Four Indispensable Strategies to Increase E-mail Open Rates

Let's Get Open

(Wrote this one for the day gig, folks. You can see it live in the corporate wild here.)

Raising your open rates is a constant concern for many marketing managers in pharma and a prime focus of what we do at MNG Direct. Here are four abiding strategies that help us deliver results.

1) To go three steps forward, you might need to take one step back.

 Here’s a quick hypothetical scenario. You are running a simple A/B creative test for an e-mail campaign, which means you are splitting the list in half and making a single change so you can measure the impact of that decision. Rank the three outcomes below in order of preference.

a) Creative A performs 8% better than average, Creative B performs 4% worse

b) Creative A performs 28% worse than average, Creative B performs 15% better

c) Creative A performs 22% better than average, and Creative B performs 21% better

The answer is (drumroll please!)…B, then A, and then C.

That may seem counterintuitive, because we all want winners, and we’re leaving the two biggest ones on the sideline…but the problem with the results from Group C is that there’s no variation in the performance that you can use to inform future creative. When your work all performs the same, or is within a range where confidence from statistical significance is low, you do not have the information you need to make optimal choices for the next execution.

So, to sum up – when testing, go for bold single changes in test cells, made without fear. Learn from every test, and test whenever possible. It’s vital.

2) Counterpunch the clock with data.

 One of the most common questions in this industry is, when is the optimal time and day of the week to send e-mail? The problem is the question does not have a simple answer, because your e-mail does not hit the in-box in a vacuum.

Let’s imagine that you get a concrete answer – Monday at 8:30 am – and that it actually is the best time to send. This finding most likely came from data or a test and will become known by other e-mail professionals. Keep in mind that your healthcare professionals (HCPs) probably also subscribe to content newsletters, get notification e-mails from e-commerce vendors, and likely sift through dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails in a day. So how many of these communications will wind up showing up in their in-boxes on Monday at 8:30 am? Probably too many for yours to really stand out.

At MNG Direct, we’ve seen consistent wins from dayparting in a more varied and granular approach, by category, click-through destination, frequency, and so on. This lets us generate a personalized plan for our flights and creates an atmosphere where we are continually learning. As a bonus, it also means that we are never overly dependent on a single time and day slot.

3) Mobile is more of a mindset than a platform. It’s also dominant.

 Many design professionals go for responsive coding in their e-mails to ensure smooth deployment in mobile handsets, and then they consider the job done. This leaves a lot of engagement on the table.

When an HCP is viewing your e-mail on a handset, it’s more than just a smaller screen that you have to worry about, more scrolling than on a desktop or laptop, or a different direction in panning. Dayparting is also a major consideration, since many HCPs are smartphone users who extend their accessibility beyond traditional business hours, and they may also not be willing or able to spend mobile bandwidth on high data transfers. With up to three out of every four people filtering for later or accessing e-mail content directly through mobile, your mindset needs to be mobile first, not mobile friendly. (As a final point on this, you also should be looking at your work on a variety of screens and monitoring how that display mix changes over time.)

4) Prioritize your testing levers.

 In every e-mail campaign, there are a number of variable choices that can have an impact on open rates. Sender names, subject lines, dayparting, preheaders, and preview pane creative elements are all in play, and that’s independent of more technical aspects like in-boxing to avoid the junk folder, hard and soft bounces, list hygiene, ISP white-listing, avoiding spam “honeypots,” and so on. Stay in the space long enough and you’ll wind up with winning and losing practices in all of the above, along with a sense of optimal practices, hopefully through test cell data.

But while all of these tactics have the ability to spike engagement metrics in different ways, they don’t have the same impact. Subject lines and sender names appear to all users, and dayparting also has universal impact. Getting deeper, preheaders and preview pane elements only have impact to the subset of users that are in a consideration path, but they can make all of the difference in the right placement, especially if you are looking to optimize beyond opens. As always, the data should drive your decision-making process.

Next Steps

While open rates may be the primary point of concern for most e-mail professionals, at MNG Direct, we take a more nuanced view, and we monitor a host of other metrics. That’s because any single e-mail metric, even one as important as open rate, will not give you the full indication of a campaign’s performance.

For instance…if your campaign has high opens but poor deliverability and high unsubscribes, that’s not a successful campaign. Similarly, a high click rate e-mail might sound great, but not if the opens are low, or if there are very few conversions on a landing page. Seasonality will also have an impact, and seeing how all of these metrics perform in relation to each other, over multiple flights, is also important.

Increasing your open rate is a laudable goal. But it shouldn’t be your only goal.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Making Money In Politics

Probably Not In Loose Bills

Like many people who do topical content, I'm really tired of feeling compelled to write about politics, especially Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President... but, well, when things that have never happened before happen, it's pretty much impossible to not have it sneak into your work and thoughts. Especially as it relates to marketing and advertising.

The hype du jour comes from a seeming ad lib in which the candidate either implied about the assassination of his opponent, or was alluding to the political power of Second Amendment enthusiasts. And for the purpose of this column, it doesn't really matter about our opinion of the tactic, since it achieved the goal of "earned" media -- which is to say, a carrying of the news cycle.

The fact that this doesn't seem to be translating into votes -- at least, according to the various polls and trending analysis -- doesn't seem to be having that much impact on the candidate's fund raising, which pulled in $51 million in June, and $80 million in July... but with almost none of that cash going to TV ads. According to Business Insider, the Trump campaign has even been outspent by third-party candidates Gary Johnson (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Green).

Which leads me to wonder... well, what is the campaign spending the money on, since the single biggest expense of a presidential campaign is typically television ads?

As I write this, there are 91 days, or 13 weeks, left until the voters put this thing out of our collective misery. Historically in America, elections reach another level of hype and awareness to casual voters after Labor Day, but as you might have guessed by now, this isn't a typical election, if for no other reason that both major party principals have been very well-known public figures for decades. Minds are being made in the here and now, and media buying being what it is, it seems increasingly likely that the Trump campaign just isn't terribly concerned with reaching ad parity, at least not on television, or against the benefit of keeping campaign costs down.

This isn't without some minor and recent historical precedent. In 2004, John Kerry kept eight figures of revenue in reserve past Election Day for a legal challenge that never came, as the campaign said they were worried about a repeat of the Florida hanging chad experience. (A claim that, frankly, didn't pass the smell test, since it's not as if donors wouldn't have been energized by that news.)

But that campaign followed a typical media buying pattern, including extensive advertising in the primaries. Trump's approach has been to dominate programming, either with call-in interviews or created controversies.

And so long as we all play along -- which makes me really worry about what's coming down the pike to count as more noteworthy than what we've already seen -- it seems the candidate is content to let the Democrats control the paid air channel.

Partisan advocates note the increasing ineffectiveness of paid media, or how much social is driving the conversation now. Trump has also been highly active in banner , but I have a slightly different question to ask.

What if the entire exercise is just, well, to collect contributions... that the candidate is under no obligation to spend? Or return?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Serious Business Of Real Fun

Bring The Fun

For about 10 to 15 minutes a day at my current gig, the people in my office get, well, there's no other word to describe it.

Goofy. We get seriously goofy.

We pull out Nerf guns and blaze away at each other -- having made significant personal investments of time and money in the gear we use to peg each other. A growing percentage of the office play on the foosball table, with increasingly over the top trash talk adding to the festivities. (My go-to phrase when trying to coax the ball away from an opponent, because I am of that age: "Come to Butthead.") On summer Friday afternoons when we close up shop a few hours early, I've pulled out a putter and putting green and tried to make shots from 100 feet of long hallway carpet away. This week, there's going to be a Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament, and I'm leaving out other details, because, well, this isn't a laundry list. There is, in fact, an entire committee based around Fun. It's also a continuing scandal to my children that I am a part of that group.

By Silicon Valley standards, none of this is particularly startling or over the top. We have no gaming consoles, don't use office computers for serious timewaste, and even in the most raucous of moments, you can always pop in headphones and grind away to your heart's content. Even the most distractable among us seems to be desk-bound for the vast majority of our day, and the foolishness is contained to more or less break or meal times.

But by the standards of the more traditional industry that we inhabit, all of this is kind of a big deal, and the occasional reactions that I get from people who work elsewhere tell me this isn't very common. I've also worked at a number of martech companies where this level of seeming frivolity was matched or surpasssed, but actually, not quite, because the underlying current of the place weren't, well, in any way fun.

Fun in the office is, at its core, something that comes from the top, spread by an actual fondness among groups and people, and something you just can't fake. When your CEO is speeding along to a meeting on a scooter, that might seem fun... but when they are going fast as a matter of showy athleticism or efficiency to get somewhere quicker, that kind of kills the purpose. When there's an after-work happy hour where people aren't talking about work, that's fun. When it's a frat-level test of tolerance to see who can pitch ideas while sloshed, it's not.

This all seems like something that should be obvious at an HR or leadership level, but the nature of business is that you are not always going to have the right people in those positions, or a company that's going to work out in the long run. If your top people are insecure about their role or the direction of the company, fun becomes just another way to show those problems. When they believe in the direction and are comfortable in their skin, you get heartfelt compliments on your foosball game from the execs, without a moment of snark over how much time you may have wasted in your life to get those skills. (To be honest, many, many hours. And as an aside, any marketing pro that wants to get something out of their engineering team should learn to play foosball, at least to a level of tolerable. It pays off in spades.)

So the question really isn't whether or not your company has fun at the office. Because every company claims that now, because every company knows that fun in the office is critical to reducing turnover and keeping morale up.

More accurately, it's this: how many people are faking it?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.