Walk away from the light! Don’t make mistakes that could kill your business.

Okay, okay, maybe that’s a bit too dramatic. But really, far too many people are making email marketing mistakes that decrease their chances of success. Avoid the pitfalls, and consider the following errors – and at times even blunders – that cost companies both revenue and reputation.

1.    Botched Subject Line

Many subject lines are truncated. Consider how cutting off just the last few letters the subject line of “A Guide to Getting Started with Analytics” ended with a really bad first impression!

You’ll want to edit carefully, and check out how your email will appear in your customers’ inboxes! Test the results! Did you get this one? TEST. THE. RESULTS. FIRST. If the emails don’t get opened, they won’t get read. If they aren’t read, you’ll lose sales. And that’s no bueno!

2.    Too Much, Too Often

Avoid being tagged and labeled as spam. If you flood their inboxes, this is a guarantee. You may want to consider an email marketing company who can measure metrics of who opens and clicks — or who unsubscribes. This can help you decide how to spread your marketing across your readers’ inboxes.

Avoid going into your customers’ spam files

If your potential customer unsubscribes, then you’ve lost them forever. That translates to a 0.00% chance that they’ll make the purchase. So, send wisely.

3.    Neglecting the Smartphone and Tablet

A whopping 50% of emails are now opened on smartphones or tablets. Maintain the big picture here: remember that the goal is for your reader to take immediate action. Be aware of creative ways to elicit a response from their smartphone or tablet, where it’s not as easy to navigate.

Keep it simple when sending an email campaign to mobile users. The more the consumer must do to make the purchase, the less likely they are to buy. In this case, less is more.

4.    No Call to Action

You know this: you have interested users. If you’re making it tough for them to click on the deal or to use a promotion code, you’ll lose business. 

5.    Too Much to Read

The rule of thumb here is 30 seconds or less. If your readers can’t read and digest the content in that time frame, they’ll click ‘delete,’ and there goes the potential purchase.

Keep it simple. Avoid overwhelming your reader with too much content.

6.    Burying Your Website Link

The goal is to have the buyer click on to your website for even more choices of products and services. Keep the link to your website front and center. Don’t bury it at the bottom of your blast, or you could lose business here as well.

7.    Including an Unfriendly “Sender”

Think about what they are going to see in their inbox. If it’s a name, they are more likely to open it. If it’s a company or an overt sales pitch, they will probably ditch the email and the buying opportunity. Who the email is from is even more important than the subject line.

8.    Missing the Boat!

There is an important window of time in which to send the email blast. If you direct your buyers way before a sale actually starts, if will fall right off their radar. They’ll know they have time to get back to it, and – it’s clear what happens when the task isn’t important to accomplish “right now.” It falls by the wayside.

Conversely, you’ll also lose possible buyers if they get the blast just hours before your promotion ends. Chart what time frame works best; maintain authentic metrics, and send that blast in a timely manner. Avoid “too early” and “to late” so that you don’t lose that potential business.

If you’ve been making some of these mistakes, don’t stress! These can be easily addressed and fixed, and you’ll soon be grabbing those lost sales right back.

———-

Guest post by Valerie J. Wilson,  freelance writer who covers business, marketing, and education.

Photo Credit: barmala

Photo Credit:  Andrew Mason

8 Email Marketing Mistakes That Could Cause You to Lose Business is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

According to a recent BtoB Magazine survey, marketers see “delivering content relevant to a segment” as the most important tactic to improving email marketing performance. Nearly half of all marketers feel this tactic will help them improve their email marketing results.

Along with this, list segmentation was recognized by 30% of BtoB marketers as a tactic to improve marketing performance.

By combining list segmentation and segment-specific content, marketers could see a dramatic increase in the quality and performance of their campaigns.

If marketers want to create more personalized, relevant messaging, then why aren’t more of them implementing segmentation strategies?

From what we’ve seen in the industry, many don’t know how to get started or which data to use to identify marketing segments. With this in mind, here are some basic segmentation strategies:

List Segmentation Strategies

The four basic market segmentation strategies are based on behavioral, demographic, psychographic, and geographical differences.

Behavioral segmentation should be central to your segmentation strategy. Recipients can be broken into groups by engagement metrics. Those that frequently open messages, click on links, and generate conversions are likely to be the most valuable contacts in your marketing database. Treat those records with utmost care and give them the attention they deserve. You may even want to consider VIP programs or special offers specifically for this segment.

Those showing little or no activity might be segmented out for a re-engagement campaign. Surveys, contests, sweepstakes, special offers, and polls may provide enough interest to re-awaken these connections and spark an increase in engagement.

Demographic, psychographic, and geographic segments can be determined based on commonalities, and content can be produced to speak to those common elements. Breaking apart your database into segments based on gender, interests, or region and writing content specifically for those segments can lead to highly personalized campaigns and quality results.

Review Your Metrics

Metrics are a marketer’s best friend. B2B marketers can glean significant insight by determining what content users found interesting and drove them to action. Which articles in your newsletter received the most clicks? Which call-to-action led to a site visit? Which ones resulted in a download or sale?

When you break this out by segment, you can get a clear understand of which messaging generates the best results.

Once you have a better idea of what your recipients find interesting, you can customize your content so it speaks directly to their interests.

Just do it

By combining list segmentation with custom content and frequently reviewing campaign performance, email marketers can determine what kind of content produces the best results for the various types of contacts in their marketing database.

Tactics and Strategies for BtoB Email Marketing Segmentation is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

The goal of email marketing is relevance and action. Recipients want emails that speak directly to them and are interesting to them, while marketers want emails that get results. The first and most important step towards improved email relevancy and results is: targeting.

A recent Marketing Sherpa case study suggests a 208% higher conversion rate for targeted emails over regular, untargeted email blasts.

But that’s not all. Nearly 40% of marketers who segment their email lists experience higher open rates, and almost a quarter of email marketers experience better deliverability and higher revenue due to email list segmentation. A study across multiple industries shows segmented campaigns yield better than 14% higher open rates and clicks.

But… a 2012 Return Path study shows that 55% of senior marketing executives are not segmenting their list. More than half of email marketing campaigns are unsegmented, and it’s our educated guess that the other half could be better segmented.

Marketing experts across industries agree: email marketing mistake #1: Sending the same email to everyone.

There are myriad benefits associated with targeting, personalization and segmentation:
• More relevant, targeted emails
• Better open rates;
• Improved deliverability
• Fewer complaints
• Increased ROR (return on relationship)
• Increased ROI (return on investment)

. . .

How to Segment

1. Demographic Data
Segment by age, gender, location, etc. For some products and age groups (like teens) completely different look and feel and content may be appropriate for male v. female segments. They don’t need snow gear in Hawaii, so looking at geography might also be helpful as you begin to target products and services to user clusters. One caveat: demographics do not necessarily match preferences. Retailers generally find that brands purchased, categories shopped and general “aesthetics” are a better way to segment than, say, age or geography. (Look no further than the nearest teenage girl and ask her if she prefers products aimed at teens or twentysomethings.)

2.User History
Your email database contains a lot of actionable, targetable subscriber data. Segment by optin date, new leads, etc. Don’t send a new customer the same email that you’re sending someone who has been on your email list for 10 years or bought dozens of products. Also, segment by how many emails you have sent, or users have opened, or how long they have been on your list.

3. VIPs, VICs and Lurkers
VIPs and VICs (Very Important Customers) 
deserve recognition. They don’t want to be treated like everyone else, and nor should they be. So find them, separate them out and send them more personal emails that acknowledge their past purchase or contributions. Ditto, lurkers and never-shoppers. They get your emails but they don’t buy or request info. So the right emails may want to remind them, or even hint that there’s a special offer or last chance. (One nonprofit we know found that text only emails helped get non-givers off the fence and drive donations from that difficult segment).

4. Behavior
Segment by type, recency or frequency of purchase, or other actions. Segment users who never click or purchase or donate as well as your frequent flyers and big spenders. The latter group (frequent clickers, buyers, social media sharers) is a great way to target your brand advocates. Nor is email the only behavior element you can use to target emails. Many marketers have the ability to integrate customer relationship management (CRM) data with customer behavior from websites and preference data from emails. There are also third-party subscription options. Rapleaf and Demandbase provide real-time visitor insights to enable better targeting and a higher level of personalization.

5. Customer or Market Segment
Segment by market or product, customer type or user group. For B2C, this might mean product group. For B2C you may have data about a user’s office location, product group, title/seniority or where they sit in the corporate structure.

6. User History and Survey Data
Segment according to survey data, preferences and other data. You may be sitting on more segmentation data than you think. If you’ve asked for demographic data in user signups, or have conducted surveys, then you likely have a lot of powerful information to help you segment better. The problem here is what’s called “siloed” data, meaning the integration of cross channel or non-email elements. It’s important to bring as much user information into your email marketing mix as possible, so that may mean finding a way to integrate different data elements into the email platform for better targeting.

7. Customer Value
Segment by influencers, customer lifetime value (CLV) or other indices of customer value. Similar to user history, this allows you to speak to users according to their interest in your product or service and their corresponding value as a customer.

8. Know What You Don’t Know
Don’t forget to create that email for users where you don’t know, say, when they signed up or whether they are men or women.

9. Big Data is Here (Or Coming Soon)
The more data you have at your disposal, the more you can delve, divide and target. Even smaller businesses are beginning to take advantage of Big Data to analyze user actions and data sets. Most analysts predict that Big Data analytics software will be presenting marketers with cost-effective automated products and services by the end of 2013.

10. Test, Test, Test
How do you know if it’s working? How do you try another segmentation idea? Test and test again.

. . .

Ready, Set, Segment

Segmentation works, and is becoming increasingly important as consumers are expect personalized, relevant emails from brands.

Ready, set, segment. And let us know if we can help.

10 Shades of Segmentation — Better Email Targeting is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Here are some tips to help ensure your open and read rates are as high as possible.

This is the goal: All emails should feel like this!

The “From Stuff”

Set up your emails to come from a real person. So many mailers choose to use “donotreply@blahblah.blah” because they want to funnel reader responses through a specific portal. You’ll do a lot better if you simply allow your mails to come from You@anactualemail.address. You can easily set up a separate address just for this, which allows you to have a specific place to gather reader responses and helps to reinforce the idea that you’re a genuine human and not just a listbot. It helps with the spam filters, too.

Pro Tip: Respond to every single response someone sends you. It doesn’t have to be a complicated response, but it must be personal and it must be sent within a reasonable time frame.

The Subject Line

This is where it all begins. Your subject line is the first thing that people on your list will see when your email arrives in their inboxes. It has to be good. It’s helpful to think of your subject line the same way you think of headlines for articles. It needs to be informative, entertaining, and intriguing all at the same time.

Keep it simple! Subject lines with between 28-39 characters are the most likely to get opened! (Source: DMA)

Pro Tip: Spell your subject lines correctly. Using numbers instead of letters and “creative” spellings makes you look like a spammer. Check out our post  our tips for writing better subject lines.

The Salutation

Using email personalization allows you to “greet” each recipient by name. Yes, the people reading the email will know that their names are there because of a code snippet. Still, it looks and feels better to send an email with a name than a “dear reader” or some other generic greeting.

Pro Tip: Start the email like you would a personal message. “Dear [NAME],” or “Hi [NAME]!” or something similar helps the email feel more like personal communication than marketing communication.
The Body

It’s a terrifying sight, but with practice you’ll make it your…you know.

Keep your emails short. Your email recipients are busy people; they get dozens of emails just like yours every day. Don’t take up any more time than you have to. If your message is lengthy, use the body of the email to get the person interested and then invite them to read more on your website.

Don’t be afraid to show some personality. It’s okay to use humor (sparingly) and colloquialisms (also sparingly) and even, sometimes, slang. Emails that are overly formal feel boring and stuffy and aren’t likely to get a good response rate.

Grab the reader’s attention right away. Use storytelling to get them emotionally invested in what you are trying to share with them.

PRO TIP: Use at least a 4:1 ratio for informative/entertaining emails to marketing emails. If all you send out are marketing and advertising messages, people will get bored. If you’re sending out information they can use or that they will find entertaining, more often than not, they’ll open your emails out of “what is she sending to me now? The last tip was so great!”-based curiosity.

Always sign off of every email with your name and contact information. Including things like your business’s phone number (there are lots of affordable VoIP SIP services out there that will set up a business number for you) as well as an email address helps increase the personal feel of the email.

PRO TIP: This is where your call to action is going to go…whatever it may be. Keep in mind that your call to action may not always be about getting your reader to buy something. You might simply be getting them to click on a specific link to learn more about the topic of that specific email.
The Signature

This is where you want to put your preferred contact information—where readers should send feedback, how to get in touch with you for professional purposes, etc. You can put a link to your product or service page here, but it needs to be the last line of your signature, not the first.

This builds trust between your reader and yourself and makes them feel better about opening the next email you send out.

Emailing is not an exact science. It’s more of an art, which is why so many business professionals struggle to get it right. It’s not something that can be boiled down to an exact formula. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and to ask your readers for feedback to help you improve. You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn by getting your readers involved!

Good luck!

Erin Steiner is a freelance blogger, vlogger, and writer from Portland, Oregon. Her insatiable curiosity makes it impossible for her *not* to open emails (even the obviously spammy ones; hooray for spam filters)!

Tips for Crafting Must-Read Emails is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

What do we mean by “doing better?” No matter how effective your email marketing is, there’s always room for improvement. Marketers should always be trying to improve their results, whether that’s increasing conversions, improving deliverability, growing their list, or some other strategy that would result in achieving business goals.

The problems email marketers experience tend to be centered around several key areas. Those include:

1. Not enough time for strategy

According to the study, 12% spend no time on email strategy, 43% feel it’s a significant problem, and 27% spend no time optimizing email campaigns. This is alarming for many reasons, but the lack of strategy will result in email campaigns that have no focus and offer little value to the recipient.

Marketers should take the time to figure out why they are sending their emails. If you don’t have a strategy, put one in place before your next campaign.

2. Lack of resources

For many marketers, simply getting a campaign out the door is viewed as a success. With limited time, budget, and manpower, few feel they have the luxury of dedicating staff to produce quality email content. But does inadequate content produce results?

3. Being unable to measure results

61% of marketers say their email campaign performance is either poor or average, which shows that the majority of marketers aren’t getting the results they want.

Many marketers don’t track conversions, and many don’t know if their campaigns bring value to their business.

Email marketing doesn’t have to be this way. Implement processes to track conversions and measure those against your business goals. Understand if your campaigns help increase leads, drive sales, or improve customer retention.

4. The CYA Syndrome

The CYA (Cover Your A$$) Syndrome tends to be found in many larger organizations. Marketers in these businesses may be the culprits of delivering campaigns that have little to no business value. The reasons for the campaigns stem largely from management directives; marketers send them out simply because they were told to do so.

How To Do Better With Your Email Marketing

Are you unsure of how to change your process to improve your results? Here are some things to consider:

1. Hire Expertise

Review your expenses and determine if you’re getting the most for your budget. You may be better off outsourcing part or all of your campaign to those with more experience.

At Mass Transmit, we’ve found that when we help businesses with their email marketing, the lift they get from their campaign results more than covers the cost of our services.

2. Put Your Money Where The Money Is

Focus on what delivers the most value to your business. You may want to start by reviewing your retention marketing, since keeping customers is always easier than finding new ones. Then review your lead-nurturing campaigns, and then focus on lead generation.

If you are focused only on trying to target new customers, you’re probably ignoring the low-hanging fruit. Your lack of success with converting qualified leads and growing the value of existing relationships means that you aren’t maximizing your potential for business.

3. Demonstrate Effectiveness

When senior management is shown concrete evidence that your email campaigns are driving revenue or contributing to some other business objective, they’re more likely to support your requests for additional budget, staff, or resources. To do this, make sure you have processes in place so you can determine campaign costs and track conversions.

Developing an email marketing strategy, tracking conversions, and measuring your success isn’t difficult, but it can be hard to know where to start. Mass Transmit helps companies make the most of their email marketing budget by identifying areas for improvement and executing campaigns that meet or exceed business objectives. Want to take the next steps with your email marketing? Contact Adam or Marla and start “doing better” today.

You Should Be Doing Better With Your Email Marketing is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

We’re getting pretty accustomed to hearing that mobile is the next big thing. Mobile devices are changing the way we communicate, market, interact and live. What’s interesting — and sometimes surprising — is how the landscape is shifting even as it grows.

1. More Mobile Devices, Users, Access

A staggering 87% of all U.S. adults own a mobile phone. For marketers, that means everyone you are marketing to. Smartphone sales grew 38% in the last quarter of 2012 to reach 700 million units sold for the entire year (Strategy Analytics). 56% of all mobile users access the Internet, and half of them send or receive email with their mobile device (Pew). There will be more internet-connected mobile devices such as smartphones and 3G tablets than people in the world before the end of the year. (Cisco)

2. More Email Opens

Email opens are soaring on mobile devices. Mobile email has shot up 138% in the last 18 months (Knotice). 88% of U.S. mobile users check email via a mobile phone every day. (DMA). 41% of commercial emails were opened on a mobile device during the second half of 2012.  Commercial emails opened on mobile devices are on pace to surpass desktop opens by the end of 2013 (Knotice). Read our post on the growth in mobile email.

3. More Android Users

In the U.S., iPhone and iPad add up to 75% of mobile opens. However, Android, which currently accounts for 21% of mobile opens, is gaining steadily here. (Knotice). Meanwhile, worldwide, Android is already dominant. 68% of the smartphones shipped in 2012 use the Android operating system (Strategy Analytics).

4. A Lot of Mobile Only

25% of U.S. mobile Web users are mobile-only (MobiThinking). That means if your email or website doesn’t work for mobile, then it doesn’t work for a quarter of mobile Internet users. Furthermore, only about 2% of mobile emails are opened on another device (Knotice), so there may be a huge missed opportunity to reach a large part of your audience if the email renders poorly on mobile devices.

5. More Responsive Emails

Virtually unheard of just a year ago, mobile-tested responsive email design is the best way to ensure emails render correctly on smartphones, tablets and desktops alike. Good responsive design ensures that your emails stretch and scale, so that all elements are readable, all images visible on mobile devices and desktop email clients alike. See our post on responsive email design.

Free Mobile Email Marketing Whitepaper

How to Create Effective Mobile Email Marketing Campaigns that Generate Results

Download now!

5 Mobile Shifts is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

Fully 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends (Nielsen). 80% of all B2C and B2B purchase involve some form of WOM recommendation (Forrester).

We use and trust word-of-mouth with or without brand involvement. (Think about the last time you found a new doctor, heard about a good movie, or made travel plans). Word-of-mouth works better — and is more measurable — when brands reach out to their influencers (customers and advocates).

What can you share via word-of-mouth? Just about anything. It works for consumer brands and B2B. Word-of-mouth is a great way to get teens to share a new brand. It’s also a powerful way to drive conference attendance or promote a new app.

If you have an Email Transmit account, you can use that platform to build a low-cost, measurable word-of-mouth referral program and/or sweepstakes.

Here’s what you do:

Create a compelling offer. Think about a discount, promotion or other incentive that will make prospects sit up and take notice.

Write great copy that speaks to influencers and your potential customers and engages them. (We’ll give you a nifty checklist and examples of referral program copy elements.)

Get your channels ready to share – email, website, social media, offline. (You may not want to share with your entire email list; you probably do want to use all of your social media channels.)

Here’s what we do:

Build a referral email that is personalized and features a compelling call-to-action.

Ensure tie-ins between social media, web, email and offline elements.

Design emails and landing pages that are good looking, powerful, branded, appropriate for your core audience and effective.

Build in tracking so that you can measure referrals and results.

Check legal requirements in the country of the offer (such as age requirements for sweepstakes winners, US CAN SPAM, Canada PIPEDA and the EU Data Protection Directive requirements).

Build a referral and/or sweepstakes module with email and social sharing.

Here are some bells and whistles:

Add a sweepstakes so that participants have more incentive to share.

Build in tiered messaging and prizes, so that brand advocates receive different communications/prizes than new users.

Tie into Facebook’s Open Graph to create relevant earned media.

Use Pinterest to share prizes or relevant images.

Integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Here’s what your customers and brand advocates do:

Open an email or visit a landing page from a brand they love.

See a compelling offer.

Share with a friend or two or seven.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here’s what you measure:

What you measure will depend on your product and service and how you measure success and conversions.

Here are some good starting metrics:
- Number of referrals
- Number of opt-ins
- Number of sales or sign-ups or other conversions
- Channel performance (email, website, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)
- Return-on-investment

Next steps:

Our team of marketing professionals have experience building word-of-mouth programs, surveys and sweepstakes for companies like Dell, Deloitte, DosXX, Estée-Lauder, Amway, United Rentals and Zoomerang.

Contact us.

. . .

How to Build a Fast, Effective Word-of-Mouth Marketing Program Using Email and Social Media is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

So how do you write effective email copy? And what do you need to do to craft a message that resonates?

There’s several copywriting tactics that are regularly found in successful email campaigns.

Tactic #1: Imagine yourself as the recipient and write to persuade yourself

Do you talk to your customers or do you talk at them? Does your copy resonate or alienate?

Write your copy with your recipient in mind. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they want to hear.

If you can’t persuade yourself, you won’t be able to persuade your target audience either.

Tactic #2: Start with the benefit

At a time when inbox volume continues to grow, readers have less and less time to spend scouring through their messages. You have to make an impact fast, and it has to be obvious to the reader why they should take action on your message.

By starting your email with a benefit, readers will instantly know why your message will help them address a core business value- saving time, saving money or providing valuable educational content.

One thing to avoid is opening emails with a personal introduction or otherwise meaningless copy. This offers no value and should be avoided.

Tactic #3: Be helpful

Are you coming across as being sales-y or helpful? Readers always respond better to messages that inform and educate.

Not sure how to be helpful? Think about the last few questions your customers asked. Or talk with your support or service team and ask them what questions they are asked regularly. You can also learn from your customers- either directly or through a poll or survey. And if none of those are options, check your web site traffic or search marketing for trends in what your visitors are accessing, and provide more information on those topics.

Whatever you do, don’t oversell. Teach, then sell. If you are helpful and educate, then the sale will come to you.

Tactic #4: Lead the recipient towards a decision

The goal of effective email copy is not to convince a customer to buy, but rather to serve a customer in a way that enables them to quickly make the best decision.

To make the best decision, a customer must be able to understand and accept a series of logical premises that lead them to take action on your message, which usually comes in the form of a clickthrough.

Write your copy so that it leads the recipient to CLICK. Your email copy should be long enough to sell the click, but no longer.

Tactic #5: Make it personal

Your email message should be conversational. People don’t buy from emails. People buy from people. Use email copy to make a personal connection, as opposed to using blatant personalization to make it feel like you’re speaking to someone.

Tactic #6: Long enough, but no longer

Your email copy should be long enough to get across the main point of your message, and no longer. Too little or too much copy can reduce your response rate.

If you review your email and recognize that certain parts of it do not lead towards your goal, delete that part of the copy. If it’s unnecessary, don’t burden your reader with the extra content.

Also, keep your paragraphs or other blocks of copy as short as possible. Visually, long paragraphs are a turn-off to readers. Don’t make reading your message feel like a chore. Convey your key point and benefits in short, clear, easy-to-read segments.

What other copywriting tactics to you use to create effective messages?

Free Mobile Email Marketing Whitepaper How to Create Effective Mobile Email Marketing Campaigns that Generate Results Download now!

6 Tactics for Effective Email Copywriting is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

According to a 2012 study, B2B email conversion rates are higher across the board than those of their B2C peers. The study, conducted by the Email Experience Council and Econsultancy, found strong conversion rates for B2B newsletters for both lead generation and sales. For example, lead generation conversions for B2B newsletters are around 4.1% compared to 1.8% for B2C vehicles, while sales email conversion rates for B2B are more than double the B2C averages.

B2B Conversions Not Just Online Sales

While online sales are important measurements of email success, B2B marketers may choose other indices of conversions. For example, clickthrough to a custom landing page or scheduling an appointment may qualify as conversion for certain marketers.

Insurance marketers track lead generation or sales cycle starters. For example, a good action to track may be how many recipients access policy information or contact a broker, as these may be the most important steps between the email transmission and winning a new account. For our financial services clients, an important conversion is the appointment schedule application – again, the first step that a potential customer or partner takes. For other clients, there are other referral and lead generation steps that we track as conversions.

Of course, tracking appointment scheduling or referrals may not be comparable to others in your industry, so you’ll begin to benchmark against yourself for these conversion indices. Nonetheless, they are vital metrics, and each marketing campaign should establish its own conversion criteria, then measure, track, and establish its own baseline metrics.

Best Practices

Segmentation Drives Conversions
According to a 2012  study, 52% of marketers say they need to improve email database segmentation [MarketingSherpa]. Another survey reports that marketers list email segmentation as the most important email marketing initiative, behind increasing subscriber engagement [StrongMail/Zoomerang]. There tends to be more segmentation already in place for B2C lists, so B2B marketers can still see benefits from increased targeting and segmentation. Email lists perform better when segmented by behavior, demographics, subscriber action or other variables.

Mobile is Missing
Fewer than half of B2B emails sent are mobile-ready, which means there is a large group of recipients that the email – and potential conversions – misses. Already 87% of all U.S. adults own a mobile phone and mobile penetration and usage continue to climb.

Identify Conversion Triggers
It is important to track conversions and also to measure email elements that trigger conversions. Sometimes the hard sell (“click here for 25% off”) is less effective than a call-to-action based on benefit (“talk to us about the lowest rates in the industry.”) So, marketers would do well to try different call-to-action approaches, vary the creative and offers with emails, and establish a benchmarking process and baseline of what works and what doesn’t.

Conversions Trump Clicks
Sure, clickthroughs are important, but most marketers agree they would rather sell something than have a subscriber read something. A sale, a new customer, policy or account, is a real, bottom line success metric. So, even if your B2B email doesn’t end in an online sale, chances are there are many conversion points to track. Chances are you are already tracking open rates, so remember it’s important to track conversions as well, even if you define conversion as something other than a sale.

…

Contact us for more about conversion tracking.

B2B Email Conversion Benchmarks and Best Practices is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!

As more and more users access their email via smartphones and tablets, marketers must optimize their messaging and destinations for a mobile audience.

Here’s the latest statistics that show the rapid growth in mobile user base, marketshare and mobile email marketing.

MOBILE/SMARTPHONE USER BASE:

• 87% of all U.S. adults own a mobile phone
• 45% of American adults own a smartphone
• 31% of American adults own a tablet computer
Source: Pew Internet (January, 2013)

• 51.8% of smartphone owners in the U.S. use an Android handset. Apple’s iOS has a 34.3% market share, and the rest is divided between RIM’s BlackBerry (8.1%) and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 platforms (4.3%).
Source: Neilsen (July, 2012)

MOBILE EMAIL USAGE:

• Smartphone owners are more likely to use their device for email than for making phone calls.
• 79% of smartphone owners use their device for email.
• Email is the most popular activity for tablet and smartphone users.
Source: Adobe Digital Publishing Report (January 2013)

• 10% of consumers use a smartphone or tablet as their primary device for checking email.
Source: DMA (October 2012)

• For tablet users, 44% check email daily and 65% check email weekly.
• For smartphone users, 61% check email daily and 80% check email weekly.
Source: Pew Research Center (October, 2012)

• Email is still a highly utilized feature on smartphones, though reading emails (67% personal, 38% work) outpaces actually writing emails (56% personal, 32% work).
• Smartphone users with children are more likely to use email (76%) than smartphone users without children (69%).
Source: MediaPost (January, 2013)

• 33% use their mobile device to screen emails before reading them later on a desktop.
Source: eConsultancy (October, 2012)

• Mobile email represents 43% of all email opens. That’s a 138% increase in the last 18 months, and a 48% increase in 2012.
Source: Litmus (January, 2013)

• 41% of marketing emails were opened on a mobile device in the second half of 2012. That’s up from 36% in the first half of 2012.
Source: Knotice (February, 2013)

MOBILE EMAIL CLIENTS:

• The Apple iPhone is the #1 email client for email opens (23%), while the iPad is #3 (12%). Android is #5 (8%) but currently represents the fastest growing mobile email platform.
Source: Litmus (February, 2013)

• More email opens are being made on Apple iOS mobile devices (80.34%) than Android (18.93%).
Source: Litmus (November, 2012)

• Android owners are less likely to use tablets for email (34%) than iPhone owners (56%).
Source: Pew Research Center (October, 2012)

• The top smartphones ranked by percent of smartphone email opens are the Apple iPhone at 74.82%, the Apple iPod Touch at 3.35%, the HTC PC36100 at 1.65%, the Samsung SPH-D710 at 1.16%, and the Motorola Droid Razr at 1.03%.
• The top tablets ranked by percent of tablet email opens are the Apple iPad at 94.64%, the Kindle Fire from Amazon.com Inc. at 1.95%, the HP TouchPad at 0.34%, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 at 0.24%, and the Samsung Galaxy 7.0 at 0.24%.
Source: Knotice (January, 2013)

• iOS and Android, the two dominant mobile operating systems in the US, account for over 99.8% of all mobile email opens.
• The iPhone and iPad represented 33% of all email opens (up from 29.34% in the first half of 2012), compared with 6.5% of all opens occurring on Android phones or tablets.
Source: Knotice (January, 2013)

• People opening email on the iPod Touch has been declining steadily over the past year.
Source: Return Path (December, 2012)

• Apple iOS and Android devices account for nearly 100% of all mobile email opens. Blackberry RIM, Windows, WebOS and other platforms account for less that 1% of mobile email open activity.
Source: Return Path (December, 2012)

MOBILE EMAIL MARKETING:

• 39% of companies said their mobile email strategy was “non-existent” and 37% said their strategy was “basic”.
• Almost half (48%) said they didn’t know what proportion of emails they send are read on mobile devices.
Source: eConsultancy (March 2012)

• Knotice projects that the share of mobile opens will exceed 50% for most marketers by the end of 2013.
Source: Knotice (January, 2013)

• Smaller tablets like the Nexus 7 and iPad Mini are used less for email, more for social networking.
Source: eMarketer (December, 2012)

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28 Statistics Show Growth in Mobile Email is a post from the Mass Transmit Broadcast Blog. Subscribe to receive blog posts via email. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+!