[HN Gopher] How we boosted our marketing email open rate
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How we boosted our marketing email open rate
Author : Curiositry
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-02-16 07:11 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (catonmat.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (catonmat.net)
| SunghoYahng wrote:
| I read the title and felt the aura of SEO shit, but this is the
| best writing style I've ever seen.
| dazc wrote:
| Yes, getting straight to the point; it will never catch on.
| queuebert wrote:
| Glad so much thought and energy is going into the industry that
| ruined email.
| lpapez wrote:
| Will suggest this to my manager, he loves seeing percentages very
| much. So much in fact that our OKR for next quarter is to boost
| our email open rate by 50%. That means from 1% to 1.5%.
| chrisdbanks wrote:
| 1.5% is seriously low. We're up over 15% and sometimes over
| 30%. I think this is a not even great for SaaS. I suggest a
| serious audit by a consultant.
| boplicity wrote:
| If your open rate is that low, you probably should do a very
| thorough list cleansing. You're probably sending to many, many
| people who haven't opened your emails in years. You should stop
| sending to them, which will improve your metrics, in terms of
| spam filtering.
|
| I would also look at the open rates for new subscribers during
| their first month on the list -- these should be quite high. If
| not, then you have much deeper problems to address than the
| timing of when you send the emails.
| chihuahua wrote:
| But don't do the list cleaning all at once. Instead, do it a
| little bit every quarter, so you can constantly claim credit
| for improving email open rates by a moderate amount.
| unpopular42 wrote:
| I'm curious. Isn't low open rate pointing to the fact that people
| don't want to read what you send them? How is this marketing
| email different from spam?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I can't believe people are still sending email marketing. I
| report spam and unsubscribe on literally anything marketing
| related even from services I use and all my friends do this as
| well and have for nearly a decade.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| email has the single best ROI of any marketing channel. Even if
| you don't like it you should be self-aware enough to realize
| you might not be representative of the general population and
| act accordingly, especially if you are an entrepreneur
| stonogo wrote:
| ROI is a dumb metric for a medium which is effectively free.
| Just another example of ignoring externalities.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Wow man, good for you!
| ryandrake wrote:
| And the gall of them... to call it unsubscribe! As if I ever
| "subscribed" and now I need to "undo" that action. Nope. I have
| never in my life signed up for an E-mail list or newsletter,
| let alone a marketing E-mail list. There is nothing to undo,
| because I never did anything in the first place. Calling the
| link "unsubscribe" is an insidious way to blame the spam
| recipient for the spamming. Your E-mail list is not full of
| subscribers, it's full of victims.
| detourdog wrote:
| I have that pathology. Email marketing is the only challenging
| part of running a mail server.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| When done right, it works.
|
| It's the hubspot/marketo approach of slamming inboxes with
| daily/weekly, non-specific garbage that needs to go. And buying
| lists or using lists from conferences - fuck that, it's just
| spam.
|
| Following up with someone who explicitly gave you permission to
| send them emails after signing up for your service is
| reasonable and expected IMO.
|
| It's the only channel that isn't owned by a walled-garden, so
| investing in it and treating it with respect is essential since
| it's the only way to communicate to customers and potential-
| customers without a middle-man extracting rent.
| unpopular42 wrote:
| Except that people don't actually want that, if they did,
| they would read it. They just got confused by the signup form
| and accidentally left the checkbox checked
| dazc wrote:
| Speaking as someone who often recovers a friend's laptop from
| near oblivion, you'll be surprised how much some people will
| click any link that is presented to them.
| ploum wrote:
| so you mean that marketing mailing is either a nuisance (for
| tech-savy people) or an abuse (of the others) ?
| dazc wrote:
| Indeed
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Finally a blog that doesn't write a 3 paragraph filler to get to
| the point.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Love it, short and straight to the point.
| johnea wrote:
| [flagged]
| hammock wrote:
| Email marketer here.
|
| Open rates would have naturally trended from 20% to 60% naturally
| when iOS added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in the last two
| years, because Apple "opens" the emails itself before you do so
| that the sender cannot track the metadata associated with the
| pings to the image servers. Without a timeframe listed on this
| "trick" I would suspect that MPP was a great contributor to their
| increase in open rate.
|
| Another thing to note is that most of the big email platforms now
| offer some kind of automated send-time optimization, which looks
| at an individual's open behavior over time and adjusts the send
| time individually for a given campaign to a time that person
| tends to be most responsive. In Salesforce this is called
| Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO).
|
| STO really only boosts open rates by 5-10% at most on average
| (i.e., from 20% to 21-22%), which is another reason why I am
| skeptical of this "trick."
| ploum wrote:
| "Email marketer here."
|
| It's "spammer". Changing the word doesn't make what you do less
| awful.
|
| (and check this nice video:
| https://youtu.be/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 )
| FredPret wrote:
| Marketing is a key function in any economic system, and email
| is just the channel
| hammock wrote:
| Email is permissioned marketing - you can opt out of it.
| Can't say the same for online advertising
| kneebonian wrote:
| Sure but I have a dozen emails just today from "email
| marketers" that I never gave my information to and never
| opted into. Why should it require active effort on my part
| to avoid not receiving more of what I don't want?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Email is a decentralized, protocol-based communications
| channel. Anyone can send you an email. Getting some spam
| does not mean that everyone who sends email must
| therefore be a spammer.
| corbulo wrote:
| I share your sentiment, but at the same time what channels
| _should_ be used for marketing? Exclusively social media ads?
| Snail Mail?
|
| When I think about it on the flipside for small business
| marketing it's really a tragic scenario of which ad mediums
| are not perceived as 'spammy'.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > I share your sentiment, but at the same time what
| channels should be used for marketing?
|
| None. Marketing is an objective blight on human society.
| dalys wrote:
| I know this is a popular belief on HN. But I assume you
| mean part of marketing that is paid advertising?
|
| Because you know, HN _is_ a marketing site for companies
| in Y Combinator and Y Combinator itself.
|
| Every landing page you have ever visited _is_ marketing.
|
| Every GitHub README.md _is_ marketing.
|
| There's not a single business in the history of mankind
| that have made money without marketing. Because they
| wouldn't be allowed to show or tell anyone they existed.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Nagging emails and 99.9% of ads suck but there needs to
| be avenues for new companies and products to be
| discovered. This site is full of marketing, but it is
| largely balanced out by user power (voting and ability to
| discuss and criticize).
| lapsis_beeftech wrote:
| A reasonable and safe default is to use the same channel
| for sending me marketing information that I used to request
| it. Unsolicited marketing is never acceptable.
| corbulo wrote:
| What about for specialized services that you may not
| already be aware of? The ideal of advertising is to
| inform and educate the consumer.
|
| Should non-megacorp specialized services simply not
| exist? How should they get the word out? The approved
| channels you speak of are very expensive and highly
| competitive.
| rd wrote:
| Dead link
| ploum wrote:
| Corrected. It was a youtube frontend I use to make youtube
| lighter and less invasive.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| This.
|
| Additionally, many enterprise email security providers doing
| automated phishing checks that click every link in the email
| and screen scrape the landing page to verify it's not an attack
| vector. If your market is the govt, schools, or large
| enterprises, this is absolutely juicing your CTRs.
|
| Vanity email metrics are incredibly broken right now - the only
| numbers that mean anything are frictioned conversions like
| sign-ups, payments, session duration etc.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Hard to mitigate MPP, and enterprise opens were unreliable to
| begin with due to preview panes and image blocking.
|
| But auto-clicks seem pretty easy to filter out of reporting
| data because they happen essentially instantaneously. Just
| drop clicks that happen within like 10 seconds of delivery.
| mindslight wrote:
| Spamming _and_ surveillance. What 's not to like?
| ploum wrote:
| I was completely astonished that this submission as nearly as
| much vote in a few hours than another, a lot more interesting,
| about trying to go to disney world without being spied.
|
| It took me a while to remember that, despite its very light and
| cool interface, HN has been built by a subculture whose focus
| is to enrich itself by making companies that lure users then
| spy on them and try to extract as much profit as it could from
| them.
|
| So you and I are probably the outsiders here...
| ploum wrote:
| I feel that the most successful con the spamming industry
| managed to do was to rename themselves "marketing email" or
| "mailing".
|
| Could we just go back to "spam" which it is and has always be.
| asdff wrote:
| At least the plain text nigerian prince emails don't have a
| tracking pixel
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| I manage an ecom with nearly 50k subscribers. Open rate is dead
| since the recent IOS update completely skews the numbers, so most
| of us have switched to click rate.
|
| Nonetheless, the strategy discussed in the link sounds pretty
| interesting. The thought process being people generally check
| emails around the same time? Might test it out.
| balderdash wrote:
| Off topic rant, but in my personal experience brands destroy more
| value/goodwill on their email marketing campaigns than any
| incremental sales they generate.
|
| Why even give me the option to not sign up for your email
| marketing list when I check out if you're going to spam me
| anyway?
| tootie wrote:
| That's a measurably false statement. Email marketing is done so
| aggressively because it's so successful. Marketing is about
| conversion. It's not about making everyone love you. Having a
| 1M customers who like your brand and don't buy anything is less
| valuable than 10K who spend actual money. You may be equally
| shocked that direct mail (ie paper mail) still have extremely
| high conversion rates which is you still get so many ads in
| your mailbox.
| kneebonian wrote:
| "I am a highly desireable mail I had over a dozen women agree
| to go on a date with me."
|
| "How many women did you ask?"
|
| "Twelve hundred, obviously I just need to be more aggressive
| in pursuing a larger number of women as it will make me more
| desirable."
| remram wrote:
| This is extremely on topic. If a company thinks "marketing
| email open rate" is a target, it has lost track of what
| marketing is.
|
| The point is to drive business to the company and that is what
| should be measured. If people click on your email but don't do
| any purchase they were already about to make, they are useless.
| If your spam also alienate your customers, stop what you're
| doing, no matter your open rate!
|
| I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing
| department get away with this.
| burnished wrote:
| The first time you personally get an effective marketing
| email it all starts to click - I suspect that you and I have
| had similar experiences in that we arent really the
| demographic those emails are trying to reach and that we only
| bought a product as the most expedient way to fill a need.
| Thus all further communication becomes an irritant.
|
| But for me the aha moment was getting an email from a
| restaurant supply store where I was genuinely interested in
| the range of goods they were advertising (hell yes I would
| like more information on a cotton candy machine!).
|
| The point here being that your own personal interaction with
| it might not generalize well - it alienates you, but maybe
| you arent really their customer anyway? Their might well be
| people that appreciate those emails.
| remram wrote:
| I am not saying that no marketing campaign works, I am
| saying that not all of it is effective, and that companies
| should be at least interested in finding out whether their
| own marketing department is helping the business.
|
| I don't understand how anyone takes "email click rate is
| high" as a definite signal that the whole effort is
| beneficial and worth the money.
|
| This is similar to hiring a cloud team and getting reports
| that "CPU utilization is high" across the VMs. Of course
| using the cloud makes sense for a variety of companies, but
| if this is the only metric you use to know whether your
| cloud team is beneficial to the business, you really have
| no idea.
| dazc wrote:
| 'I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing
| department get away with this.'
|
| Probably because their marketing people are highly skilled at
| marketing themselves.
| badwolf wrote:
| or... because marketing works.
|
| Something folks here are rare to ever admit. HN is
| populated with amazing people who see thru all facades and
| are completely incapable of ever being a 'victim' of
| advertising, because we all know better!
| remram wrote:
| It definitely has an impact in general, that doesn't mean
| that every marketing campaign has a positive impact on
| their company. Though of course if you only ask the
| marketing department whether they are efficient, they are
| going to always say yes.
| chowells wrote:
| Marketing working is exactly what makes it unethical.
| dazc wrote:
| Indeed it does, I'm not sure that means we shouldn't
| criticize some of the most annoying aspects of it though?
| paulcole wrote:
| It surely couldn't have anything to do with non-marketers
| overestimating their knowledge of marketing.
|
| You wouldn't trust a marketer to give input on the job of
| computer programming. Why would you trust a programmer to
| give input on the job of marketing?
| dylanowen wrote:
| 100%! I open every marketing email I receive, to hit
| unsubscribe...
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Marketing objectively makes the world worse. Every other
| complaint about them is just a matter of precisely how.
|
| Their goal is to hijack our attention to sell us shit we don't
| need. To that end they will neg us and play confidence tricks.
| The constant exposure to these messages causes significant
| psychological damage that translates into sociological damage.
|
| Society would be much better off if we shot every marketer into
| the sun.
| ploum wrote:
| Bill Hicks nailed it...
| https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
|
| What I find still completely baffling about marketers is that
| not only they have no shame, but they still seems proud of it
| to the point on posting on HN.
|
| Let's be clear:
|
| - You are, on purpose, annoying millions of people. - You are
| destroying the brand and the value that employ you - You are
| ensuring that the company is focused on metrics completely
| unrelated to its real success - You are consuming lot of
| resources of the company - You are consuming natural
| resources to do all of that. and, worse of all, - You have
| convinced everyone, from politicians to NGO and small family
| shop that everybody in the world should be like you and think
| like you.
|
| That's probably the first time ever I do really want to
| downvote a link submitted to HN
| zztop44 wrote:
| I think this is probably not true. For certain types of
| businesses email marketing is shockingly effective at
| generating revenue. And extremely cost effective compared to
| paid advertising.
|
| Of course some people are of the opinion that all marketing is
| inexcusable and that if the product is good it will sell
| itself. Respectfully, I'd question how much experience those
| people have with selling products.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| Another way you can probably increase the effectiveness of
| marketing emails is to send less of them. If you're sending daily
| emails or worse multiple emails a day, your emails are spam and
| people will start auto-deleting them. This trains the spam filter
| to identify them as spam which means you will probably be
| identified as spam for other users with the same email provider.
|
| If you're a clothing store, you can also increase the
| effectiveness of your marketing emails by only sending emails
| that are relevant to that customer. If I've never bought
| children's clothes at your store, that probably means I don't
| have any kids and am not interested in hearing about a sale on
| clothes for kids. Likewise, if I only buy men's clothes that
| means I'm probably not interested in hearing about sales on
| women's clothes.
|
| In the case of Amazon, they have a bad habit of sending marketing
| emails if you've ever bought anything in a specific category. Buy
| a vinyl album for somebody as a Christmas gift once? That means
| you must be interested in hearing about similar vinyl albums on a
| regular basis.
|
| The common thread between those 2 is that retailers collecting
| data on past customer purchases is a good practice for both the
| retailer and the customer but only if the data is used
| intelligently to send relevant marketing emails when they're
| going to be genuinely of interest to the customer.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| > ... collecting data on past customer purchases is ...
|
| illegal, unless you have obtained informed consent to collect
| and use that information for that purpose.
| dazc wrote:
| That'll be one of the boxes he/she ticked or unticked that
| expressly gives that consent.
|
| Admittedly, he/she probably didn't read it that way.
| hammock wrote:
| Your credit card is selling purchase data. So are most of the
| national retailers you visit.
| [deleted]
| that_courtney wrote:
| Unless you are looking over my shoulder, you won't know if I
| opened your email. And regardless of whether you are looking over
| my shoulder or you are instrumenting messages with intrusive
| surveillance, you're being creepy. Cut it out.
| troysk wrote:
| Genius! I have scheduled emails to be sent exactly 1 day, 2
| day... later so that it goes at similar times, never did I think
| to separate out the time part and generalise it for the user.
| Blindspot removed, thanks.
| marckohlbrugge wrote:
| If you don't want to keep track of when your users are visiting
| your site, you can instead use their time of signup as an
| approximation when they are likely to be online.
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