Listening to your audience

We, as email marketers, receive lots of advice from experts in our field.  I’ve learned over the years that you have to take the advice, decide what makes sense for your list and then test the change and measure the results.

It sounds like simple advice, but if you start asking questions about why certain procedures are being followed, sometimes the answer is “They said that’s the best way to do it.” Or “That’s the way we always do it.”  We have to test, because every company and their audience are different.  This makes for differing expectations from the email communications.

Background

Our client, Epic Educational Program Innovations Center, offers continuing education courses for engineers and other technical personnel.  They send monthly emails promoting their seminars.

Initially, we broke the emails down based upon general types of seminars being offered and by geographic region.  The seminars are technical training topics and are grouped by engineering discipline (civil, mechanical, environmental, electrical etc).  My logic was that people would be interested in only the seminars that related to their own discipline. We tracked the open rates and click through rates so we could measure improvements.  The trouble that we found was that if someone had mechanical codes and electrical codes they would only get one type of seminar and we had to create something like 20-25 emails a month because of different regions and the different general seminar topics.

I had the IT guys create a database program that selected specific seminars based upon an individual’s coding and their geographic region so that everyone received an email that was unique to their own interests and region.  It was a pretty sweet program.  We ran this database for a number of months and tracked the open rates.

Then, against my better judgement, we tried another test.  We sent emails broken down by geographic region, with all of the seminars scheduled in that region listed.  The seminars were organized by discipline and date and we featured a couple of seminars each month by giving them more real estate at the top of the email.

Open rates began to rise and click throughs were higher than ever.

Conclusion

That’s when I started to think about the data.  We have people tell us what they are interested in, but we also infer their interests based upon their job and the industry they work in.  Some people in management have broader interests because of the people reporting to them and we had to admit that there are inaccuracies in assuming what someone’s training interests are based upon the criteria we had.

The lesion learned is that I’m not as smart as I think I am and we have to listen to what our email recipients are telling us from the data we track. (We also have feed-back options, but not many people use them. )

This is the model we currently follow.  We are constantly testing different frequencies, subject lines and days to send to find little lifts in the open rates

Steven