Create Relevant Emails, Step 1: What Are Your Subscribers Doing?

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

In a recent comparison of email campaigns at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I noted two key questions you need to ask in order to create more relevant emails:

What Are My Subscribers Doing?
What Do Those Actions Mean?

Simple, right?

And yet many businesses do not have any idea what their email subscribers’ wants, needs and interests really are. Of those who have an idea, most don’t know how those wants, needs and interests differ from subscriber to subscriber.

Why Not?

Those things are not hard to deduce, as long as you answer the 2 simple questions above.

The trouble is, just like Barnes & Noble in our comparison, those businesses either haven’t:

Thought to ask those questions; or
Decided what to do with the answers.

How Do We Ask What Subscribers Are Doing?

We can look at several actions when deciding what a subscriber is doing:

Do they open emails? (Which ones?)
Do they click links? (Which ones?)
Do they visit our website (Which pages?)
Do they purchase products? (Which ones and how much do they spend?)
Do they unsubscribe? (When?)

What other subscriber actions, if any, might you include in your analysis? Share them in the comments!

Expand Your Email Analysis Beyond The Inbox

Note that some of these actions (purchases, visiting our website) take place on your website, rather than directly in the email.

And they aren’t necessarily triggered by receiving an email — subscribers can go to your website and purchase a product at any time.

Even though they might not be traditional “email metrics,” we still need to look at these events, because they can still give us insight into our subscribers’ needs, wants and interests — and we can use that information to create more relevant email campaigns.

Once you start looking at email beyond the immediate results you get (opens and clicks), you can really start to figure out what your subscribers’ needs, wants and interests are, and what motivates them to do business with you.

Next Time: What Do Those Actions Mean?

What would you do if you knew what your individual subscribers were doing with your emails and on your website?

In my next post on this subject, I’ll look at how we might explain our subscribers’ activity, and how we use (and test) those explanations to increase the relevance and success of our email marketing campaigns.

Talk to you soon!

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Extended Reading: check out some of Kevin Hillstrom’s posts on email.. Especially this one where he discusses looking at the lifetime value of an email subscriber. His background is more with the Fortune 500 set than small business, but he brings some great insights and data to any email discussion.

Tags: email web analytics, relevance, strategy

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4 Responses

Aaron Abber
June 27th, 2008 at 8:57 am

Great post.

One key ingredient that most people miss is the differences between ASKING subscribers what they are doing/would like/etc. and OBSERVING what they actually do. When we ask we get told what they believe is true and what we want to hear. When we observe we get a true picture of our subscribers.

Thanks for giving us great observation tools.
Lori Radun
June 27th, 2008 at 11:25 am

Now that’s an interesting way to look at things. Observing is great but how do you get in the minds of your subscribers? For instance, if 60 people click to view a product promotion but none of them buy, why? Is is too much? Were they just curious the first time? Do they not have time to invest? The mysteries of email marketing are enough to drive someone crazy. ha ha
Chris
June 29th, 2008 at 4:04 pm

Those questions are interesting, but unless you know the answers and how to analyze them, it’s not going to be too useful.

People often do the same thing for different reasons. One person may unsubscribe because they were offended by something, and someone else may do it because they are getting too much email in general or going on a long trip or lost interest in the subject or any of 1000 other reasons… so how do you know which it was, and what would you do with that information?
Siobhan
July 1st, 2008 at 5:58 am

Thanks for the great post. As you say, you need to track what is being opened, and if they are clicking through.
But then what?
All too often, marketers have no clue.
One tool I have found really useful for showing on page clicks at your site is Crazy Egg. It will show you what they are clicking on, or more to the point, NOT clicking on.
If you track your page for about 100-100-visits depending on volume, then try to weed out anything causing meaningless clicks, you should have a well-honed sales message at the end of it which you can then use to improve your mailings to your customers-make the offer right in the email and see what happens.
It should boost your sales, and this tracking can be a firm basis for split testing your sales letters to do even better. I was able to raise my customer conversion from 5% to 25% on one sales letter alone. From 1% to 6% on several others. Just think what THAT can do for your bottom line. It is all a question of observing, looking at your reporting, and applying what you learn from it to do even better.
Email is a great tool, but the money is NOT in the list, it is in people’s wallets, and will stay there unless you can persuade them to buy.