A friend is grumbling that his site gets lots of visitors and traffic but no conversions. Getting lots of traffic is great, but it doesn’t help if it’s the wrong kind of traffic.
For example, if I write a post called: Barbie: 50 Years of Greatness and talk about the successful marketing of the doll, I may get lots of traffic. However, it’s likely to be from 9 year old girls excited about toys. Since my target market is small businesses, the traffic won’t do me (or the girls) any good. None of us will get what we want.
Author Archives: Jodi Kaplan
Bigger is Better!
Forget everything I’ve said about targeting. It is better to “spray and pray”, to make your list as big as possible, reach as many people as you can. Never mind whether they want or need your product. After they see your message 1,000 times they will want it!
Don’t clean your list. Bounces don’t matter. What’s important is that your list is as large as possible.
Never, ever target your audience. If you sell women’s shoes, put your ad everywhere: GQ, Esquire, New York magazine, Cat Fancy, Popular Mechanics. All eyeballs are good eyeballs.
April Fools
Photo adapted from: demi-brooke
Is Your Product a Solution Without a Problem?
I was surfing the Web the other day and stumbled on a bra dryer. I can’t post the picture here (copyright issues), but it looks like a mesh sports bra or workout top. The idea is (apparently) to strap a bra inside it and it will dry faster or not lose its shape or something.
Trouble is, it only seems to come in one size, and well, women come in lots of sizes.
Also, for you guys out there, bras can be hand-washed, hung up to dry, and forgotten about. Drying them faster is NOT a pressing problem.
I point this out not because I want this blog to regularly focus on underwear, but because the men who came up with this contraption never stopped to do any research to see if anyone wanted, needed, or cared about their product. Yes, successful products (say the iPhone) can often come from a product nobody KNEW they wanted (until they saw one). But this, this is just silly.
Before investing time, money, and effort in a new product or service, check and see if there’s any interest. Show potential vendors a prototype, do some market research. Google the problem. Check with users. Find out their reactions. Is it wow? Or is it are you kidding??!!
Photo: hoyasmeg
The One-Minute Marketing Test
Here’s a quick way to see if your marketing is effective.
Go to your web site home page. Or, even better, check a landing page. If you prefer, pick up a brochure, leave-behind, or any other marketing material you have handy.
Read the first paragraph.
Start counting
See how many times it says, “me”, “I”, or “we”. Then, count how often it says, “you” or “your”. The “you’s” and “yours” should greatly outnumber the “we’s”. If they don’t you’re focusing too much on yourself and not enough on your customers.
Check your competition
Now, go to a competitor’s Web site. Read the first paragraph. Can you plug yours in? Are they significantly different? Does your site say anything special about you? Or, does it use language like “leading edge technology company” or “fostering health education and education activities for Southern Michigan since 1996”? Is the wording interchangeable? Is it clear from the first sentence exactly what your company or organization does?
Now, go back and rewrite the paragraph. Read it out loud. Better yet, read it to someone else (preferably someone who doesn’t work for you). See how much better that sounds?
What Open Rate Should Your Email Get?
If you check the Q&A on LinkedIn, Marketing Professionals or other business forums, you’ll see lots of questions about email open rates. What open rate will I get? How many people will click on my link? What will my response rate be?
They’re tough questions, and you’ll see lots of answers (including mine) saying that “it depends.” Not that I (and my fellow responders) don’t want to be helpful, it’s just that the results you will get depend on lots of different factors (list you use, your niche, what you want people to do, what they get for doing it, the words and design you use, even time of day). Too many options for a one size-fits-all answer.
Average email open rates by industry
Each year, Mailer Mailer puts together a detailed report showing open, click through, and subject line performance for over 1 billion emails. Here are a few highlights from 2008 (when I first posted this) compared to the latest 2015 report.
2008 Highest Average Open Rates
General Small Business: 16.49%
Education/Training: 15.76% (largest gain over 2007, when it was 13.76%)
Government: 25.6%
Nonprofit/Trade Association: 14.6%
2015 Highest Average Open Rates
Museums and Galleries: 24.9%
Manufacturing and Distribution: 24%
Arts and Crafts: 20.3%
Average email click through rates by industry
2008 Highest Average Click Rates
Religious/Spiritual: 6.66%
Real Estate: 6.35%
Transportation/Travel: 4.65%
2015 Highest Average Click Rates
IT Services: 3.4%
Transportation: 3.4%
Food, Beverage and Agriculture: 3%
average email open rates by subject line length
2008 Email Open Rates by Subject Line Length
Under 35 characters: 19.64%
Over 35 characters: 14.83%
2015 Email Open Rates by Subject Line Length
16-27 characters: 12%
28-39 characters: 12.6%
40+ characters: 11.1%.
Open rates have risen since 2008, but the industries getting the best open rates have changed completely. Extremely short subject lines used to do well, but now the sweet spot seems to be somewhere in the middle.
The important thing is that each industry is different, as is each offer, company, and so on. While the absolute numbers are best as a big picture view, don’t worry too much if your numbers are lower than your peers. Instead, use the report as a guide for which stats to watch and what to test.
How to improve your email open rate
Test your subject lines. If you’ve been using long very short subject lines, try something a bit longer. If your long subject lines aren’t doing well, shorten them.
Watch the click to open ratio (meaning how many people opened, read, and clicked on something in the email message). Has it been going up? Or down? Sunday had the worst open rate, but the highest click rate. Track the numbers and see which ends up being more profitable (or meeting whatever indicator you’re tracking: downloads, sales, queries, etc.).
Change days of the week, or times of day: are you doing better on Monday? or do you get better results on Wednesday? Emails did better this year on Mondays and Wednesdays. These are likely business to business, if you’re selling a consumer product, you may do better on weekends. Try sending later, or earlier, in the day and see if it makes a difference in your open rates.
Personalize or not? Interestingly, something that used to work well in 2008 can now backfire if you overdo it. Personalizing in the body of the message worked well, but personalizing the subject line reduced open rates from over 17% to 11. Personalizing both reduced it even further, to only 4.9!