Marketing automation is not an exact science, true. But it is something that, when done correctly, can be very useful. It’s like any process, it has to capture the attention of the recipient, make them perform an action focused on benefitting them, and then hopefully take them all the way through to becoming a customer. Sounds great. But how can you do all that as effectively as possible?
Last time, I told you about how we redesigned our marketing automation after someone downloads a trial version of Kentico. If you haven’t had chance to read it, you can find it here. At the end of the article, I promised to show you the emails and, more importantly, the data we had before and after the redesign.
The emails we used to send in our marketing automation before the redesign were in a simple email template with the Kentico logo in the left upper corner and a grey footer with a long unsubscription message. Because we wanted to have these automated emails as different to those that we’re all sending every day manually as possible, we rewrote the copy of the unsubscription note. On the picture below you can see the old version.
We also got rid of the customized email template and put the copy into a plain text one, where we just formatted the footer with the unsubscription message.
That looks much less like an automated email, right? With this, we were really able to make the people receiving them believe the emails were sent from some real person. But I’ll tell you more about this later.
As you remember from the previous article, we had the content prepared in three versions—for marketing-oriented people, technical people, and mixed. All of these were now updated to British and US English versions. But before that—and now comes the part you were surely waiting for—we took a look at the data. To make sure this article won’t be super long, and I don’t repeat myself, I have chosen to show you the data from the technical content.
As the email issues are ordered by the last sent email, you can find the first email of the marketing automation process at the bottom of the list, with a decent open rate of 21.47%, but also with a high unsubscription rate.
What we did first was to analyze the open rate by comparing the click rate inside every email. Using these numbers, we evaluated if our leads were interested in the content we’re sending them. By the content, I mean the various materials that are helping people with their evaluation of our product, such as documentation, articles, how to videos, and so on. Using this data, we kept most of the content and just kicked out about one or two emails sharing reviews from TrustRadius and G2Crowd listings in each set of content.
Now, time for the copy. Are the subject lines persuading the lead to open the email? Is the copy catchy enough to keep the lead’s attention? We gave the copy to our sales team for reviewing. In the end, they are the ones that are speaking to our customers.
A few days after, we got the copy back with a lots of notes and also many suggestions on how we could improve the whole process further, like the order of the emails, time period between each issue, and so on. So with sat together again, discussed every note, and built the process up again.
I won’t lie to you, the numbers weren’t growing rapidly right from the outset. But now, five months after launching the new version, we can say that the redesign was successful. You can see on the screenshot below that we managed to raise the open rate of the emails by at least 5%, and the click rate nearly doubled!
To sum this up, here are the things we consider as those that had an impact on the successful redesign:
- A changed tone of voice from too friendly to more courteous
- Shorter subject lines
- An email template without any formatting
- A shorter period between each email, where we went from an average of five days to three
- Possibly changing the sender from Content Strategist to a Sales Representative
You’re might now be overwhelmed with information, but maybe you are wondering—how can the change of sender name influence the open and click rates? And do they know if leads appreciate having the content in the British or US English variant? To answer this, you will need to wait for my next article! :-)
I love the experimentation and tweaking aspects of marketing automation. And am very interested to hear about your experiences with getting “under the hood” of your marketing automation too. Please share your stories with us in the comments section below.