Are your Click-through rates good enough? A growth hacking study
Everything great endeavour can be explained by conversion rates. — Winston Churchill*
First, some context.
We, at Seekube, spend a sufficiently large chunk of time testing new acquisition channels and relooking at old ones to see if they still make sense. This article might seem useful if you have decided that Email Marketing is one of your channels or are rigorously testing it.
We are proponents of email and the power one can unleash with the right tools and a little creativity.
All righty then, let’s get to work.
What we noticed
Mailchimp gave us decent open rates but the click-rates were so low that we were starting to wonder why.
We had one singular objective in mind — to increase the click-through rates for email.
At this point, for the benefit of the readers, it is good to understand that every channel follows a curve as shown in the image below. We realised that although email had been exploited, sub-channels like plain-text emails were still yielding results.
Our Hypothesis — Changing the template from a WYSIWYG template to a plain-text will result in a 15% higher click-through rate because recipients will feel that the sender is actually sending them the message.
Tools we used
Yet Another Mail Merge — A great, inexpensive Google Sheets Add-on to send bulk email in plain-text. Integrated with Google Sheets and Gmail.
Linkedin — Get a premium account for free for a month. Hire freelancers to get you the details namely first name, last name and the headline.
How can this help you?
Ask yourself if email is a central channel for your company
Email has been a central channel for us since the beginning because we have the power to make it extremely targeted and the open rates and click rates can be drastically increased through a few tweaks and some creativity. Plain-text email converts much better for us than Mailchimp. So ask yourself whether it could yield results for you.
Get creative with tools
The main tools we used for this hack are Yet Another Mail Merge and Linkedin. We needed to get creative with Linkedin because Linkedin is in a sense very highly restrictive.
Find a way to scrap emails and find email patterns
We had to find a way to scrape a list of first names and last names and the titles on Linkedin. Again, this was very specific to our sector, recruitment. We banked on the fact that most schools had a fixed pattern for email IDs. What is important is to personalise the email sufficiently so that the recipient opens the email because a decrease in open rate can affect the click rate.
Personalise the email through Google Sheets
The aim was to use Google Spreadsheets to try to guess from the headline which sector they may be interested in and suggest them a forum accordingly. This can be done through a simple search function that returns TRUE when it contains a related keyword. For example, if the cell contains marketing, return TRUE and suggest Forum Métiers du Marketing. This function helped us automate the task largely.
Personalising the subject also required many tests. We tested subject lines like, “Join 2439(RANDBETWEEN function) other candidates from <<schoolname>> on Seekube).
Result
There was a 30% increase in the click-through rate through a personalised YAMM-based email. Here’s what the email looked like:
Voilà!
Email marketing can be leveraged to a great extent through creativity and a testing-centred approach.
*Not true. Refer to In The Light Of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman
