0:00
[MUSIC PLAYING] If it ain't broke, don't fix it. My friend, Ramit Sethi, who's an incredible email marketer, talks about a concept called Greenlight Benchmarks. If you're doing as good or better than your benchmark, you have the green light. Move on to the next step. Don't slow down or try to over-optimize something if it's already working for you. There are other fish to fry. So let's use that idea here.
0:28
If you've already reached the benchmarks of a 20% open rate, a click-through rate of 5%, and email marketing revenue at 20% of your total store revenue, move on to the next module on advanced email marketing strategies. You've got the green light. If you're struggling with one metric, however, let's dig deeper in this lesson. One way to improve your benchmarks is through an approach called A/B testing.
0:52
This simply means that you carve your email list into three groups of recipients-- an A group, a B group, and a C group. You send the A and B groups each slightly different email variations, then you send the better-performing email to the C group. A/B testing has two benefits. Firstly, it gives you concrete data to back up what you might intuitively think will work with your customers.
1:16
Secondly, it's an inexpensive way to improve your overall sales and conversions. Say your open rate is much lower than 20%. You don't yet have that green light on the benchmark. To improve that open rate, I would test the following. Your subject line-- this one's probably the most important-- your from name, your send time, and send day of the week. Run some tests with those variables to see if you can get that open rate above 20%.
1:43
If you're still significantly below 20%, you might have what's called poor list hygiene. That means you might have many subscribers who subscribed years ago and have no idea who you are today. If that's the case, purge them. That's right. Just delete anyone from your list who hasn't opened an email in six months. Your open rate will skyrocket as your list hygiene improves. Another reason you'll want to clean up your list like this is that personal email service providers like Gmail or Hotmail see a very low open rate as a flag.
2:15
To them, it means this sender should go into the spam folder because no one is opening it. Then all your emails go into spam for your entire list, which of course, further hurts your open rates. Now, let's talk about your click-through rate. If you're noticing that your click-through rate is below the greenlight benchmark of 5%, your content isn't resonating. I'd start to fix this by focusing on testing your calls to action in your offers.
2:40
Remember that in every email you send, you want to include a strong call to action at the end, and direct your potential customer to the next step, ideally back somewhere on your website. In the resources below, I've included some call to action examples. Once you improve your open rate and your click-through rate, and get both up to our benchmark standards, your email revenue will naturally start to increase. Unless you have some major challenges with your product page or pricing, there is no reason why interested, highly-targeted subscribers won't become paying customers.
3:13
Make testing a habit. Set up a weekly meeting with yourself to check in on your tests and see what's working. Each week, tweak your tests, and start to uncover your best campaigns and approach. [MUSIC PLAYING]
