Content may be king, but only if it rules with relevancy. Time has got to be one thing we all value above most other things and woe to those marketers who waste it with irrelevant email marketing campaigns.
Research from email service provider (ESP) ExactTarget and social media monitoring company, CoTweet, indicates nine in ten email subscribers have opted out of email marketing lists because of too much frequency or because the messages became to repetitive or boring.
Segmenting and testing your campaigns is crucial to staying relevant because you have to know what is and what is not working. Taking segmentation further to ensure subscribers are targeted even more tightly to maintain relevance is also an imperative for success.
According to Experian CheetahMail, loyalty programs are also a very effective way to get subscribers to open, click and convert via your campaigns (source: Emarketer).
The return of loyalty
Mailings targeted to loyalty program members outperformed general mailings with open rates 40% higher, CTRs 22% above and transaction rates higher by 29%. Revenues per email were also up with loyalty program segments generating 11% more.
Aside from being relevant to one’s subjects, another thing a king or queen needs is loyalty. Without loyal subjects, a ruler has no thrown to rule from. So, what keeps them loyal? According to the report, different loyalty-related emails produced different performance results.
Perhaps it’s won’t come as a shock to the court that a notification about a reward being available resulted in a 126% increase in open rates and a 19% boost in CTRs. Redemption reminders were also up there with a 54% increase in opens and a 11% uptick in CTRs. Even an email about a loyalty member’s status level gets a boost in open rates of almost 50% and a boost of 8% in CTRs.
The customer lifecycle and attention spans
Studies have found that targeting subscribers based on a customer lifecycle or behaviour can increase performance. This is because the more you target a subscriber correctly, the more relevant your content is to them. Loyal subjects like to see the king or queen out among them, getting to know them.
People’s attention spans are not getting any longer and neither is their tolerance for email or any marketing content which they don’t feel speaks directly to their needs. As more and more channels open up for people to interact and access information from, the attention span of the consumer is going to drop even more. The cross-channel consumer of today exists in a fragmented world of information and thus, is picky about what they will and won’t engage with.
Mobile especially enhances the need for research and effort by marketers to be absolutely relevant to their intended target audience. No one wants to be getting messages which are poorly timed and don’t even resonate when they arrive. I suspect consumers are going to get even more territorial about their mobile inboxes then they currently are about their desktop email.
You won’t have the luxury of people marching with torches on your castle to tell you that something is amiss. That’s bad news because if you haven’t been testing and segmenting your list, then the only way you might be aware of a problem is if just that very thing happened.