OVERVIEW:

Did you know email marketing is the #1 acquisition tactic for subscription and membership sites?  Is your subscription business using the latest email marketing tactics and achieving best-of-breed results compared to your peers?  Learn from Minal Bopaiah in this 25-minute on-demand webinar as she walks through lessons learned from our Email Marketing Benchmark Report for Subscription Sites.  Minal will explain why email is still a digital publication’s best friend and how to optimize campaigns and lists for maximum effect.   

VIDEO:

Transcript:
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Kathy:              Welcome everybody. This is a webinar from Subscription Site Insider, “Email Marketing for Subscriptions: Benchmarks and Best Practices.” Welcome, I’m Kathy Greenler Sexton. I’m the CEO and publisher of Subscription Site Insider, a website dedicated to helping professionals run and operate their subscription businesses more profitably and efficiently. I’m here today with Minal Bopaiah who’s our Editor-at-Large for all Subscription Site Insider, and spearheaded the research of our email benchmark report we are presenting today, She is going to be presenting the data and best practices that we’ve learned from that report. Minal?  

Minal:              Thank you so much Kathy. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Welcome everyone. Let’s get started and just do a deep dive into the numbers and the data behind this report. The impetus of this report was our 2013 online subscription benchmark report which actually found that of 128 surveyed Subscription Site executives 60% told us that their in-house email list was the single most cost effective acquisition strategy for getting new paying subscribers. It actually outpaced organic search. As you can see like social media doesn’t even hold a candle to it. The key critical piece of information here is that it’s the in-house list. If you noticed further down about number six is third party list. We want to talk to you about how you can grow your in-house email list and then optimize that for getting paying subscribers.

                        In 2014 we released the email marketing benchmark report for subscription content. You can get it from us on our site. [02:00] Just click on reports and you’ll get sent a link. But a lot of the charts and data are from that report. This presentation also has a lot of creative and marketing samples so you want to stick around and see, get some ideas as to how you can design and optimize your emails after you get all of this really helpful information.

                        One of the questions that we asked in our benchmark report was, “How was your email marketing performance trending?” As you can see from this chart email is alive and well. Over 50% are reporting increases in email marketing and in email sign-ups and things like that. Very few are saying that it’s very negative. There is a somewhat of a substantial portion that reports a slow decline. We think that those are people that really shouldn’t despair. What their email program probably needs is a little bit more segmentation and optimization in a more sophisticated manner. We’ll get into that a little bit later. 

                        Just like the email marketing itself is going up there’s also an upward trend line in terms of sign up. What this is saying is that consumers actually do want emails from paid content sites. I think content sites unlike ecommerce sites are in a really great position with email because people are signing up for information. It’s not like they’re giving an email just to place an order and then getting a promotion and having to opt out or spam or anything. If they’re signing up for your newsletter it’s because they want your information. Just optimizing your fee versus your paid balance is the way to really start optimizing your emails and getting more subscribers and getting the most out of your email list.

                        Following that we asked, “What’s the goal of your [04:00] email marketing program?” It’s no surprise that over 90% report that it’s to acquire new subscribers. It’s reasonable that about 75% are saying that they use email to increase member engagement. We think that that could be a little bit higher and more people should think of email as an engagement tactic.

What was really surprising is that about 57% said they’re using email to renew subscribers. We really think that email is being underused by a lot of subscription sites for renewals. If you get nothing else from this presentation really start thinking of email as a channel for both acquisition, member engagement, and renewal, and make sure you’re optimized for all three of those marketing functions.

                        We asked the unique open rate just to get an industry benchmark. We divvied it up depending on the type of email. As you can image, customer service email, so a receipt of paying for a subscription, a personalized note about if you’re having a problem getting access on the site and your customer service department is resolving that problem for a subscriber, those are getting the highest open rates.

But second to that are the on boarding emails, which is really critical for retention rates. On boarding is one of the most valuable things that you can do to ensure a higher retention rate. It’s often overlooked or people only send one on boarding email instead of the best practice of sending about four in a week, or they’re just not sending them at all and they’re losing people right then and there. Then you can see the other thing.

                        Also just to note, newsletters are getting about a 25% open rate which is actually above the industry standard. Or I’m sorry, not the industry standard, but the overall ecommerce email marketing standard [06:00] which is about a 15% open rate. Subscription sites and paid content sites are getting higher open rates than most other email marketing programs for other types of businesses.

                        We also asked what the average click rate is. This number is a little bit deceptive. We asked for unique clicks over unique opens and because most people are using email service providers I’ve come to believe that they just reported their click rate, not their click through rate. The reason for that is because as we found out MailChimp is actually the most popular email service provider for subscription content sites, and MailChimp, when they give you your reports their click rate is actually their click over emails delivered. It’s not their clicks over emails opened. The click over email opened, I’ve had other sites report something as high as 38% so you can get a really high rate with that. But this gives you an idea of how many people are clicking on your emails once they’re delivered to their email inbox, and it follows the same general pattern as the open rate.

                        We then asked what were the most effective opt-in tactics. Unsurprising to us but maybe surprising to you was the fact that lightbox overlays were by far the most effective opt-in tactic, so the most effective way to gather and build your in-house email list. That was only followed by unpaid sign-up box and Subscription Site Insider actually really recommends that subscription sites have both the lightbox overlay and an on page sign-up box. Then their standard lead generation devices for getting emails, free [08:00] downloads, a meter pay wall or limited access to content that requires registration with an email address, webinars.

Here’s the thing that I found the most interesting, business cards collected by staff, by your sales people can be a really great way to grow your email list particularly if you’re a b2b site. Collecting business cards is actually outperforming third party list. This is a mistake I see over and over again where b2b sites feel that they need to grow their email list and they look to buy a list from somebody.

As our next slide shows not one of our survey respondents reported that that was a highly effective tactic for growing their list. Most said that it was very ineffective to somewhat ineffective. Most of them are saying it’s ineffective and only less than a quarter said that it’s somewhat effective. So if you’re a b2b site looking to build your email list I would strongly encourage you to reach out to your sales people to collect business cards, to get in touch when your sales person meets someone, tell them, “I’ll put you on our email list,” and then that person will then be ready to receive that, instead of trying to buy your way through a list. It’s not like direct mail. It’s really not going to give you the ROI that you want.

Then we’re talking about lightbox overlays as a great acquisition tactic. My apologies for this image here, I don’t know why it stretched out. But lightbox overlays are really great. This is one of my favorite overlays, mainly because it’s really simple, and it was cued after I scrolled all the way to the bottom of an article page. Usually when you go to somebody’s homepage after about a 10 second delay they’ll cue a lightbox overlay [10:00] to collect an email address.

That can be really effective. I’m not going to discourage doing that. But if you are a content provider and you have articles and you have blog posts if somebody reads to the bottom of an article that’s somebody who’s really interested in your content, and that’s the best place to start capturing emails. I would recommend putting an email sign-up box right below every one of your articles above the comments section but right below the article. If you can’t cue a lightbox overlay at that point. Another lightbox overlay that I like is this one from Flight of the Conchords. It’s not a subscription site but I just like that it’s quirky, it’s really clear by its iconography. What is asking for it’s asking to email you basically even though it’s using an airgram design. Obviously subscription sites are going to want to make a little bit of tweaks to this. Instead of asking for post code you can for their company name. Or depending on how you’re trying to optimize your subscribers and what data is most interesting to catch you can change it to their first name and their last name or their business title or whatever.

Then as you remember I said the following lightbox overlay the second best tactic or the one that should be used in tandem with lightbox overlays it’s an onsite sign-up box. The reason I say it should be used in tandem is that sometimes as a reader people can feel that the lightbox is cued too soon right when they’re in the middle of a thought or reading a thought and they’ll automatically X out of it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in signing up for your email. So you cued them to join your newsletter. They X out of it, they finish reading the article, and that’s actually when they’re most interested to join. So if you have an on-site box, usually in the top right [12:00] corner of your page, that can be a great way to also collect email addresses.

The first one on this page is from the Successful Investor which is a case study we have on Subscription Site Insider. It actually runs like ad on the right hand side bar. That’s where they collect a lot email addresses. The second one is from The Motley Fool and it’s actually a bit of content marketing. It’s a free article to view but they’re asking for the email address to keep viewing it. If you look at that gray button at the bottom it says, “Click here. It’s free.” Basically it’s a registration wall where they’re asking for an email address but they’re doing it in a very smart way because they’re not saying become a registered user, which for the commitment phobic online may be too much. I really like this example as well as a way to collect email addresses.

Then we also asked about auto responders. If you can see here autoresponders that were triggered after a website action were the most effective followed by onboarding emails and then post registration offers. Win back campaigns were really not that effective. What’s really interesting is shopping cart abandonment or save attempts were not used by enough of our survey responders for us to include information or data on it. That’s somewhat disheartening because save attempts can be really powerful for getting you new subscribers. We really encourage all subscription sites to start exploring how they can use shopping cart abandonment or save attempts.

I have an example from Hulu coming up right now. This is actually an autoresponder that I got when I was looking at Hulu Plus. My favorite part of this email is its subject line [14:00] which is, “Was it something we said,” which was a great witty way to engage a prospect who is looking to sign up for your premium services or your premium subscription and then abandon their shopping cart, and then this is the email that they sent to get them to sign-up instantly. They offer a free trial. It’s also really brief, the subject line is brief. It’s image heavy and the content is pretty brief. This is a great example of how you can use shopping cart abandonment or save attempts to get new subscribers.

This is also an autoresponder for MarketingProfsPRO. What it’s doing is that it’s actually triggered after a website event. It’s warning, it’s telling you that there’s a webinar that day that you can watch. It observes a lot of best practices in that it has a lot of hyperlinks so that you give your readers different ways to interact with your site depending on what their interest is. But it also has up top and what the arrow is pointing at is a mobile optimized text. It just states really clearly today there’s this webinar at 12 pm eastern. What that does is that because most people are reading emails now on their mobile devices, that little bit of text is going to show up in the preview, even if they can’t really take the time to open up the email or click or expand, enlarge this, the whole body of the text and everything like that. Optimizing for mobile is a really great tactic for optimizing your email overall.

Then on boarding emails also count as autoresponders and because it’s not really been used as much as it should be by subscription sites I wanted [16:00] to give you a couple examples. This is from getvero.com and really what it is when one somebody join they send an autoresponder from the president or the co-founder in this case. They made it look like it was sent from his iPhone so it looks like you’re getting personalized service from the co-founder the minute you sign-up. It’s brief. I mean it’s like what, one line of text, the subject line is brief, but it absolutely makes a subscriber feel like they have a connection with the site and with the people working behind the site which is … I mean, you can’t. That’s just priceless, not only for your retention rate, but just for your site overall for getting people to spend money with you on other things like events and benchmark reports and things like that.

This is one from a consultant who actually specializes in email marketing. When you sign up for his site he sends you a thank you note for subscribing and then he asks can you just answer three quick questions. These questions are, “What’s your biggest need when it comes to email marketing? What are you struggling with the most? And what do you hope to get out of the Waldow Social Weekly?” This is a great way to not only onboard your new subscribers but also to get member engagement and get people engaging with you and your staff, get market research information about what people’s biggest concerns are. You’re going to get great information about what concern led them to join either your email list or become a subscriber of your site. So I would highly recommend this tactic for anybody, particularly b2b sites. This is a really effective tactic.

Then I included this one from SteckTwits just because it’s very graphical. It’s a light on text. I’m a big fan of using [18:00] icons because they convey meaning much quicker to the human brain. They can convey more complex topics in a much more succinct manner than a lot of text. This was actually taken if you notice it says “Welcome to SteckTwits @SubSiteCentral” off of a Twitter login. You can use your Twitter and Facebook logins to collect emails. Then if people are logging in with a social media account sending an email like this in response as a thank you.

Then the other thing that our report looked at was Gmail. As I once heard somebody from the New York Times say, “Google is the frenemy of all news and information sites out there.” They’re great for distribution, for getting our voice out there. They tend to pilfer from us as well, so it’s always a mixed bag with Google and with Gmail.

If you haven’t noticed and I’m sure you have Google has started a new thing of separating emails in inboxes by primary, social, and promotions. There’s also a couple of other tabs that people can have. When we did the survey for the benchmark report we wanted to assess whether having your emails segregated into the promotions tab was hurting or helping open and click through rates. What we found is that none of the subscription sites that we surveyed reported an increase. About a third reported a decrease in open rates and about 20% reported a decrease in click through rates but the majority said that they haven’t been affected by Gmail.

This is obviously still ongoing. We’re going to keep an eye on it and keep trying to assess what Gmail promotions tabs is doing to open and click through rates, [20:00] particularly for subscription sites. But one of the things that I wanted to let you know is coming down the pipeline and that you should probably optimize for or look to start optimizing for is a change in how promotion emails are going to show up.

If you see on the left, that’s what the promotions tab looks like right now. When you click on it it’s just a list of emails. In the future and I’m going to try to take a little bit of maybe draw something here, so if you look, right there, the consumer can toggle between getting a list of emails and going to a grid like format. If you get a grid like format this is what will show up where it’s basically like a Pinterest page of promotions. If you have subscription offers that are going into the promotions posts or the promotions tab on Gmail you want to start using images that are optimized to show up in the Pinterest style grid format of an email inbox because that where Gmail is going, and most people are probably going to start engaging with marketers and businesses in the promotions posts through the grid format rather than the list of emails. So keep that in mind.

To sum up I hope you got a lot out of this but the top 10 lessons for email marketing is, one, email is your best friend. It’s really great for subscription content sites. Segmentation can improve your email rate. So if you find that your email open or click through rate are on the decline or your sign-up rate is on the decline look to gather more information from your subscribers and to segment your list according to strategies that make sense for your business [22:00].

Three, customer service onboarding and retention emails are going to get the best open and click through rates. Four, lightbox overlays and on-site sign-up boxes are the best way to capture email addresses and every subscription site should be using both in tandem. Five, b2b sites are going to have better luck with collecting business cards than they are with buying third party lists. Six, don’t ever underestimate the power of onboarding. Even if it’s brief as if you sent an email from your iPhone, even that’s great. But for best results send about four onboarding emails within a week for a new subscriber. If a subscriber is not using your site within 72 hours of signing up you should be highly alarmed or you should budget for probably losing that subscriber when it comes to renewal.

Seven, optimize for mobile viewing whenever you can. There’s a big shift in mobile viewing for emails. There’s a big debate about mobile viewing on emails because it doesn’t really make it easy for people to buy or engage with your services. You want to check out our how-to on optimizing for mobile and optimizing for email marketing on Subscription Site Insider which will give you some tips as to how to optimize email marketing on a mobile platform.

Number eight, every subscription site should be testing save attempts or shopping cart abandonment emails. Number nine, Gmail promotions tab is changing so figure out how many, like what proportion of your email list is using Gmail or has a Gmail address and then start optimizing with images if it’s worth your time.

10, if you’re looking for more samples like this all of the samples that I showed you and a lot of more are in our marketing samples library, so I highly recommend you go check that out. We have great examples from the Motley Fool, [24:00] The Economist, Consumer Reports, Dropbox, AngelList, all sorts of sites, b2b sites, b2c sites, streaming video, e-learning, databases, news, information, whatever you want we probably have an email on it.

If you have any questions you can also contact me or Kathy and we’ll be happy to help you either find an email marketing sample that speaks to your needs or get you information as to how you can optimize your campaigns, or how to optimize your list, how to keep your list healthy, any of that information we’re here to help. You can shoot me an email. You can call me. You can get me on Twitter. The same goes for Kathy. Please reach out. We’re here to help.

That’s all that I have for now. Before we leave I should mention that next month and actually in just a few weeks in December 9^th we’re going to have Russell Perkins who’s the CEO and founder of InfoCommerce Group talk about top tactics for selling subscription data products. I highly recommend everybody attend this. Russell, whenever he speaks in person he has workshops that are standing room only. They can’t pack enough people in. Everybody wants information from him because he’s a real knowledgeable expert in the field and knows his stuff backwards and forwards. Mark your calendars for that and we’ll see you then.