EmergeEvolve

The most influential takeaway point that Dan (@DanZarrella) presented during The Science of Email Marketing Webinar was 'Don't be afraid to send too much email'.

Generally it is assumed that the more emails that are sent to subscribers, the more likely they are to unsubscribe or start ignoring your emails, it turns out that there can be a huge benefit to sending more email with the consequences being less severe than you think.Dan presented some simple but powerful statistical analysis that shows increasing your email frequency can result in a far higher net clickthrough while only having a minimal (negative) effect on unsubscribe rates.

The effect of send frequency vs click through rate showed us that sending 1 or 2 emails a month showed the highest click through rates however sending anywhere between 3 and 30 emails per month resulted roughly in the same click through rate.

Effect of Sending Frequency on Clickthrough Rate - Hubspot Science of Email Marketing Webinar

In addition we were also presented with the effect of sending frequency on unsubscribe rate.

Effect of Sending Frequency on Unsubscribe Rate - Hubspot Science of Email Marketing Webinar

What is remarkable here is the more frequently you send your email the lower the unsubscribe rate is. This is because your emails become part of your subscribers every day routine. Although it is important to note that we are dealing with unsubscribe rates so don't get sucked in to believing you will be having less unsubscribes. Due to the increased frequency you will have a higher net unsubscribe count.

If you send an email every day of the month and have a 0.2% unsubscribe rate, your total unsubscribes will far exceed that of a weekly emails 0.3% unsubscribe rate. Also the the cumulative effect of unsubscribes escalates with an increase in frequency.

For example if you have 1000 subscribers and you send out email campaigns with the following parameters.

30 emails a month and you have an unsubscribe rate of 0.2% After this period you will have lost 58 subscribers.

4 emails a month and you have an unsubscribe rate of 0.3% After this period you will have lost 9 subscribers.

While your subscriber count will drop in the 30 emails per month instance this is countered by the fact that your click through rate will be roughly equivalent to the 4 emails per month instance. The net effect of clickthroughs will far exceed any effect of the unsubscribes.

30 emails a month and you have an clickthrough rate of 4% After this period you will have lost 58 subscribers. Results in approximately 159 clickthroughs over the month.

4 emails a month and you have an cliickthrough rate of 4% Results in approximately 783 clickthroughs over the month.

In this example we can see that increasing the email frequency by a factor of 7.5 we can attain 5 times as many clickthroughs over the month!

Of course your click through rates and unsubscribe rates will always be connected to the quality and usefulness of your content. If you are sacrificing your email quality just to increase the frequency of your emails you most likely be seen as a spammer, receive huge unsubscribe rates and lose important brand integrity.

The point that is 'don't be afraid to send more email' and don't be afraid to experiment. For some businesses you may be able to double your site traffic by sending just one more email a week, others even more than that.

This post is related to: The Science of Email Marketing - Webinar Breakdown A correlation exists between a email campaign's link frequency and its unsubscribe rate. As Dan (@DanZarrella) discovered that an increase in linkage resulted in a decreased unsubscribe rate!

This seems counterintuitive as lots of links would generally indicate spam, however Dan suggests that the subscriber just can’t find the unsubscribe link as easily and simply gives up. While this may be the case, it could also be that emails that contain a lot of links such as newsletters are potentially valued as highly informative resources by the end users. Email campaigns which are perceived to have value for the user have a lower unsubscribe rate.

To target the issue of linking in email campaigns we can broadly split our campaigns into 'single link' or 'mutliple link' campaigns, each of which can be dealt with a little differently.

'Single Link' Campaign

This type of campaign can be known as a 'solus' email. Effectively a one off drive to generate traffic to a particular link. These campaigns usually have a lot of imagery, minimal text and do their best to seduce the user into clicking just one of the many duplicate links in the email. (Although other links may be present, they are generally not the reason the campaign exists).

You can increase the chance of a click-through in a solus email by presenting the same link in many different ways. Here’s a sneaky example. Lets say I wanted to send out an email driving users to my Facebook page. Omitted here are a welcome and general introduction.

'You can now find EmergeEvolve on Facebook. Just 'Like' the page and get the latest e-marketing tips, advice and news streamed directly to your Facebook wall and cultivate your e-marketing knowledge to get the best out of your business.'

Here we have a title link, descriptive link and call-to-action link each of which provide a greater chance for the user to reach my page, each link may also appeal to a different type of reader. Don’t be afraid to throw in a relevant image link alongside the text. While the multiple links may seem excessive, it works.

'Multiple Link' Campaign

It's hard to go wrong when you are linking for emails with lots of content, as long as you are still linking the right words and your content remains valued by your subscribers.

Generally you would write more succinctly than in a 'single link' campaign in order to conserve space for the rest of your content. While emails can be potentially limitless in height, users don't want to be reading a whole article inside a email. A large proportion of your subscribers will be viewing your email campaign in a non-browser-based email client which can make reading difficult, so the shorter your email the better.

You can still apply the duplicate link feature in this case. Generally a title link is not informative enough to secure a click-through, the user will want to know more especially if your email has a lot of featured content. In this case you can use a combination of a title link and a content summary with a descriptive link.

For example, assume I am using this article in a newsletter, placed between 5 or 6 others.

Using links in Email Marketing

Recently Dan Zarrella from Hubspot revealed an important bit of analysis on link usage based on 9.5 billion email campaigns. Data  indicated that more links in an email campaign will produce a higher click-throughs rate. Find out the best way to use links in your email campaigns.

Cation: Using links on web pages

While lots of links may work well for email campaigns you should not apply the same logic to web pages. Increasing the frequency of a duplicate link on a page will lower a pages search engines ranking as the page is potentially spam (especially if the page does not have adequate content to justify the link frequency). Instead use succinct descriptive call to actions in your web pages such as:

Last Thursday Dan Zarrella (@DanZarrella) a social media marketing scientist, covered the basic science of email marketing to over 20,000 users via a HubSpot webinar.

Dan was very lucky to have access to over 9.5 billion campaigns to analyse (courtesy of @MailChimp), full of interesting email marketing factors such as click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, subject lines, frequency of email sends and every other conceivable piece of email campaign data you can imagine. Data analysis produced some interesting results which counters some popular e-marketing assumptions.

Over the next few days I will go over some of the takeaway tips from the webinar and provide some personal insight into the findings and hopefully in doing so will help small businesses make the right e-marketing decisions in the future.

Businesses are consumers.

Try sending emails on weekends, send emails very early in the morning.

Optimise your emails for mobiles.

Use lots of links in your emails.

Include reference information in your emails.

Serialize and label your emails.

Give your subscribers special access.

Send emails from someone they've heard of.

Don't be afraid to send too much email.

Your newest subscribers are your best.

Make them want to get your emails.

Ask people to follow you, not to share your emails.

Last night I was having a chat to a friend that is in the marketing team for a small company with a great product.

I asked about their social media strategy for the company and was surprised to hear that the boss stated that "Tweets are for Twits" and that the social media was to be a low priority! Instead there was to be a focus on sales.

It seems obvious to me that this company leader is completely ignorant of inbound marketing and the power that social media can have on brand awareness. A sales focus is of course important, it can brings in the money that allows your company to continue, but it is only one side of the coin. A less direct approach using social media and inbound marketing can have a huge impact on your future sales.

You can use social media to:

Increase brand awareness.

Gain recognition as a leader in your field.

Drive your followers to interesting industry related content.

Connect with like minded companies or individuals, learn what's happening in your industry on a daily basis.

I think that it is important to realise that even if you are a small business you can benefit from getting involved in social media. Sure you may not make any direct sales out of social media right away, but thats not really the point. You should be concerned with the long term effect the brand awareness can have on your business. If have a great product/service and you stay interesting you will get noticed.