Let's face it: We all get a deluge of email every day. And as marketers, there are lots of ways we try to increase the response rates to the emails we send. The key metric for email marketing is usually clickthrough rate (CTR), not open rate, and for our industry, the average email clickthrough rate is about 2.4% (you can check out benchmarks for marketing and software industries from our friends at MailChimp). Here are two things we did at HubSpot recently that helped us totally crush those industry benchmarks and get an email CTR of 16.4%, which is 583% higher than average.
Step 1: Use Inbound Marketing and Segmentation to Improve Contact List Quality
The first thing you need to do is stop spamming people. This may sound obvious, but list quality is the key to high email marketing engagement rates, and downloading names from Data.com or using a "targeted list researcher" to build a list of names is not going to drive engagement. By building a permission-centric, opt-in database of contacts using inbound marketing, you can increase your CTR for the average email you send by quite a lot. The logic behind this is simple: People who want to receive your email are much more likely to love it and click on it than people who have never heard of you.
Second, by not emailing the same thing to everyone on your list, you can increase the relevance of each email you send, which also increases engagement. At HubSpot, we went from segmenting our contact database into 3-4 parts and sending about 10-20 different emails per month to sending about 200 different emails per month to much smaller, more segmented lists, including triggered emails sent to segments of 1.
So what has this permission-based, extremely segmented email approach done for us in terms of email engagement? Rather than the industry benchmark CTR of 2.4%, if you look at the average of all the emails we've sent at HubSpot over the past 9 months (since we moved to HubSpot 3), our CTR is 6.4%, about 166% higher than the benchmark. Not too shabby!
Step 2: Be Remarkable and Personal With Video and Humor
While beating industry benchmarks is great, the marketing team at HubSpot doesn't just like to win; we also like to take our goals and totally dominate them. So here's what we did: We took a segment of our contacts database that was our best fit leads who had opted in to hearing from us, but who had been marked as "unable to contact" in our CRM system (Salesforce.com) after a sales rep had reached out to them a few times with no response. Because our CRM is integrated with our marketing software, we can set up a workflow that triggers an automated email whenever a sales rep changes a lead's status to "unable to contact."
But rather than send a dry, boring email, we decided to spice it up and try hard to re-engage these people with humor and visual content. So we created a video that tried to make fun of the situation, empathize with the marketers we sell to (who often dislike sales), and bring a smile to their faces -- and perhaps even get them to love our marketing a little bit. Here's the email we started sending them, with the goal of getting people to visit this page, and then either contact us or watch a demo video:
You can watch the video we embedded in the email below:
The Results
This email has a CTR of 16.4%, which is 583% higher than the 2.4% industry benchmark. And because the email and video are so unique, lovable, and engaging, people actually share it in social media and reply with comments like "Loved it!" and "Hilarious email" and Love your marketing!" So not only are we plugging a leak in our funnel and attracting more revenue, but we're also building love for our company and our marketing.
How are you making your marketing lovable? Have you done anything to radically increase your email CTR? Share your stories in the comments.
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Rick Noel 9:14 AM on March 01, 2013
Excellent video Mike. Very creative, funny and well executed.
A 16.4% CTR is nothing to sneeze at.
Thanks for sharing.
Ed Alexanian 9:32 AM on March 01, 2013
hubspot,
as always very nicly done!
Elyse Meyer 10:30 AM on March 01, 2013
Thank you for sharing! Great video!
Patricia 11:26 AM on March 01, 2013
I do love that video.
Very creative way to connect. I'm sure it will bring more sales.
Steve 12:13 PM on March 01, 2013
Hey, Mike! About that email I sent you...
Terry 12:40 PM on March 01, 2013
Very funny, awesome finish.
Linda Waterhouse 1:53 PM on March 01, 2013
Truly unique! I'm usually very cynical, but this really got me smiling. Thanks!
Andrea 5:41 PM on March 01, 2013
Very clever. You've given me some new fresh ideas to connect with our own clients. Thanks!
Martin Szalay 6:29 PM on March 01, 2013
I approve this message!
Simple and straight-forward, your assessment is dead on.
Too many things to discuss on this topic, but I will just say this... your example is perfect. This is something everyone can do TODAY.
Though you can not embed a Video in an Email (that I know of), a screenshot with the look of a YouTube Video is exactly what you need to get those click throughs. Everyone knows what the Play icon is and they will click it if the thumb image looks amazing. No matter what you are selling.
The first time we did that, about 2 years ago, our engagement rate from less than three percent to 53%. That is an easy win and you will look like a genius. And never send a 30mb attachment of an AVI file. That's a big no no.
Also, I have found that you still need to direct the recipient to a call to action, "Check out the Video Here"
Of course, this is all moot if you have no video or gallery. If not... WHY? That's a whole other discussion.
And look at that Text, short straight and to the point but more than enough so that if the recipient is viewing with images off they know the content.
Well done.
jeff waters 6:49 PM on March 01, 2013
By my calculations you actually increased the CTR by 683%.
16.4/2.4 = 6.83
As a side your video is gold.
Tom Costello 8:11 PM on March 01, 2013
Looks like Mike needs to meet me at the gym for a power workout or two or three or four or...
Tony Han 10:16 PM on March 01, 2013
I have found an amazing thing here.
Ben Riall 4:47 AM on March 02, 2013
Loved the video, absolute genius!
Jorgen M 2:59 PM on March 02, 2013
Do you want to make money on trips to Las Vegas, then visit my page.
You do not sell anything itself, but has its own sales team behind you.
It is an exciting and fun extra work that can give you a good income.
Sanju 11:47 PM on March 02, 2013
Very nicely written post + very entertaining.
Dan Perez 2:42 AM on March 03, 2013
the video does a good job of poking fun at what we email marketers are up to; good strategy.
Sue Martin 5:13 PM on March 03, 2013
I want to know what you count as a clickthrough. For example, the email that leads to this article simply has a title. So in order to even fully understand if a topic is relevant, I often have to click through to the full article. At that point, I may find that the article is not of interest to me. Do you count this as a clickthrough, or do you only count clickthroughs that occur from the article to further information on your website?
Lisa Steyn 12:45 AM on March 04, 2013
Absolutely fantastic...what an awesome video. If this doesn't catch attention then nothing will. Spot on!
Monika Szabadkaiova 3:49 AM on March 04, 2013
Absolutely brilliant video! Enjoyed reading the article as well, short & to the point! :)
Stu 4:26 AM on March 04, 2013
Hi Mike,
You mention that the video was 'embedded in the email'. Can you confirm whether you featured an image of the video with a link to a hosted version or whether you did actually embed the video in the email? If it's the latter, could you give some more details about the mechanics of this and the testing you went through?
I'm currently looking at this area and embedded video appears risky in terms of upping file size and also the number of ISPs/ESPs that support it.
Cheers.
vipin 7:39 AM on March 04, 2013
amazing video..
really impressed..
Mike Volpe 8:18 AM on March 04, 2013
@Jeff Waters - I think the way to calculate a % change is the amount of the change divided by the original, so (16.4-2.4) / 2.4 = 583% which means that 16.4 is 583% higher than 2.4. You math says that 16.4 is 6.83 times 2.4 which is correct but a slightly different meaning, I think. Either way, the results are obviously something people should not and think about how it could be used to improve their email marketing.
@Sue Martin - A click through in this case the number of times someone clicks on a link in the email and goes to our website from that.
@Stu - In this case the video was not *actually* embedded (good catch) there was an image of the video with a play button but it linked to the page where the video was, you could not play the video in your email directly (for all the reasons you stated).
Xx 11:02 AM on March 04, 2013
Although I like the article, the video is in my opinion
not funny at all and poorly edited/directed.
Steve 11:03 AM on March 04, 2013
Did it drive sales.....With segmentation, you can easily hit in the 30s
Karla 3:02 PM on March 04, 2013
We recently tried a humorous video to market Homecoming on campus. We maximized the video by using it in email, on the website, on social media and as an actual campus announcement. We saw more engagement on all fronts! We'll be doing this more often. Take a look at what we did. http://player.vimeo.com/video/58482782
Scott Upham 12:30 PM on March 05, 2013
most marketing campaigns are focused on getting folks to initially notice, recognize and reach out to engage with your brand. This article focuses on those folks that have already opted in so the comparison to non opted in list emailing isnt apples to apples in my mind.
Darrick 12:26 PM on March 06, 2013
I wanted to click on it just to see what that dude was screaming about. Lol
Apoorva 1:35 PM on March 06, 2013
Thanks for the useful information ,Well the key to a successful email campaign is the emailing software..You always need a right mix of quality and quantity..I stumbled upon www.futuremarketz.com recently and i found their software is pretty awesome,reasonable cost and quality product..happy with its performance... :) Cheers for life
Nina 12:31 AM on March 07, 2013
Sending emails to people who opted to receive the email is more profitable than randomly sending emails, often most of those random people will never open the emails
Marketingowy 5:38 PM on March 07, 2013
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones. Segmentation -> content -> results