histogram of thousands of publishers analyzed)

But open rates decline...Hi Jennifer,

I have a question. Our open rate keeps going down and I have no clue what’s going on there. From your experience, could you tell me what seems to be the problem? It’s getting worse and worse. We’d like to stop this as soon as possible. Could you give us your advice on this?

Thank you,[Name of email marketer]

In fact, you need to look at cohorts...

What does average open rate really mean?

People open on average every 2-3 sends

You can increase your open rate...

2 good ideas and 1 bad idea to improve your open rate

Test subject lines - usually a BAD IDEA

● Unless you are running transactional emails● Unless you have a 100k+ list

● Off-hour such as 8:37● Before/after holidays● When you know subscribers open

Send at a different time

Change up your subject lines● Reduce number of characters● Special characters● Ask a question● Be vague● Use different diction

Click-through-rate

66k campaigns

300M emails

Most people click on the first or second link (< 5 links)

Call to action should be the first or second link

But did most have only 1 link?

# of Campaigns w/ just 1 link

# of Campaigns w/ just 2 links

# of clicks on link position 1 131,914 72,003# of clicks on link position 2 --- 163,419

Doing the math...203k clicks on link position #1 for emails with just one or two links1.5M clicks on link position #1 for all emails

=> 13%

163k clicks on link position #2 for emails with just two links2M clicks on link position #2 for all emails

=> 8%

Only a small percentage of clicks are attributed to emails with just one or two emails

People click "evenly" on 5+ link emails

Having too many links reduces your call to action

Reduce your links

Digest layouts “teach” people to click: strong impact on click-through-rate

Digest: 44.2% click-through-rate vs.

Non-digest: 17.8% click-through-rate

Non-black fonts have a significant impact on click-through-rate

Non-black font: 36.4% click-through-rate vs.

Black font: 18.9% click-through-rate

One-column newsletters have a low impact on click-through-rate

One column: 27.7% click-through-ratevs.

Multi-column: 17.5% click-through-rate

Get more stats & case studies..for free!

Thank you!● Questions? Email me: elizabeth [at]

launchbit [dot] com● Follow me at @launchbit