Have You Spring Cleaned Your Email Marketing Yet?

Many people have commented in past posts about ProFlower.com’s incredible conversion rates. You’ll often see them with a conversion rate over 30%. However, most people won’t dedicate the necessary resources they need to achieve such success. Over at EM&C, they cover what’s behind Proflowers.com’s incredible conversion rate by looking at their email marketing.

Here are a 7 things you can do to improve your email marketing performance:

1. Delete your entire email list! You might not need to be as drastic as this however, list hygiene is important for ensuring email deliverability.

2. Segment your email list. Don’t treat everyone like they are the same.

3. Follow the email marketing secrets of other top converting websites (lots of tips here). Your write as you read. Subscribe to as many of the top converting website newsletters and review them regularly.

4. Rework your content to maximize the dynamics behind gr8 web 2.0 copywriting. People have changed their preferences on how they consume content online – have you revised the way your email marketing is written? Be innovative and relevant. Leverage the voice of your customer as well. Are you leveraging social media as well?

5. Improve your landing pages – test, test and optimize again. You don’t want your email marketing to suck. You need to always be testing.

6. Don’t send emails in the dark. Make sure your emails are being tracked by web analytics all the way through the conversion funnel and that you are making improvements and optimizing along the way.

7. Review all your auto-generated emails like your thank you for your order, subscriber or lead confirmation, autoresponders, etc. Make sure the dates are correct, unsubscribe links work (you don’t want to end up like this company), review what is being said, etc. Make sure to plan for more intelligent, dynamically generated emails based on visitor activity.

P.S. It never hurts to have an outside perspective to review your email marketing for you.

In Customer Experience, Improving Conversion, e-commerce

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Comments (13)

Depesh
April 21st, 2009
6:17 am

This needs a lot of time and dedicated, unfortunately as with our situation, without a dedicated email person it’s not easy to commit to.

Some great tips nonetheless – even if you follow a few of them like segmenting your e-database and testing/optimising, you’ll see a vast improvement (against if you’re not doing that)
Depesh
April 21st, 2009
6:22 am

The http://www.proflower.com/ is currently down… too many hits???
Audio Bible
April 21st, 2009
8:17 am

I have an email list of past subscribers and customers. Right now I email them about once a month with a promotion email and once a month with a request to get the past customers to review their purchase, (because I just added customer reviews and want to get as many as I can).

How often should I be email my list but not spamming them? Is once a week to much? I do notice a good jump in orders and conversion rate when I email my list but I do not want to spam them.

Any suggestions?
Depesh
April 21st, 2009
8:36 am

I’m giving a complete top-line opinion, without knowing too much about your product, market etc. but once a month for a enewsletter is good (assume it is FMCG) then have flexibility for targetted offers within that period… I think once a week is too much, considering your customers may also be receiving a number of other emails/offers so at minimum leave 2 weeks apart if possible unless you have something fantastic to talk about/sell then they’d forgive you for sending 2 emails within a week/2 weeks…
Sameer
April 21st, 2009
10:03 am

When talking in terms of site conversion it is important to segment the conversion based on channel performance. Not sure what percentage of proflowers high conversion comes from email. It will be interesting to see the segment distribution of the conversion rates of top 10 converting site.
7 Tips For Improving Email Performance | Kikabink News
April 22nd, 2009
7:49 am

[...] Bryan Eisenberg, “Have You Spring Cleaned Your Email Marketing Yet?” GrokDotCom, April 2… Share and [...]
Luis Rafael Burgos
April 22nd, 2009
11:52 am

I’m really getting on track with you, thank you for putting some focus on my clients works.
Let’s Not Be This “Clear” With Our Email Marketing | FutureNow's GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog
April 23rd, 2009
8:11 am

[...] really needs to spring clean and segment their email lists better. Sending your pre-existing customers offers that are irrelevant is just like sending [...]
Printable Scrapbook
July 18th, 2009
10:49 pm

6. Don’t send emails in the dark. Make sure your emails are being tracked by web analytics all the way through the conversion funnel and that you are making improvements and optimizing along the way.

Good idea!
Promotional Merchandise
September 12th, 2009
12:26 am

These are really great ideas for monitoring and ensuring your email marketing is doing what it should. Especially the comment on getting outside perspective. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to pay for the service, you can always ask impartial people to just give your opinion, of course the experts might have more informative hints.
fashionapparel
October 9th, 2009
12:27 am

I will segment my email list.
thanks
Genetic
October 16th, 2009
9:31 pm

Hello Bryan,

It’s usefule article.
พระเครื่อง
October 27th, 2009
11:36 pm

This is great. Thanks for posting. พระเครื่อง

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