The context
At Seekube, we spent time testing acquisition channels. Email was one of them. This might be useful if you've decided that Email Marketing is one of your channels or are testing it.
We believe in email's power when used with the right tools and creativity.
What we noticed
Mailchimp gave us decent open rates. But click-rates were so low we started wondering why.
We had one objective: increase click-through rates for email.
Every channel follows a curve. Email had been exploited. But sub-channels like plain-text emails were still yielding results.
Our Hypothesis
Changing the template from a WYSIWYG template to plain-text will result in 15% higher click-through rate. Recipients will feel the sender is actually sending them the message.
Tools we used
- Yet Another Mail Merge - A Google Sheets Add-on to send bulk email in plain-text. Integrated with Google Sheets and Gmail.
- LinkedIn - Premium account for a month. Hired freelancers to get details: first name, last name, headline.
How this can help you
1. Ask yourself if email is a central channel for your company
Email has been central for us since the beginning. We can make it targeted. Open rates and click rates can be increased through tweaks and creativity. Plain-text email converts better for us than Mailchimp. Ask yourself whether it could yield results for you.
2. Get creative with tools
The main tools we used were Yet Another Mail Merge and LinkedIn. We needed to get creative with LinkedIn because it's restrictive.
3. Find a way to scrape emails and find email patterns
We scraped a list of first names, last names, and titles on LinkedIn. This was specific to our sector: recruitment. We banked on the fact that most schools had a fixed pattern for email IDs. Personalize the email sufficiently so the recipient opens it. A decrease in open rate affects the click rate.
4. Personalize the email through Google Sheets
The aim was to use Google Spreadsheets to guess from the headline which sector they may be interested in and suggest them a forum accordingly. This can be done through a simple search function that returns TRUE when it contains a related keyword. For example, if the cell contains marketing, return TRUE and suggest Forum Métiers du Marketing. This function helped us automate the task largely.
Personalizing the subject also required many tests. We tested subject lines like "Join 2439 (RANDBETWEEN function) other candidates from <<schoolname>> on Seekube".
Result
There was a 30% increase in click-through rate through a personalized YAMM-based email.
Email marketing can be leveraged through creativity and a testing-centered approach.