You’ve heard the saying, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The same sentiment applies to email marketing. If your emails are never opened, or worse, never even make it to your customer’s inbox, what’s the point?
You could spend hours crafting a really clever email filled with beautiful images and helpful content, but if it never reaches your subscribers’ inboxes, then all your hard work was a waste of time and money (something we address in greater length with our big sender guide).
Our clients at ideal-LIVING experienced this conundrum firsthand. The Wilmington, North Carolina-based media and marketing company represents resorts and retirement communities across the country, and they rely heavily on email marketing to promote their magazine, partner communities, and in-person expos. Yet for years, they struggled with spam complaints, low open rates, and, ultimately, low ROI.
That’s when they decided to become a Premier Client with iContact, partnering with Strategic Advisor Steven Rausch to transform their ignored and unseen emails into content that converts.
“We first came to iContact in order to email our 200K database,” says David Heck, Director of Web Development at ideal-LIVING. “We started out emailing only a few times a year and saw an open rate of 10% or less, and we wanted to improve that. We found out quickly that one of the best tools offered was a Strategic Advisor.”
David and his colleague Will Weinel have a recurring monthly call with Steven to discuss metrics, strategy, and goals. The first effort they tackled together was focused on improving their email deliverability.
Deliverability is the percentage of emails that actually make it to a subscriber’s inbox. Email deliverability failure typically means an email is filtered into the spam folder or is blocked by the Internet Service Provider (ISP). This happens for a few reasons:
1. ISPs keep track of engagement metrics to determine if a message should get delivered. If people aren’t opening or clicking your emails, it lowers your chances of future messages making it to their inbox.
2. ISPs also watch for things like bounce rates to determine if you’re a trusted sender. If you send emails to a bunch of invalid or non-responsive addresses, your bounce rate will increase, creating a red flag and again lowering your chance of strong deliverability in the future.
3. ISPs uphold variety, so sending content with transactional, promotional, and educational flavors is much better than an overused and static type of email.
With Steven’s expert guidance, the ideal-LIVING team began cleaning up their email lists and resting non-openers (getting rid of invalid, non-responsive, and duplicate email addresses).
He helped their team track open rate trends from expo to expo, timing any list clean-up around the end of their busy season so they’d have plenty of time to improve deliverability before the next round of in-person events. He also tracked engagement rates overall, only including non-openers on the most important emails so that ideal-LIVING’s average open and click rates could increase, helping them gain better standing with ISPs.
“We were hesitant at first to rest our non-openers,” says David. “From a numbers perspective, we always thought we needed to send to as many people as possible to be successful. But cleaning our list not only made our deliverability more successful, it also boosted our open rates to percentages we didn’t believe were possible.”
The first email they sent after resting non-openers saw a 32% open rate and the second email, a newsletter campaign sent to over 70,000 subscribers, was one of their best open rates ever at 35%.
In addition to improving their list hygiene, Steven helped with content projects to diversify their sending patterns and prevent email campaigns from being marked as spam.
“Our ROI is measured by ‘community requests,’ or how many resort and retirement communities receive information requests from our audience,” explains David. “When we first started using iContact, we were looking at hundred or less of these a month. But thanks to the strategy Steven developed, our best email this year received almost 4,000 community requests by itself. We were floored.”
During their monthly calls, Steven, David, and Will continue to track their metrics and develop new strategies for continued improvement. With Steven’s advice and the support of iContact’s technical team, ideal-LIVING is working on a campaign to re-engage email non-openers on Facebook. It’s these types of efforts they hope will continue to make their emails (and their results) better and better.
“Working smarter is better than working harder,” says David. “We believe in going to other experts to help us get even better at what we’re already doing well.”
Adds Will, “Steven is there if we need anything or if we have any concerns. His advice and expertise has really paid off the last two years.”
