I recently took on an email marketing campaign for a relatively small business. The client had a fairly substantial email database for the size of their business, standing at around 20k subscribers. The task was to improve their email strategy & re-design the email’s whilst improving the effectiveness, deliverability & open rates. Read more …
Aside from the re-design of the rather dated & dreary emails, I was tasked to look at how to improve the overall success of the campaigns. So I grabbed my shovel & started to proceed with some initial digging around. It certainly didn’t take long to notice the first thing I could look at improving. I noticed that every campaign to date was being sent to the entire database, despite some of the emails being fairly targeted to a specific audience of the customers business.
To set the scene, the business category relates to an outdoor sport and within this sport there are different “sub-types” (such as within Athletics you have different track & field events) that a customer may or may not be interested in.
Now, because this business has very limited resources along with a distinct lack of technology link-up, I had to think outside of the box a little. How could I target certain campaigns to a specifc sub-type? Working with the company I identified the different sub-types that were relevant & listed them out.
Then within the e-marketing system (Pure360 in this case) I created a brand new list that had all the existing data along with a new field for each of the 5 different sub-types. This would allow me to later on import the existing list of subscribers into the newly created list with sub-type options setup & ready to assign.
Now this was completed, I began scanning the email campaigns that had been sent previously. As I checked through the historic email reports I started matching each campaign to one of the sub-types we had just agreed. Any “generic” campaigns, such as a sale, I skiped over as these were not relevent to a specific sub-type.
Once I’d identified the campaigns I needed to focus on for each of the sub-types, I began exporting a list of every customer who opened an email targeted to sub-type1. Out off all of the historic campaigns there were 3 that specifically matched sub-type1. I created a new CSV for this sub-type & de-duped all records so I was left with a list of individual email addresses. Then I imported the CSV into the newly created list from earlier. The CSV simply contained the email addresses & a column marking “Yes” that identified these email addresses have expressed interest in sub-type1.
I repeated the process for the remaining 4 sub-types until my new email list in Pure 360 was complete. I now had basic segmentation to which I could create an email filter that would target a specific campaign about a sub-type to customers in the list who had previously expressed interest in this sub-type.
Of course for a large business this process would be automatic, but although this is a relatively long winded process, it really works for a small business with limited resources. The results were fantastic – open rates increased from around 15% to 40%+ whilst yielding lower unsubscribe rates.
To keep the list up-to-date there are points where you will need to send an email about a sub-type to the entire list, then run the process again to mark who is interested in this sub-type. However for a company without the technology to do so or the resource to invest in an email marketing team… this worked extremely well!
