In the world of digital marketing, there’s a concept of 1 + 1 = 3, which means that your marketing results are more valuable than the sum of its parts. Conventional knowledge would have us believe that in a series of email campaigns, the first one would boast the highest ROI with the second in second place and the third with the least.
A contrarian perspective
That’s also what we at Israel365 thought as well. But, to our surprise, the opposite turned out to be the case. Earlier in the month, we ran a small fundraising campaign for a Holocaust survivor. Instead of sending our usual one email, we sent three.
Three main messages
The first email was pretty standard – We made the prospective donor aware of the problem – a Holocaust survivor’s home was in desperate need of renovation. We then showed them how we were raising money to solve it. Usually, we stop at that point.
But then we decided to throw in a follow-up mailer. In the second email, we provided a small update explaining how people just like them have been donating and that we are on our way to reaching our goal. This email also introduced the idea that we have a limited amount of time to raise funds.
The final email created a sense of urgency saying that we only had a couple of hours left until the funds could be transferred. (This was actually the case since the contractor we were working with to renovate the home placed a tight deadline on payment).
The results
The results of the first email were 27% of the total revenue from this three-pronged campaign. If we had stopped at that one blast, that’s all we would have raised.
The second email brought in 42% of the total donation amount. This was interestingly the highest ROI in the campaign.
The third and final email was responsible for 32% of the total revenue, a development that pleasantly surprised us all.
An unexpected twist
Many would have you believe that there would be diminishing returns over each email you send. That’s because the initial campaign is no longer fresh in the prospect’s minds, and the people who want to donate are more likely to do so at the outset. However, we see from this strategy that the revenue virtually increased with each email that we sent.
Interestingly, the third email brought in a higher percentage than the first email.
This shows us that by sending three emails instead of just one single blast, we increased revenue by 273%!
The moral of the story
We learned from this experience that when it comes to email blasts, sometimes the more, the merrier. If we had only sent out one email, we would have missed out on 74% of the revenue! The main takeaway is to send three emails with a targeted strategy in place. To learn more about how we positioned each email to reach this milestone or other insightful email strategies in your business, contact the Israel365 Media team today.