Lead Gen Email Success Series: Generating maximum response

Earlier this year we explored how to ensure maximum deliverability in your high-volume email campaigns. As part of our series delving into the secrets behind lead gen email success, we’re now turning our attention to how to generate maximum response.

Does the type of offer you are promoting have an effect on response? How important a factor is the marketing data you’re using? We’ve gathered the best advice available to ensure your next high-volume email campaign brings results.

Is your product or service suited to email?

Not all offers and promotions are suitable for high-volume email campaigns so before getting started, make sure that your product or service doesn’t fall into one of these problematic categories. For example, anything to do with a financial or insurance offer doesn’t tend to perform well in high-volume email campaigns. Nora Brophy of ResponseGenius explains: “ISPs might think they’re predatory, particularly emails which contain offers promoting higher rates”. Larger ticket items also see a lower response rate due to the cost of the product involved.

The products that tend to perform best in high-volume email campaigns are soft consumer offers. Pet promotions, subscriptions, and memberships usually do best in these types of campaigns. This is because they are impulse buys that generally don’t come with a high price tag attached.

Another thing to consider is the time of the year you’re launching your campaign, as it will affect the response rate. Typically gifts perform well in the run-up to the holiday season while gym memberships and diet offers see a good response in the new year after December’s excesses.

Make the right offer

What should your promotion be? Generally “free” is seen as a red-flag term. This is due to algorithms running in the background which pick up on certain keywords and may send your email into your target’s SPAM folder. Marketers would see a much better response by offering a discount instead. ResponseGenius’ Brophy recommends these discounts be limited-time offers in order to generate urgency which can help to spike response rates.

A study by Lifecycle Marketing supports this argument for a percentage discount. According to them, when looking to generate leads “the most effective retail offer is percentage off (7.9 percent) promotions”. For subscribers who are ready to buy, % off generates the highest conversions because that is the most relevant message for consumers at that stage of the buying process.”

Another thing to consider is to offer a guarantee of results with your offer. This is particularly important if the campaign is sent to a list of people who don’t yet know your product. Offering a guarantee will make you more credible in their eyes and your prospects may be more willing to convert on the spot into paying customers.

Segment your audience

Audiences generally respond better and are more likely to click on your email when they feel that the promotion or offer is specifically relevant to them. Therefore, consider segmenting your audience with offers to match in order to improve response.

In fact, Mailchimp ran a study to understand how much of an impact segmentation had on response rates and the results were striking: a 14.31% higher open rate in segmented campaigns compared to non-segmented campaigns and a 100.95% higher CTR.

Are you using the right data?

You’ve got your offer and messaging sorted so you should be home free, right? Wrong! So often marketers spend a good deal of time thinking about the email creative without considering their target audience. Your distribution list will also greatly affect your response rate.

A recipe for success: mix first-party and third-party data

If you’re unsure how to get started, take a look at your Google Analytics account to understand the type of audience that visits your site and more importantly to understand who converts into paying customers. This can be done in conjunction with an analysis of the first-party data you hold in your database.

What is the persona of the person who buys your products and services? Is there more than one persona? Do you have people coming to your site who don’t go on to convert? Is there something in their profile that you should exclude from your email campaign? By analyzing your own first-party data, you can derive insights that can then be used by a third-party data provider to model and build a much larger audience for your email campaign.

At LBDigital we take a consultative approach to our clients and work with them to determine the best segment for their email campaign. Using our extensive PII data, LBDigital can help marketers to expand their audience via lookalike modeling. We also have over 3,000 carefully curated quality and privacy-compliant data segments ready to use in your next campaign. Or, we can create a custom segment based on your specific needs.

Carry out tests

Once you’ve decided on which marketing data to use, don’t just put all of your marketing budget against it and hope for the best. You may have made an assumption when analyzing your target audience which is incorrect.

For example, we recently worked with an e-bike supplier who wanted to target people in rural areas. We were skeptical and advised a test first, splitting the test budget between rural areas and inner-city areas. As we predicted, the city-based audience performed best and the client was saved from putting their entire marketing budget towards a low-performing segment.

We recommend you test out the segments you’ve chosen and make adjustments as necessary. Our mission at LBDigital is to help marketers save on spend and truly believe that testing is a fundamental way to do this. We advise setting aside at least $3,000 on testing in order to be absolutely certain you’ve made the right choice. In our experience, it’s always better to be safe than sorry!

Get in Touch

If you’re still unsure how to generate an optimum response in your high-volume email campaigns, get in touch with us to discuss your needs. Our email services have already helped many businesses from across different industries to generate high-quality leads.

Read the previous blog post in this series: Ensuring Deliverability