The slow death of your email (and how to stop it)
Latest posts | Feed | | By Mark Brownlow
We'd all like to be running one of those email marketing programs that deliver the Hollywood results you read about in case studies.
Most of us, though, are trundling along with unspectacular programs delivering solid results. And have been for a while. Emails work, even if you're not a database marketing hero.
But your program might be dying a slow death, thanks to the way subscribers behave and the new email landscape we now live in.
Here's how open rates have changed over the last 2 years on a small B2B newsletter I run:
It doesn't take a statistician to reveal that open rates are in decline.
Some of that is down to the growth of image blocking (though that excuse is getting a little old). Some of it might be delivery issues. Some might be a decline in the quality of the emails (hope not).
But there are two factors ensuring that declining responses will likely affect every email program that keeps doing more or less the same thing as before. Like mine.
First, there is ever-increasing competition for subscriber attention. Both from other emails and all the other ways people now have to get information and promotions (most notably social media).
Second, the longer someone is on your list, the less engaged they are (on average). Here's the chart to prove it, which looks at open rate by year of sign-up for the most recent newsletter:
This slow decline in response rates due to such factors as aging and competition doesn't get much attention, because list growth usually compensates.
So while the percent of people responding drops, the absolute number of responders stays steady or even rises. Example:
The August 27th, 2007 issue of the above newsletter got an open rate of 47% and a click-to-open rate of 30%, which meant 160 clicks.
Two years later and the open rate drops by over a third to 30% for the August 24th, 2009 newsletter. Click-to-open rate is still 30%, but the list is now three times the size it was.
List growth more than compensates for the drop in open rates: the number of clicks is 332.
Actual responses have doubled, even though relative attention has fallen.
So why worry? Surely it's the end result that matters?
There are two big issues on the horizon here.
First, using list growth to compensate for declining response rates is not a long-term strategy.
The older and bigger your list, the more new addresses you have to find to compensate for list aging. And the low-hanging fruit is likely already gone: your frequent visitors or customers are already on the list.
You have to work harder and harder on list acquisition, investing more and more resources. At some point, it won't be enough.
You may also end up seduced into questionable list acquisition practices that see subscriber quality drop and lead to permission and spam problems.
The second issue is deliverability.
A while back, people in the industry were predicting that those organizations managing incoming email (particularly the big ISPs) would broaden the list of criteria used to define spam (unwanted) email to include how people interact with a sender's messages.
If recipients aren't interacting positively with an email, this indicates he message is unwanted and the reputation of that email's sender suffers.
This is no longer speculation or theory.
Consider this quote from a recent report on a meeting with Yahoo's anti-spam czar:
"Yahoo stressed that the key to inbox delivery was to work towards positive engagement."
Among the signs of "positive engagement" cited: "Members are opening messages...members are clicking on the links in the message."
In other words, a decline in such numbers as open and click rates not only hurts responses, but might now lead to a poor sender reputation, in turn leading to deliverability problems.
Compounding the issue is the prospect that future inboxes will also include more tools allowing users to quickly identify or filter out those messages that are not spam but are also not that important (i.e. not open or clickworthy).
Ouch.
[You'll find more commentary on these sea changes in the delivery landscape from, for example, Stefan Pollard, Jeff Rohrs and George Bilbery.]
So what can you do?
If you keep doing the same thing, your response rates will fall, you'll be under a lot of pressure to grow your list and you may run into new deliverability problems.
The obvious and glib answer is to certify your emails and get into all those advanced tactics that we keep putting off because things are still pretty rosy. Now is the time to start investing time and resources in things like segmentation, testing, trigger emails etc.
But there's more to the challenge than just improving targeting (which is what nearly every advanced tactic is about at its heart).
Consider why older addresses tend to disengage from your emails.
Some reasons are inevitable: people change interests, move jobs, etc. But there's also a parallel to population ecology. Um...what?
A population of animals can survive the occasional dip in numbers, provided the number of surviving animals never drops below a certain extinction threshold. If it does, the population is doomed.
I like to think of subscriber interest the same way. Your "relationship" with the subscriber can survive the occasional dip in interest, provided this interest doesn't drop below the extinction threshold.
In other words, you can send the occasional irrelevant email and people will forgive you. They'll still look out for your next email.
But if enough emails in a row are irrelevant, then the loss of interest dips below an extinction threshold. The recipient switches off and future emails can get ignored, even those emails that are valuable and relevant.
And the longer someone is on your list, the more chance there is that they'll encounter one of those catastrophic interest drops.
The key point here is that I don't believe that advanced targeting techniques are a complete answer to that disengagement problem.
A retailer who sends out offers cannot expect people to keep opening and clicking on promotional emails, however good and targeted those offers might be. I'm not going to buy a new digital camera (or camera accessory) every week or even every year.
If engagement becomes critical to delivery, then you must be less tolerant of letting people go inactive, even though many of these inactives may still be "unemotionally subscribed" and likely to buy/respond at some later date.
So how do we keep them engaged?
First, we can start to think of responses not just as sales, downloads, registrations etc., but also in terms of engagement. So what we used to think of as purely process metrics (opens, clicks etc.) might now become valid goals in themselves.
This encourages us to invest in email content that drives interaction: feedback surveys, teasers, etc. It also suggests those selling via email should also focus on engaging content as much as targeted offers.
For more on that concept, read Should all email marketers become content publishers?
And I wonder if we might reach the stage where the occasional email is used as a loss leader...where the offer is so good that it may even have a net financial cost to the sender to make it.
But the loss leader email boosts response. It keeps people away from the "extinction threshold" and keeps those engagement metrics up so that future emails have a better chance of being delivered and responded to.
What do you think?
Most of us, though, are trundling along with unspectacular programs delivering solid results. And have been for a while. Emails work, even if you're not a database marketing hero.
But your program might be dying a slow death, thanks to the way subscribers behave and the new email landscape we now live in.
Here's how open rates have changed over the last 2 years on a small B2B newsletter I run:
It doesn't take a statistician to reveal that open rates are in decline.
Some of that is down to the growth of image blocking (though that excuse is getting a little old). Some of it might be delivery issues. Some might be a decline in the quality of the emails (hope not).
Slow death factors
But there are two factors ensuring that declining responses will likely affect every email program that keeps doing more or less the same thing as before. Like mine.
First, there is ever-increasing competition for subscriber attention. Both from other emails and all the other ways people now have to get information and promotions (most notably social media).
Second, the longer someone is on your list, the less engaged they are (on average). Here's the chart to prove it, which looks at open rate by year of sign-up for the most recent newsletter:
This slow decline in response rates due to such factors as aging and competition doesn't get much attention, because list growth usually compensates.
So while the percent of people responding drops, the absolute number of responders stays steady or even rises. Example:
The August 27th, 2007 issue of the above newsletter got an open rate of 47% and a click-to-open rate of 30%, which meant 160 clicks.
Two years later and the open rate drops by over a third to 30% for the August 24th, 2009 newsletter. Click-to-open rate is still 30%, but the list is now three times the size it was.
List growth more than compensates for the drop in open rates: the number of clicks is 332.
Actual responses have doubled, even though relative attention has fallen.
So why worry? Surely it's the end result that matters?
Think beyond list growth
There are two big issues on the horizon here.
First, using list growth to compensate for declining response rates is not a long-term strategy.
The older and bigger your list, the more new addresses you have to find to compensate for list aging. And the low-hanging fruit is likely already gone: your frequent visitors or customers are already on the list.
You have to work harder and harder on list acquisition, investing more and more resources. At some point, it won't be enough.
You may also end up seduced into questionable list acquisition practices that see subscriber quality drop and lead to permission and spam problems.
Engagement is also a deliverability issue
The second issue is deliverability.
A while back, people in the industry were predicting that those organizations managing incoming email (particularly the big ISPs) would broaden the list of criteria used to define spam (unwanted) email to include how people interact with a sender's messages.
If recipients aren't interacting positively with an email, this indicates he message is unwanted and the reputation of that email's sender suffers.
This is no longer speculation or theory.
Consider this quote from a recent report on a meeting with Yahoo's anti-spam czar:
"Yahoo stressed that the key to inbox delivery was to work towards positive engagement."
Among the signs of "positive engagement" cited: "Members are opening messages...members are clicking on the links in the message."
In other words, a decline in such numbers as open and click rates not only hurts responses, but might now lead to a poor sender reputation, in turn leading to deliverability problems.
Compounding the issue is the prospect that future inboxes will also include more tools allowing users to quickly identify or filter out those messages that are not spam but are also not that important (i.e. not open or clickworthy).
Ouch.
[You'll find more commentary on these sea changes in the delivery landscape from, for example, Stefan Pollard, Jeff Rohrs and George Bilbery.]
The obvious solutions aren't enough
So what can you do?
If you keep doing the same thing, your response rates will fall, you'll be under a lot of pressure to grow your list and you may run into new deliverability problems.
The obvious and glib answer is to certify your emails and get into all those advanced tactics that we keep putting off because things are still pretty rosy. Now is the time to start investing time and resources in things like segmentation, testing, trigger emails etc.
But there's more to the challenge than just improving targeting (which is what nearly every advanced tactic is about at its heart).
Consider why older addresses tend to disengage from your emails.
Some reasons are inevitable: people change interests, move jobs, etc. But there's also a parallel to population ecology. Um...what?
A population of animals can survive the occasional dip in numbers, provided the number of surviving animals never drops below a certain extinction threshold. If it does, the population is doomed.
I like to think of subscriber interest the same way. Your "relationship" with the subscriber can survive the occasional dip in interest, provided this interest doesn't drop below the extinction threshold.
In other words, you can send the occasional irrelevant email and people will forgive you. They'll still look out for your next email.
But if enough emails in a row are irrelevant, then the loss of interest dips below an extinction threshold. The recipient switches off and future emails can get ignored, even those emails that are valuable and relevant.
And the longer someone is on your list, the more chance there is that they'll encounter one of those catastrophic interest drops.
The key point here is that I don't believe that advanced targeting techniques are a complete answer to that disengagement problem.
A retailer who sends out offers cannot expect people to keep opening and clicking on promotional emails, however good and targeted those offers might be. I'm not going to buy a new digital camera (or camera accessory) every week or even every year.
See engagement as its own objective
If engagement becomes critical to delivery, then you must be less tolerant of letting people go inactive, even though many of these inactives may still be "unemotionally subscribed" and likely to buy/respond at some later date.
So how do we keep them engaged?
First, we can start to think of responses not just as sales, downloads, registrations etc., but also in terms of engagement. So what we used to think of as purely process metrics (opens, clicks etc.) might now become valid goals in themselves.
This encourages us to invest in email content that drives interaction: feedback surveys, teasers, etc. It also suggests those selling via email should also focus on engaging content as much as targeted offers.
For more on that concept, read Should all email marketers become content publishers?
And I wonder if we might reach the stage where the occasional email is used as a loss leader...where the offer is so good that it may even have a net financial cost to the sender to make it.
But the loss leader email boosts response. It keeps people away from the "extinction threshold" and keeps those engagement metrics up so that future emails have a better chance of being delivered and responded to.
What do you think?
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | September 11, 2009 | 5 comment(s)
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Permalink | September 11, 2009 | 5 comment(s)
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5 Comments:
Yet another in depth post of a subject everyone should be aware of. Many of us get caught in a pattern of sending out the same campaigns with the same offers, not thinking that people have become less engaged.
Even for those having great success, shaking things up every now and then is a must to stay competitive.
By 
Michael, on
16 September, 2009
Becoming engaged is key! I've been email marketing now for 10+ years and by far, the best open rates occur when an interactive element is present.
By Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach, on
17 September, 2009
Thanks Michael, Barbara!
By , on
17 September, 2009
Mark,
Another great post. So true about the value of engagement for its own sake. I find free downloads useful in this way as well as odd but intriguing links (highly clicked, even if somewhat off topic in content-based newsletters).
And thanks also for pointing out the decreased interest that readers display after being on the list for a long time. Finally I understand why my wife of 20 years ignores whatever I say.
Michael
By 
Michael Katz | Blue Penguin, on
22 September, 2009
Which begs the question Michael: just how do you plan to get her back engaging in the conversation?
By , on
23 September, 2009
Comments closed during migration to a new blog platform in early May
