Improving Email Campaigns for Wolters Kluwer Opleidingen
Kluwer Training is part of the Wolters Kluwer knowledge-based organisation.
Every year, Kluwer Training offers more than 1,500 training courses from 5,000 companies and organisations, mainly in Dutch and French.
These training courses are tailored to every career stage: from the basics for those in early career to masterclasses for experts.
Kluwer Training
Kluwer Training needed an interim Marketing Coordinator for training courses in the domains: finance, tax, accountancy and legal – for seven months.
This assignment included the coordination of multichannel marketing campaigns (website, email, social media, search and display advertising, print, direct mail, …) and the follow-up of the marketing budget per domain.
Furthermore, measuring and analysing the impact of these marketing actions on business results was necessary.
Since email had been the most profitable of all marketing channels for several years, we decided to look for ways to improve the existing email templates of different domains and brands.
One brand was experiencing aggressive competition which increased the need to take a deeper look at the existing email templates.
Goal: Increase website visits (CTR)
Actions:
- Shorter email
Message length appears to be one of the top email inefficiencies. People don’t read emails which are too long. Shorter email messages have a better chance to being read, understood and acted upon so we shortened the client’s messages significantly. - Call to action
Message length – along with the amount of information included in the message – could be one of the reasons CTR was rather low. Subscribers felt no urge to visit the client’s website since all information they needed to know was already available in the emails they received. However, clients could only convert on the website and not in the email itself.
That is why we decided to use an information gap to invoke the reader’s curiosity. We triggered readers to click trough, in order to get the missing piece of information. We established to do so, by cutting off content and insert a “read more” call to action. - Customize sender name
Emails sent by a real person are more likely to be clicked on than emails sent from a company name. For that reason, we strived to make the message feel more personal by adding the name and picture of the responsible product manager.
Results
A/B-testing revealed that this new email template had a CTR that was 243% higher than the email template used before.
Conclusion
With just a few adjustments we increased the email’s conversion rate significantly.
When it comes to email campaigns, there is always room for improvement. Even small adjustments can have a great impact on the behaviour of your target audience. However, we always recommend testing changes on your target audience first.
In this particular case A/B-testing was the most suitable way of testing.
