When an E-Mail Marketing Campaign Goes Bad
Damage control for e-mail campaigns.
Damage control for e-mail campaigns.
It’s happened to all of us at some point. You’re marketing a new product or service for the first time. You use your best instincts and knowledge to develop a campaign strategy, identify targeted e-mail lists, set the offer, write the copy, and send. Despite your best efforts, the response is less than you anticipated. I can’t tell you how to avoid the situation (wish I could, because then I’d really be in demand as a consultant!), but I can provide some tips for damage control both before and after the send.
A quick note before we start. In this column, I focus on CTR (define), but the real criterion of campaign effectiveness is determined by your end goal, not CTR. In the example below, our goal was to get people to opt in to a free e-mail newsletter. The number of new subscriptions didn’t match our goal. That’s the point at which we went back and focused on the campaign metrics. If we’d had a different goal, say selling enough e-mail newsletter subscriptions to cover our costs, we might have made it with the same CTR. Your goal, not CTR, is your benchmark for success or failure.
Before the Send
Here are the results:
List | List Cost ($ CPM) | CTR (%) | Effective CPC ($) |
---|---|---|---|
A | 350 | 1.72 | 21.88 |
B | 100 | 0.32 | 35.71 |
C | 100 | 0.18 | 62.50 |
In the end, those less expensive lists didn’t perform nearly as well. They ended up costing a lot more on a per-click basis. You never know going in exactly how things will turn out, but what appears to be a “bargain” list often isn’t.
In the example above, the same creative and offer were mailed to all three lists. Two performed very poorly; the third list, while not a superstar, returned an acceptable CTR. As a result, we were able to theorize the creative wasn’t the problem, those two lists were. If we’d mailed to only one list and it bombed, we wouldn’t have that key learning. Ditto if we’d sent significantly different creative to each list.
After the Send
In the example above, the broker agreed to a make-good send for the low CTR lists, using hotlines (the most recently acquired e-mail addresses) from similar lists. The mailing used the same creative as the original send, was equal in quantity to the two original test lists, and sent a week later.
The short-term goal is to triage to generate a higher final return on investment (or, more precisely, a lower cost per new subscriber, as this is a newsletter acquisition campaign).
The longer-term goal is mailing test quantities of significant sample size and identifying lists we can roll out on in the future. There won’t be enough e-mail from any one list to know it will perform if we roll out. We may be able to rent a similar mix of hotline names on a regular basis and have success with that, but that’s not where we started. In that scenario, the potential universe of names is smaller.
Until next time,
Jeanne
Jeanniey is off this week. Today’s column ran earlier on ClickZ.
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