Why Your Email Program Sucks
Do your email subscribers find your marketing emails useful? I ran across a statistic from Fluent that suggests consumers think marketing emails are consistently useful only 15% of the time and not useful nearly 60% of the time. So how do you ensure your email program falls into the first category? By ramping up your sophistication.
I recently presented a session on “Why Your Email Program Sucks.” My goal: Offer my own research on where email marketing is lacking and make the group stop and think about their own brand’s email experience. To provide authentic examples, I signed up for the email programs of five well-known brands, using the same 5-7 email addresses. I wanted to not only assess their effectiveness, but how each company used the information I provided (at sign-up, via the preference center, my click, browse and purchase data) to better target me.
With one email address, I never opened a message. With another, I consistently opened but never clicked. For another, I opened and clicked on the same link in every message. I also used the accounts to manage my preferences, abandon my shopping cart and make purchases.
Here are a few questions I wanted to answer:
- Did the brand differentiate itself from competitors?
- Did they influence me to purchase?
- Were the messages timely and relevant?
- Did they incorporate my purchase behavior?