Smart Strategy and Great Creative Drive Results
I recently had a conversation with an associate about email marketing, and gleaned some details of excellent results we recently produced with an email marketing campaign for the business to business realm. I’m not here to solely parade this win, but also to highlight the strategy as it relates to many businesses. Here is the short list of what I think made this exceptionally effective:
Marketing 101: Speak to Uncertainty or an Insecurity
This email was sent to property investment types, specifically property managers, institutional investors, and the content played into a fear of investors: Will the market turn downward soon? What’s in store for my NOI and portfolio?
Targeting 101: Make Sure it’s the Right Audience
This was a nurtured list of leads and subscribers for the Yardi Matrix product newsletters. These are industry specific people who are in the business of apartment buying, selling, and leasing, so the list was relatively well vetted and matured.
Creative 101: Make it Appealing, Simple, Emotive
Sometimes people overthink design and marketing copywriting. In this case, the primary piece of art was this image, the rest consisted of no more than 60 words and two calls to action. Usability studies suggest that your headlines should be no more than 3 or 4 words, paragraphs should tease the content but not spell it out at 20-30 words. Less is definitely more. Some of the more effective B2C emails I’ve seen lately even have more like 10-15 words per product/call to action block.
Hyping the Event
Send an email promoting the event, several times, both to existing clients, and prospects, leading up to the event. Here we beat industry standard by about double, with an okay open rate of about 15%, click rate nearly 2%…good but not exceptional.
Followup
Sending an email after the event offering the content to people who may have ignored it or been too busy, to watch the webinar on their own time…this is a key. “You Missed Out…so sorry, but watch anyway.” Looking at these stats, this followup email generated 44.73% open rate among the people who didn’t respond the ramp up emails. Click rate was 22%! Again, you’re playing into insecurity…everyone wants to be on top of their field, and if someone implies you missed out, you’ll read up and make sure you stay on top, right?
A separate followup to attendees garnered 51.57% open rate, and 31.38% click rate. Anyone familiar with email marketing can attest that these numbers are stellar engagement for email creative. This is very relevant for e-commerce too. You shop on a site and save a cart, but you decide not to buy then. When you get a followup email reminding that you abandoned your cart, and that what you have may be gone before you get back, then the return on that is huge.
The Results
This email campaign and strategy, combined, produced:
- Over 200 Registrants for an online webinar in 48 hours
- Over 1000 Registrants total, 300 attendees on the day of the event
- The leads followed and actualized created $250,000 in new business during the 2 month span
This is just an example of what you can do when you put the right content, right strategy, right creative, and deliver it at the right time. And this is part of a broader campaign of the big data utility at work in the campaign that included other creative I’ve produced, such as the Guide to 2016 magazine by Multi-Housing News. That publication has produced a big buzz about Yardi Matrix data products in the industry at large. See more of this work on my portfolio page.
