Email marketing continues to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is a critical marketing tool to communicate with and nurture your leads – as well as to retain and educate your customers. A periodic prospect email is a great way to keep in touch with leads.
However, with all the noise, the incredible onslaught of spam and more advanced email filters, creating messages that reach someone’s inbox – and then get read – is a challenge. That’s why a successful email marketing strategy must be carefully planned, executed and measured.
We describe email solutions and strategies in detail on a page on our website called, The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Strategy.
And to prove we put our money where our mouth is, we recently used some of our own advice from that page for a longtime customer.
Prospect email success
For this particular client, we send a newsletter every other month to both leads and customers. We’re pleased with the open and click rates of the newsletter. But we felt the time was right to do something more for leads.
We decided to test an offer for the prospect email to further engage those leads and gently move them down the marketing funnel.
We selected a downloadable workbook that has proved to be very popular on the website. We previously offered the workbook on social media but not through an email specifically aimed at leads.
We chose a subject line that teased a current U.S. statistic, enticing recipients to open the prospect email.
The content of the prospect email was to the point and much shorter than our newsletter emails. The content included information on how easy the workbook was to fill out, and how by doing so it might reduce the recipient’s stress level – and who doesn’t want to lower their stress?
So, how did it perform?
The email had an open rate 10 percentage points higher than the average open rate of the newsletter sent to leads.
And, the click rate for this prospect email was 278% higher than the average click rate for the newsletter.
What’s even more impressive is the number of downloads. It had a 31.7% conversion rate. According to the ecommerce experts at Barilliance, in 2022 the average conversion rate for marketing emails was 8.17%. Our email performed 288% percent better than the average marketing email.
What we learned from this exercise was:
- The right offer makes all the difference. That’s part of the magic of email marketing.
- Our subject line and send time encouraged more opens than the average newsletter
With this analysis we know that our leads are hungry for helpful content. We’ll also use our findings to improve our bi-monthly newsletter by testing different subject lines and including calls to action for downloading more helpful content.
If your email open rates and conversions are starting to drop off, check out our Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Strategy.
