As we’ve said here before, we keep posting about email marketing because of its singular importance to our B2B clients …most of whom use it fairly heavily for lead nurturing (if not generation).
Say you have 5 or 6 relatively independent things you want to say about a certain topic, that would culminate in a particular offer. Are you better off putting all those points into one email message, sort of blogpost-style? …or splitting them up into a series of 5 or 6 separate messages, sent over a period of time? We’ve always suspected that the latter is best, but haven’t had the proof; but now we do.
Posting on SherpaBlog, trainer Jeanne Jennings describes work she recently did for one of her clients. Her working hypothesis was that multiple emails should do better than one, simply because even strong open rates customarily average only in the 20% range, and click-through rates even worse (mostly in the single digits). Her logic was that most likely the “opens” on a 2nd, 3rd, etc. send would probably be mostly different from those who opened the earlier ones, so that a multiple send would result in greater cumulative reach. So she sent a series of 6 related emails over roughly 12 weeks.
The data astounded even Jeanne:
- the second send increased the unique open reach by 31%
- the unique cumulative open reach increased an average of 11% with each send in the series
- in the end, cumulative unique open reach was 95% higher than the open rate on the first email alone; so the last 5 efforts nearly doubled the number of people that were exposed to the campaign by just the first email
Click-through results were even more remarkable…
- the second send grew unique click-through reach by 63%
- unique cumulative click-through reach increased an average of 20% with each send in the series
- in the end, cumulative unique click-through reach was 236% higher than the click-through rate on the first email; so the last 5 efforts captured more than three times the number of individuals who clicked on the first email
But the real success story was the click-throughs on the key call-to-action link, where the numbers were:
- 105% increase for the 2nd send
- average (cumulative) 25% increase for each send
- final cumulative unique click-through reach on this key link: nearly five times that of the first send… or a lift of 392%!
Note that a strategic email series differs from a simple resend. Instead of sending the same message over and over, you craft a “message map” and use it to develop different content, all focused on the same goal or offer. Different people will tend to respond to different aspects of your message, which – aside from purely chance factors – helps explain the remarkable results just seen.
And the good news is that such campaigns tend to be “evergreen”. Let’s say you want to cross-sell your new customers on additional products or services; you can use the same multi-step email series on them essentially forever, because it’s a virgin audience every time you initiate it.
It turns out that this is just one item on the agenda of an “Email Essentials” workshop that Jeanne is running around the country for Sherpa; not cheap, but if your B2B can use improved results from your email program, it could be just the ticket. The East Coast swing will wrap in Atlanta on June 25 …so don’t delay.
