Website Optimisation Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers

This is the 4th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results “hybrid” approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Email Marketing Optimisation: Keeping Prospects Engaged With Your Conversion Process

Every online conversion process is different, but all are made up of a series of conversion steps. Understanding how users are responding to each step of your process is the key to incrementally improving your results.

While an email sequence is by no means the only way to convert “raw” website visitors into high-quality sales leads, it is an effective technique that we have successfully deployed across dozens of industries.

Case Study: Optimising an Email Autoresponder Strategy

Hutton Real Estate is one of Australia’s most successful independent real estate agents. One of their lead generation strategies involves giving away a highly informative Home Selling Guide to people who may be thinking of selling their home, then following up with a series of autoresponder emails to provide additional information and encourage qualified prospects to enquire.

(At the same time, this process is designed to sharply reduce unqualified enquiries (e.g. people who not thinking of selling their home in the next 3 to 6 months). If low lead quality is a problem you face, filtering prospects through a well-designed autoresponder process is a strategy you could test.)

Two months after successfully launching the process, we ran a report to determine how many people had unsubscribed from the contact list. Here are the results:

Above: This report from the Aweber autoresponder system shows that a total of 78 users unsubscribed (around 15% of the total), and also when they unsubscribed within the 7 email series.

Clearly, most of the unsubscribe requests were being triggered by messages 4, 5 and 6. This information enabled the content of each message to be reviewed and adjusted:

• Message 5 didn’t add a lot of value - it merely re-iterated some earlier points from the ebook - so it was removed from the sequence altogether.
• Messages 4 and 6 provided valuable new information, but based on feedback from subscribers we suspected that the delivery interval between messages was too short and that prospects felt “bombarded” by emails, so we increased the delivery intervals for these two messages from 4 to 7 days.
• Additional messages were added for delivery 6 and 12 months after the initial signup. In other words, this system can be set to automatically follow up with prospects without requiring any additional effort from the Hutton Real Estate team.

Results

Introducing the above tweaks reduced the unsubscribe rate from around 15% to less than 3%. Leads cost money to generate - it pays to keep them in your marketing funnel even if they don’t convert into new business immediately.

Hutton Real Estate has also used this optin process to capitalise on several successful PR campaigns. Many PR campaigns generate a flood of interest that quickly dissipates. In the case of Hutton Real Estate, a PR piece that appeared in the Brisbane Sunday Mail generated over 600 opt-ins within a matter of days, locking in long-term value.

Related Articles:

• Website Optimisation Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns
• Website Optimisation Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Website Optimisation Part 6: Visualising Where Visitors Are Clicking