Will you be joining me at the Email Innovations Summit, June 18-19, 2019 in Las Vegas? I hope so! My session there is a live case study. It’s titled:

Interactive Case Study: Frameworks for Analyzing and Optimizing Email Marketing Performance

You’ll walk away with:

• Frameworks for analyzing real life email marketing situations in a strategic way
• Many, many ideas for boosting your organization’s email marketing performance
• A feeling of accomplishment

And here’s the case we’re going to use. So jump in and read it, take some notes on what jumps out at you and how you might address the issues raised. For those who can’t make it to Sin City, I’ll write-up the results in late June.

Your Engagement

You’ve been hired as a consultant to analyze a company’s current email marketing situation and develop a prioritized three-month plan to boost short-term performance while positioning the channel for long-term revenue growth.

The Client

Your client company sells a SAS (software as a service) product that helps organizations streamline their accounting and payroll. Let’s call the company OurBrand and the product Account-Roll. OurBrand is a B2B organization and their target audience includes CFOs as well as SVPs/VPs in finance roles. Customers are typically medium-to-enterprise sized organizations.

Account-Roll is a high ticket item that includes an annual five-figure licensing fee as well as additional costs based on features/functionality and number of users (seats). The company has an SVP of sales and a large team of sales representatives focused on driving revenue. The typical sales cycle is 3- to 6-months long and includes a demonstration as well as a free trial of the software. A sample customer journey appears below.

About a month ago, OurBrand has hired its first ever CMO and while the person has digital marketing experience they haven’t ever worked closely with email. Your meeting with him went well; he is eager to have you speak with the email marketing manager and is looking forward to your insights on this channel. He’s got his hands full with search engine marketing, display advertising and direct mail.

You have the full backing of OurBrand’s CEO in this engagement. She recently heard you speak at a conference, set up a meeting to better understand your approach and decided that you and your team would be the perfect fit for this project.

The Email Marketing Team

Team is really a misnomer; there is just one person here dedicated to email marketing. She has been with the company for 3 years now, and has been working in email marketing for a year and a half. Before this she was a sales assistant, someone who pre-qualified calls for the sales representatives.

One of her strengths is her knowledge of the target audience and which companies and titles would be considered highly qualified prospects by the sales team. One of her weaknesses is her limited experience in email marketing, and in marketing in general.

That said, the email marketing manager is enthusiastic; she sees the arrival of the CMO as a chance to learn more about traditional marketing as well as an opportunity to apply some of the strategies and tactics she’s read about in email marketing industry publications.

In her previous job as a sales assistant, all her goals were short-term. This has held true in her new role, where she is focused on driving the quality and quantity of leads required by sales each month.

Results

The email marketing manager is good with spreadsheets and numbers; she can crunch with the best of them. She is happy to share her reporting on the monthly promotional email — it’s below.

The results here had been keeping her up at night. Her open rates are staying fairly consistent, just a little degradation. But the click-through rate (CTR) has dropped precipitously in the last year, taking the click-to-open rate (CTOR) with it.

In an effort to combat the slide, she had started changing up the offer and/or the creative with almost every send. But it wasn’t really helping.

Until recently, her reporting had included data on the number of demos generated each month. The sales team was pretty good — most months they were able to entice nearly half the leads (clicks) to sit through a demonstration.

But the link between their marketing automation software and their CRM system failed back in February and without someone on staff who could fix it, they were no longer able to attribute demos back to the email marketing channel.

List Growth

The list was growing by leaps and bounds. The monthly promotion went to everyone in the database who wasn’t a customer. Part of the growth was due to a new website and an optimized opt-in process for requesting a demo.

OurBrand has also begun to purchase email addresses to grow the list more quickly. Starting in September 2018, 50,000 email addresses a quarter were purchased and added to the list.

A trade show they attended in late September 2018 also added a significant number of names to their October 2018 send.

List Analysis

Her curiosity and concern over the declining click-through rate drove the email marketing manager to further analyze the time-on-list (TOL) and click-though rate (CTR).

She read an article showing that addresses more recently added to the list performed better. So she broke out her list in that way and looked at the click-through rates.

In general the newer names performed better, but some months they didn’t. Their click-through rates were generally more consistent as well, except for those months when they dropped off a cliff!

Then she started thinking about the source of the addresses. She read that purchased lists often don’t perform as well as opt-in lists. So she decided to look at that breakdown.

She realized that the CTRs were off a little bit — the overall CTR (dark blue on the right) should agree with the CTR Opt-in CTR for January through August 2018, but it didn’t. Then she figured it out. She wasn’t taking bounces into account in the CTR Opt-in number. That was what was causing the variance. But she decided that the numbers were close enough — it didn’t make sense to take the extra time to adjust for bounces.

Once again, there was a variance in performance, by a lot. The purchased names had a click-through rate much lower than the opt-in names. But they were still generating some clicks, and they didn’t cost that much, so she decided to just leave it be for now.

But not before she went down the rabbit hole and did one more analysis on the list.

Yes, she did it. She analyzed time on list, source and click-through rate to see what she could learn. But by this time she was lost in the numbers and she had to start working on the next monthly promotion. So she set it all aside.

Performance Testing

When asked if she was doing any testing to boost performance, the email marketing manager said yes and was excited to share her work. A screenshot of her spreadsheet follows.

She’d only started testing in January, but she was using the monthly promotional send as her sandbox.

Her narrative on the results to date: “I really hate that subject line ‘Meeting Request.’ but I know that I’m not supposed to change it unless I can come up with something that performs better. So I am going to keep testing other subject lines until I beat it! When I’m able to test out of this subject line I’ll move on to testing other elements of this email message.”

Campaigns

While most of the email marketing manager’s time and energy was spent on the monthly promotion, there were other email marketing campaigns that went out. A complete list appears below.

Most of these are triggered; some are strictly transactional, although all carry an unsubscribe link. The ‘demo shortfall’ email is supposed to be sent ‘as needed’ but since the start of 2019 it had gone out at least once a month — and sometimes she had to send it twice!

All of the triggered campaigns were set up before the email marketing manager arrived, so she didn’t really have much to do with any of them. She thought that someday she would love to look at upgrading the copy and design of them, but she didn’t really time for that.

Most of the triggered messages were very basic. Many didn’t even have the company logo at the top! She feared that some had broken links — she had never met anyone at the company who really took an interest in them. They were sent from the CRM system, so they didn’t even get tracking and reporting on them.

She had considered developing a monthly email newsletter, but again, no time. She had a lot of ideas, but in the end it all came down to driving leads for that month or that week or that day — and there was never time to think about the longer term.

Your Turn!

Now it’s your turn. What jumped out at you as you read the case study? How would you go about analyzing the situation and developing a three-month road map to not only boost performance in the short-run but set the email marketing program up for success over the long term?

We’ll discuss all this in Las Vegas on June 18th. And watch for a synopsis of our discussion here in late June!

Viva Las Vegas!