Targeted E-mail Expands Museum Direct Marketing

Clean, targeted e-mail data can help museum marketers reach new members, event participants, or donors as well as improve retention and performance of house names. Evidence that e-mail can be a successful player in museums' multi-channel campaigns comes from Constant Contact's March 2019 e-mail statistics for house databases in the arts, culture and entertainment vertical (including museums and galleries), which show overall e-mail open rates averaging 17.54%, and click-through rates averaging 6.81% for the vertical. Those results are better than the all-industries averages of 16.74% open rate and 7.43% click-through rate, plus ahead of all but 13 of the 34 verticals tracked, and far ahead of some verticals, such as technology (e.g. web developers), automotive services, salons, retail and consulting. Marketers can also use e-mail to prospect for new members, donors and event participants. For example, marketers report success with event audience building via a series of e-mails that start with a promotion linked to ticket purchase, RSVP and/or social-sharing request, then follow up with reminders prior to the event, and finish with a post-event thanks e-mail that includes a request for an online review. Other successful e-mail series reward loyalty or re-engage dormant supporters by offering special perks (such as discounts). E-mail automation can make contact strategy even easier with programmed triggers, such as a re-engagement e-mail automatically sent six months after a last visit. Earning response to a house database or prospect list requires a few e-mail basics: 1) personalized, targeted messaging; 2) a brief subject line that inspires opens and CAN SPAM-compliant creative that inspires click-through; 3) mobile optimization of the e-mail with a clear call-to-action linked to a mobile-optimized digital landing page; and 4) an updated, clean opt-in e-mail list to avoid spam filters. AccuList's services especially focus on the last point. For responsive, targeted prospects, AccuList's proprietary research has identified the top choices among opt-in e-mail rental lists (plus telemarketing and direct mail lists), including lists of museum members/donors, lists of museum mail-order buyers, and lists by type of museum and collection. For clean, targeted house lists, AccuList points marketers toward database enhancement and hygiene, including identification of recent e-mail address changes through Electronic Change of Address (ECOA) lists, enhanced targeting by adding demographics from outside lists, and expanded reach by appending opt-in e-mails. Museums also can pair e-mail's advantage in highly targeted and personalized messaging with social media's ability to engage and build brand and web traffic. Social media apps can be used to capture new e-mail opt-in subscribers, for example. With platforms like Facebook, house e-mail data can be matched with the huge social audience to deliver demographics- and interest-targeted ads and promoted posts to existing names and lookalikes. And both social media and e-mail targets can be matched with direct mail for multi-channel power. For helpful links, go to https://www.acculist.com/targeted-e-mail-expands-museums-direct-marketing-options/

U.S. E-mail Deliverablity Rates Drop in 2015

About one in four e-mails sent in the U.S. do not reach intended recipients, reflecting a sharp decline in U.S. e-mail deliverability rates for 2015. The overall U.S. e-mail deliverability rate is just 76% for 2015, down from 87% in 2014, according to the latest global research by Return Path. Return Path's "2015 Deliverability Benchmark Report," which analyzed inbox placement statistics by country, industry and e-mail provider, did have some good news for consumer-facing industries; retail, health and beauty, food and beverage, automotive and apparel industries all showed e-mail deliverability rates of 90% or above globally. In reporting the study, MediaPosts's Email Marketing Daily noted that e-mail provider policies and new spam filtering systems could be one factor impeding e-mail marketers' deliverability ratings. For example, Yahoo! Mail inbox placement rates dropped 13%, although Outlook improved by 3% and Gmail stayed consistent (Gmail's new block button has sparked concerns for 2016 deliverability, however). Another factor could be the overwhelming volume of e-mails, according to the Return Path report, noting that e-mail traffic has grown by 16% since 2013. For more on deliverability by country and industry, read http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/260317/email-deliverability-rates-drop-in-2015.html

Are Inbox Placement Fails Sapping Your E-mail?

It's an old saying in business that you can only manage what you measure. A recent Target Marketing magazine article by Tom Sather, Return Path's senior director of e-mail research, makes the important point that many marketers are not measuring, and thus not managing, e-mail inbox placement rates. In evaluating e-mail campaign performance, they may focus on improving subject lines, list targeting or brand engagement without realizing that a key part of the target audience never saw the message. They may be comforted by a good deliverability rate, but that rate only measures the percent of e-mail that did not bounce. Inbox placement rates, on the other hand, measure the number of messages actually arriving in subscribers' inboxes, taking into account those undelivered plus those shunted into spam folders. E-mail inbox placement will be affected by bad addresses and ISP filtering for poor reputation, content and engagement. Inbox placement will in turn fundamentally affect the validity of benchmarks and testing results as well as e-mail ROI, Sather points out. To put his remarks in perspective, note 17% of permission-based e-mails fail to reach inboxes globally--6% going to spam folders and 11% blocked--according to Return Path's most recent "Inbox Placement 2014" benchmark report. U.S. marketers did only a little better, with 13% of e-mails failing to reach inboxes on average. But on an industry basis, inbox placement rates have a wide range, with the best inbox placement rate attributed to health and beauty pitches (96%) and software and Internet e-mails at the bottom (43%). For Sather's comments on why inbox placement matters, read http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/inbox-placement-rates-cant-measure-cant-see/

Study: Mobile Drives Double Store Sales of Desktop

Retailers who neglect mobile ad campaigns could be losing a huge chunk of in-store sales. Direct Marketing News magazine recently reported that a new study found mobile campaigns drive more than double the offline sales delivered by desktop ad campaigns. In the study by ad platform 4Info, mobile executions produced about $30 in sales per 1,000 impressions versus only $13 for desktop, with the average return on ad spend for mobile hitting 257%. 4Info claims its research is the first true benchmarketing of the mobile channel's impact on in-store sales. The study focused on 83 mobile campaigns by 59 brands in seven consumer packaged goods categories over their entire durations, with the average being 11 weeks, and was performed using Nielsen Catalina Solutions, which integrates Catalina frequent shopper data with Nielsen homescan to derive results representative of national activity. See the DM News story for links to more detail, including 4Info's free report download: http://www.dmnews.com/mobile-marketing/study-mobile-campaigns-drive-twice-the-sales-of-desktop/article/413941/

Spring-Clean Your Event Marketing for Higher ROI

Part of your marketing department's spring cleaning should be a thorough review of event marketing plans to remove dusty, worn-out strategies and tune up for higher ROI. A recent MarketingProfs post helpfully lays out six drivers of event marketing ROI, and we suggest you check to make sure all are in place and running smoothly. First, make sure that all stakeholders are using the same playbook, with common goals and metrics for success. Executives may want increased lead quality, but an on-site team focused on maximizing contact forms regardless of quality isn't going to deliver. Next, plan how each event will engage its audience in a way that compels action and achieves goals, whether the aim is audience data collection, sales or brand message sharing. Just being there isn't enough. Third, make sure event strategy includes lead-capture best practices; namely, throw out those paper forms and embrace digital apps and auto-uploads for more accurate and timely data collection and database entry. Timely post-show data analysis, data distribution and follow-up with new and potential customers should be a top priority; marketing automation tools for e-mailing coupons, incentives and follow-up messages are one way to boost responsiveness. Also, benchmark results against competitor events and your own past events in terms of leads, sales, social profile, engagement, site traffic, brand awareness, etc., and adjust future strategies. Finally, debrief with stakeholders who were at the event to identify issues behind the data--such as booth location, technology glitches, audience feedback and even inclement weather--and fine-tune plans moving forward. For the complete article, go to http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/27463/six-drivers-of-roi-in-event-marketing

Study Reveals the 7 Habits of Successful Marketers

If you want to lead the market, you'll need to market like the leaders. There's no arguing with the results: Companies with more advanced marketing and sales capabilities have 30% greater revenue growth than the average firm in their sector, according to a recent benchmarking study by McKinsey & Company. Per a report by The Economist Group, the McKinsey analysis looked at more than 140 leading B2B and B2B2C global businesses and identified the seven marketing and sales hallmarks of the top-tier firms. The seven ingredients of the market-leaders' secret sauce: 1) view marketing and sales as an investment, not an expense; 2) know what needs to be fixed based on detailed marketing comparisons against best-performing peers; 3) target the capabilities that matter most, so that while there may be 40 marketing and sales skills impacting growth and profitability, the best companies focus on improving only about six; 4) don't try to do too much at the same time; 5) tailor improvement in marketing capabilities to current stage of development, whether the performance challenge is growth, profitability or both; 6) think about institutional capabilities and priorities, not just individual skills; 7) have an operating model with specific, measurable goals, embedded in a culture of review, incentive and leadership. For more on the study's "seven habits" of successful marketing and sales, read http://www.economistgroup.com/leanback/the-next-big-thing/mckinsey-study-revenue-growth-marketing-leadership/

Top E-Mail Marketers Widen Lead in CTRs, Opens

In e-mail marketing, there's a widening gap between top and bottom performers. A 2014 E-mail Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study from Silverpop found that the top-performing quartile of e-mail marketers scored a 9.5% click-through rate (CTR), six times higher than the overall median click-through rate of 1.5%, per a summary report in Marketing Land. Meanwhile, bottom-quartile performers mustered CTRs of just 0.2%. Analyzing marketing e-mails sent by 3,000 brands from 40 different countries during 2013, Silverpop calculated mean and median benchmarks for various e-mail metrics, including click-through rates, open rates and bounce rates. Evaluating the CTRs of fourteen different industries, the study found real estate, construction, health care, consumer services and nonprofits generated the highest median CTRs. According to the study, transactional e-mails – messages triggered automatically by events such as purchases, subscriptions and account activity – earned a median CTR of 4.2%, compared to a median CTR of 1.5% for non-transactional emails. The study also reported that unique open rates for the top-performing quartile of e-mail marketers stood at 39.4%, more than double the median for all marketers and way above the bottom-quartile performance of 6.5%. Health care, nonprofits and education represented industries earning the highest median unique open rates. For a summary of Silverpop's study in terms of CTRs and open rates by industry, go to http://marketingland.com/study-top-performing-email-marketers-see-60-higher-click-rates-87025

How Does Your E-mail Response Measure Up?

Do you know if your e-mail response measures up competitively in terms of open rates and click-through rates? A recent blog post by Christopher Ratcliff, an econsultancy.com writer, helpfully put together benchmark measures by industry (and country) from third-party e-mail service providers MailChimp, Silverpop and UK-focused Sign-up.to. Just to give you a taste, Silverpop's 2014 benchmark study finds that the average U.S. unique open rate is 20.1% and the average U.S. click-through rate is 3.2%. But the differences between industries are significant. Just looking at Silverpop figures for example, health care scores the top average unique open rate of 26.2%, followed by education (25.7%) and nonprofits (25.3%). By comparison, travel and leisure e-mailers are at the bottom for unique opens with a low 15% average, along with media and publishing (16.6%). When it comes to click-through rates, Silverpop's top average goes to health care again with 4.8%, followed closely by consumer services (4.7%) and education (4.5%). Meanwhile, the travel and leisure industry also ranks lowest for average click rate with 2.2%. To check on e-mail response benchmarks for your industry, B2B or B2C, go to https://econsultancy.com/blog/65034-what-is-a-decent-email-marketing-response-rate#i.dm8nfzdnneipzz

Q1 E-mail: Insurance Tops CTR; Mobile Design Lack

Insurance e-mail marketing led other industries in terms of response in the first quarter of 2014, according to Yesmail's "Q1 Benchmarks Overview." Insurance e-mails scored the highest average open rate (31.4%), unique click rate (7.6%) and click-to-open rate (CTR) of 24.1%. Per the Yesmail study of more than 5 billion e-mails deployed in the first quarter, marketing/advertising company e-mails had the dubious distinction of the lowest average open rate (9.8%) as well as the lowest unique click rate (0.7%). However, the lowest CTRs were earned by the e-mail creative of Financial Services (3.7%) and Technology (5.3%), despite high 28% and 20% open rates, respectively. Overall, open rates rose 6% in the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter of 2013, and unique click rates were up 8%, but those increases may have been due to 20% lower e-mail volume after the year-end holiday quarter. For e-mail marketers seeking to leverage mobile, there is some key news: E-mails using mobile-friendly responsive design had a 21% higher CTR in the first quarter when compared with non-responsive e-mails. Yet 75% of marketers neglected mobile design, with 31% not sending responsive e-mails at all, and 44% sending them less than half of the time. See more on the Yesmail e-mail benchmarks in the MarketingProfs report at http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2014/25246/marketing-email-benchmarks-open-rates-by-industry-device-trends