According to the DMA Email Benchmarking report 2020, the average open rate benchmark is 20% for B2C and 21% for B2B. In comparison, Pure360’s customer benchmark is 28%, which means that Pure360 customers benefit from open rates nearly 30% above national benchmarks.

We know that it’s not all about the open rate, that brands should be measuring and tracking so much more to get the best actionable insights. However, it is still an important part of the email marketing puzzle.

So what are our customers doing so right?!

A few years ago we launched the Email Marketing Maturity Model, a tool that allows our customers to benchmark their email maturity/sophistication and understand how to improve. This model, which our success teams use as a framework to help our customers, sets the tone of constant improvement and optimisation. Our mission “to enable our marketers to be the best they can be” ensures that we are committed to improving results every step of the way – wherever our customers are in their maturity.

Here are a few of the areas  we are working hard with our customers to optimise so that they can achieve awesome open rates, which you can work on too!

Good Deliverability is key

Without good deliverablity all the email marketing efforts you have put in could go to waste. There are many areas that are consultants work with customers to excel, including:-

  • Data collection and List Health
  • Sender Reputation
  • Complaints
  • Bounces
  • Spam Traps
  • IP Warmup
  • Sending Volumes & Consistency
  • Blocklist analysis
  • ESP infrastructure – including DKIM/SPF/IP address setup/ ISP feedback loops

Optimise for mail clients and devices

With free Litmus testing for all campaigns our customers are able to do this with ease. If your emails don’t render well in the inbox, people may be put off opening them in the future. Also test subject lines for how they appear on mobile devices

Test subject lines

Once the email has landed in the inbox, then one of the next most important elements is the subject line. Test different versions, use personalisation and get a sense for what length of subject line works for best for your campaign and brand. There’s an art & science to subject lines – see our guide here.

Customise the preview text

Subject lines are important but the optimising the preview text gives you maximum inbox impact. Use the preview text to build upon the subject line persuading the recipient to open.

Be insight led

Using customer data to inform campaigns and segments is tremendously important to the whole health of your marketing results. Work with your teams to drive insights from data that are not just campaign centric but take a whole view of the customer. Drive insights from Recency Frequency and Engagement metrics instead of just campaign level metrics. Understand the frequency of purchases and average order value to know what and when to set up important triggers.

Implement a Welcome Nurture Campaign

A welcome email can generate over 70% open rate, it is the time your recipient is the most engaged. A welcome series helps you make the most of this honeymoon period. A useful and relevant welcome series can help improve the open rates for the remainder of the customer lifecycle.

Ace Personalisation

At Pure360 we believe that personalisation is key to your success. Consumers are expecting it! Giving the consumer the best experience whilst being useful and thoughtful can only be delivered with the right personalisation strategies and tactics. It’s not about inserting someone’s name into your emails.

Many brands believe true personalisation is only available to the large global or household businesses. But this is not the case.

Pure360 customer, Luke 1977, is a fashion brand that had the ambition to implement personalisation on their journey to business growth. They doubled their campaign revenue as a result! See the full case study here.

Send behaviour and lifecycle automated campaigns

Campaigns that are triggered by a behaviour or delivered at certain points in the recipients lifecycle will usually deliver higher response rates. Due to their relevant and usefulness at the time. Pure360 customer Watchfinder were able to increase their open rates by 225% by implementing a simple re-targeting campaign.

Test, Test and Test again!

According to the DMA Marketer Tracker 2020, testing is still a tactic that marketers find hard to implement. This is why we created a Testing Framework that are clients can use, guaranteed to increase results. We have published this framework for you to use here.