Email Marketing, Shared

These are perhaps the second most important audience after sales people and marketeers.  You need to understand why they didn’t respond, enquire or order.  In marketing terms, these non responders have brought down your response rates and significantly reduced your profits.  Before you start your next campaign you need to investigate who they are, find out why they didn’t respond.  If you establish that the communication you sent needs to be tweaked for them to respond then do so.  If there is no hope that they will ever buy from you then use them to suppress others who look or behave like them.
 
It could be that the prospects targeted simply have no requirement, perhaps it was the price, perhaps they do not respond to email offers.  However, we need to understand the exact reasons and identify if there’s a common trend.  For example, if we note that ‘Plumbers’ will never need a “Widget” then we learn from this and exclude plumbers from future campaigns that promote that product.  Via intelligence, we will reduce data & broadcasting costs whilst increase your next email campaign conversion ratio to better your ROI.
 
Typically we target 15% of the non responders to analyse why they haven’t purchased – if you’re doing this then it should be a good cross section of the non responders, not just the top of the list. 

Each campaign you send out will be more targeted based on your understanding of the non responders.  The response rate will therefore increase every time you run a campaign as the list provider you use for your emails will be suppressing people that look like your non responders.

Success, you have orders and you have enquirers!  The email campaign has been a success (especially if the response rate was guaranteed! – this is covered elsewhere if your wondering).  Now we look at significantly increasing the response rate for your next campaign.  Let’s start by looking at the organisations that responded and then compare those to the non responders. 
 
Why?  Well to increase the number of orders you get with each subsequent campaign you run.  Through analysis, we can better the last campaign’s results!  
  
How?  You have a great deal of data on the businesses that you selected, you know there name, sex, job title, location, the business type that they work from, the number of employees located there, their turnover.  Okay, so you probably do not have this level of information just yet but it’s easy to acquire.  The data manager that provided the list will have this level of content or should do, so ask them to append it to your records or ask them to run two profiles.  The first profile is base don customers and the second based on non responders.  By analysing and understanding more about each camp you can restrict future prospecting by supplying the data broadcasting agency or email list provider with suppressions (a profile of people that do not buy your products) and selections (a profile of people that do buy your product). 

By profiling each camps industry type, their size, the contact’s position, their turnover, their office type, address, how many offices they represent in the UK, etc.  We analyse & segment using this information to identify patterns.  We can use this to improve the next response rate, by adjusting your selection profile; excluding businesses with a low probability to respond whilst selecting high probability prospects.
 
 
Sounds simple!  Well, if you need us to analyse by product and then segment this profile based on high profitability, look at life time value of a customer and then work out allowable cost to acquire a customer…… Lets just say it takes a little experience.  Experience we are happy to offer to you if it will increase your response rate and help us retain you as a longer term satisfied customer.  Through analysis and profiling we have lifted response rates from 0.05% to 74%!

Email Broadcasting Response Rates

Of course the response rate you will receive from an email broadcast will very much depend upon what your trying to sell and how your marketing.  Other factors include the list you use, how tightly you research the prospects you will be targeting and how personalised your email content will be.  Other factors such as will you be following the email campaign up will help with sales but are not relevant to response rates for the email broadcast.

The following response rates are based on an average of what clients receive from their vampaigns.  Some campaigns in my opinion are better constructed than others, likewise some products are more in demand than others.  The stats are broken down by sector to give you an idea of a typical response rate based on the products being sold by that sector:

Industry Sector
Average Response Rate
Advertising  2.65%
Charity   1.58%
Design   1.30%
Commerce   1.81%
Finance   2.33%
Human Resources  1.08%
IT   1.49%
Leisure/Entertainment  1.82%
Marketing Services 1.84%
Medical   1.79%
Public Sector   1.96%
Publishing   7.28%
Telecoms    1.28%
Overall Average 1.58%

The response rate is measured as an immediate response (within 5 days of a campaign being sent), naturally responses increase a little (but not much) if the window was extended to say 2 weeks.