Use This One Audience Segmentation Rule to Increase Your Open Rate
Email Deliverability Explained: In this series, we explore how to improve inbox placement for your marketing and fundraising campaigns
Email Deliverability Explained
You can send as many clever, elegantly crafted marketing emails as you like — but none of your work matters if these messages don’t appear in your recipients’ inboxes.
How do we land messages in inboxes, rather than spam folders or promotions tabs? In this series, we explore how to improve inbox placement for your marketing emails.
Use Audience Segmentation to Increase Your Open Rate
Send Email To Less People
How will sending email to less people improve your open rate? This is the most counterintuitive rule in the book — and I can hear your questions and objections already:
But I want more people to hear our message! More recipients = more conversions!
No. False. Natch. Na da. Nope, and wrong-oh.
More Inbox Placement = More Conversions
People can’t open your email if they never actually see it. And they certainly can’t act on your call to action if they never see it!
The more times that your email campaigns land in people’s primary inboxes — not their spam folders or promotions tab, and not their secondary email address — the more chances you have of achieving a conversion.
In this article, we’ll explore how smaller, segmented audience lists full of trusted, known openers can recursively improve open rates and inbox placement, thus leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Open Rates Explained
Your open rate is a simple equation: number of emails opened / number of emails sent in a campaign.
The numerator, “number of emails opened,” can be affected by things like a jazzy subject line, a recognizable from name, or the timing of the send. But by and large, there are a fixed number of people who are going to be interested in your message at any given moment. You can make a greater impact on your open rate by identifying these people and lowering the denominator.
That is, if you only send email to people who are likely to open a given campaign, your open rate goes up.
Example 1: 200 opens / 10,000 recipients = 2% open rate
Example 2: 120 opens / 500 interested recipients = 24% open rate
Open Rates Matter for Inbox Placement
One of the metrics that Mail Service Providers (MSPs) like Outlook and Gmail use to filter out spam and unwanted marketing content is the ratio of engaged subscribers that they can observe across their platform.
For every email you send with a low open rate, MSPs are inferring something like:
Well gee, people don’t seem interested in this organization’s messages. Maybe I should filter future messages from this domain to the spam folder or promotion tab to keep my users’ inboxes focused on more important content.
The more times this happens, the more likely future messages are to be weeded out. And since people can only open emails that they actually see, landing in the spam folder or promotion tab decreases your open rate on future sends, leading to a downward spiral:
Low open rate —> worsened inbox placement —> lower open rate —> even worse inbox placement —> eventually you’ll find it impossible to crawl out of this hole.
Aim for the Upward Spiral
On the flip side, a higher open rate —> more inbox placement —> more eyes on your content and even higher open rates —> stellar inbox placement —> upward spiral.
It’s simple math:
1) Open rates can most easily be increased by decreasing the number of recipients, eliminating audience members who are less likely to engage with your campaign.
2) Higher open rates mean more more chances for future opens.
Identify Likely Openers & Send to Them
Hosting an event in Detroit? No one in Miami cares about it.
Launching a P2P fundraising campaign for an upcoming marathon? Only runners want to get involved.
Audience segmentation is your first line of defense against shoddy open rates. Send content to people who are likely to be interested in a given campaign, based on their:
Geographic location
Personal demographics
Personal interests
History of engagement with your organization
Get to Know Your Constituents
You can’t segment your email audiences without subscriber data. Surveys, signup forms, meetings, events, and email campaigns are all opportunities to get to know your constituents.
Sally mentioned she lives in zip code 20705
Raymond first signed up on a petition about climate change
Caroline attended last year’s gala and pledged $2K
Alex has opened three messages about puppy mill cruelty
Jeremy hasn’t opened any email from us in over six months
These data — when captured in a standardized format — can be utilized to send email campaigns to the people most likely to engage with a given message.
Want to dive deeper into how to capture and classify your constituent engagement data? There’s too much to cover in this article, so let’s talk.
Qualify Subscribers at Signup
One of the best opportunities that you have to collect data about your subscribers is when they first signup. If they’re making a donation, buying a product, or just clicking that ‘subscribe’ link — it may be the first and last time they submit a form to your organization.
You’ll read countless articles explaining why minimizing forms, even down to a single field (an email address), is a good way to expand your email list.
But remember, an expansive email list is not the goal. Higher open rates are.
The person who can’t be bothered to fill in two or three extra fields probably isn’t interested enough in your work to make a donation or purchase, register for an event, or step it up to become an advocate and volunteer.
You don’t want lazy subscribers. They’re just going to drive down your open rates.
Approach signup forms as an act of qualification — likely email openers will be willing to tell you their name and base geographic location, perhaps even a few details about their interests and goals.
Inspire Trust
Willingness to share information increases if you are transparent about why you’re collecting these data, and how you plan to use them. For example:
We ask for your zip code so that we can send you announcements about local events
Your interest selections below help us prioritize programming in the year ahead!
On occasion, we may share invitations to check out like-minded initiatives. You have the right to opt-out of having your personal data shared with these partner organizations by checking the box below.
Privacy Policies, alongside a human touch on signup forms, go a long way towards inspiring trust.
Without Trust, People Lie
Most people have a “real” email address that they check every day, as well as a handful of secondary addresses that they use for various authentication, signup, and commerce purposes. When potential subscribers aren’t sure that they can trust you to send them relevant content, rather than a bombardment of daily spam, they’re more likely to signup with secondaryaddress@irrelevantdomain.com.
Telling people about your plans for audience segmentation makes them comfortable giving you their “real” email address — meaning your messages are more likely to be seen, and thus opened.
Plus, you’re less likely to run the risk of sending messages to a honeypot, which is another tool MSPs use to screen for spammy senders — more on that in an upcoming post!
Higher Open Rates = More Conversions
In this article, we’ve explored how audience segmentation — wherein you send email campaigns to less people — counterintuitively help improve your conversion rates by first improving your open rates, and thus your inbox placement.
It’s simple math:
1) Open rates can most easily be increased by decreasing the number of recipients, eliminating audience members who are less likely to engage with your campaign.
2) Higher open rates mean more more chances for future opens.
3) Conversions are only possible after opens!
Thoughts? Comments? Objections?
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