Increasing newsletter click rate by tailoring content

Increasing mail marketing engagement by delivering relevant content

After reading an article from the Nielsen Norman Group about UX findings in Newsletters and how tailoring content for specific interests result in better responses I decided to make a test.

“Recipients want organizations to use known information about them to deliver valuable and relevant content in their newsletters and marketing messages.” NNGroup

Our company sends a monthly newsletter to all its subscribers, over 10k people. Currently, the newsletter is a collection of articles, of different subjects, posted on the website. On average, our newsletters gets 12.67% open rate and 1.45% click through rate (Table 1).

Table 1 — Last Newsletters Results

In search of better results in content delivery and conversions, we decided to submit some articles again. However, this time, we only sent one article in the email and to specific lists of emails from the same database, segmented by industry of interest.

The aim of this investigation was to test Nielsen Norman Group findings and determine whether sending out a post to a specific industry received greater unique opening rates, and generated more unique clicks than sending the same post in the Newsletter to the entire email database.

It's important to have in mind that the users received the same article twice (once in the newsletter and once tailored). This was conducted over four separate single posts, with 99% certainty in results not being due to random chance.

The Test

Profiling

This test was conducted by re-sending some articles that were included in previous newsletters to the same users, but this time tailored to their interests.

To find out about the user interests we set website cookies to tag the users according to the pages and posts that they visited. So when a user visited out article about breath research, we set his interest as being biomedical. At the end, we didn't have many prospects with a area of interest tag but still were able to get great results.

The email campaigns

We used the same image and text used on the newsletter, but this time containing only one article and sent to a segmented list based on area of interest.

It is important to note that those people on the segmented list received the article twice, once in a bundle inside the newsletter and then just the article itself a month later.

Table 2 — Mail Marketing Results

Note that the segmented articles were sent to a way smaller database and got almost the same or more clicks than sending to the entire database!

Conclusion

Looking at table 2, there was an increase of the open rate in all articles sent segmented, but the result was not significant. However, comparing the results by tailoring content in single articles, the average increase in clicks was 920%!

Table 3 — Final Result calculated

Even with such impressive results, it does not mean that we will stop with the newsletter. Our newsletter still has a wider reach and more clicks overall, and is currently a great way to get more information about the interests of our subscribers. In response this results, we also decided to send the targeted articles after the newsletter and continue to improve our mail marketing with UX knowledge.

References:

Thanks to Jon Tweed

Designing Marketing Email and Newsletters: UX Research Findings