B2B Email marketing

Mark Nicholson
Marketing Director at Conosco

14 May 2009 12:22pm

Hi,

I run the marketing for a technology company and to date we have been mailing about 5,000 prospects harvested/cobbled together from various sources with HTML and text email offers.

We deliver these email blasts through Netsuite our CRM system. We seem to get a reported 12'ish% opening rate and a 0.4% response rate (although this includes 'out of office' and 'opt outs' so in essence we get very little response.

How much will I have to pay to get a specialist email marketing company to mail a new data selection (sme's in London) with our email to see whether it is our data or our system that is producing the poor response?

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks

Mark Nicholson
dan barker
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker

15 May 2009 17:56pm
hi, Mark, how are you?

12% doesn't sound bad for 'harvested prospects', depending on how they've been harvested. the 'response rate' does seem low though (i'm counting that as 20 people from 600 openers, if your 0.4% refers to the whole list?). It also sounds like when you're talking about 'responses' you're referring to actual reply emails.

based on those assumptions, it feels like either your offers aren't great, your creative isn't great, or your prospects have no interest.

here's an idea for you that will firstly validate whether your results are as bad as your current system is telling you & secondly will allow you to try out a few different creative approaches & compare them to see whether that's the problem:
1. use mailchimp for your next campaign. very cheap, very reliable, great company for small volumes like yours.
2. figure out what your 'response' should actually be (it sounds like you're counting an email reply as a response?) - for example a click through to a specific landing page on your site.
3. split your list into 5 equal parts. use the same subject line for each, but use different creative for each. make sure the entire purpose of each email is to drive visitors to your landing page.
4. measure your response rate therefore as 'number of opened emails' divided by 'number of visits to the landing page as a result of the emails'.
5. see whether your total results match up with your previous results.
6. see what the variation was between the different segmented creatives.
Hopefully that's of some use or may spark some ideas.

If it's any additional interest, I see you work for an IT service org. I used to manage emarketing for a fortune 500 IT co, sending out around 70 mass emails a month. If you'd like a proper chat feel free to get in touch (email is: d at brkr dot org).

dan

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http://www.barker.dj
Chloë Thomas Silver
Managing Director at indiumonline

09 June 2009 19:25pm

Hi Mark,

Dan's got some great tips there, and hopefully I can add some more!

Another fairly cheap tool you could try is constantcontact - they have great deliverability. And deliverability is key to getting your emails into the inbox and therefore read. If you're sending from your own system you might be experiencing some deliverability issues - this could explain the low-ish open rate you're getting. (along with content, subject lines, interesting messages, data quality etc etc)

With a list of 5k emails you've not got enough data to do a reliable split test - testing different content / subject lines etc. Not that that means you shouldn't do it - just that you should only believe very starkly different results to be meaningful. If A has a response of 10% and B 12% I'd ignore it at those volume levels, but 10% versus 50% would be worth believing!

Cold emailing can work in the B2B environment - but I wouldn't send those lists from your own system. Most suppliers will manage the send for you anyway. 2 to try would be:

http://5mins.co.uk/

or 247emaildata.com

Hope some of this works for you!

If you want to chat any of it through you can get hold of me here:

chloe at indiumwm dot com

01865 339 470

Cheers

Chloë

Indium Web Management