Shaun Whynacht shares results from a client's virtual event email campaign. Long-form nurture emails hit 40-50% open rates but only 1-2% clicks. A final ultra-short email with a branded URL instead of a button kept opens high and jumped clicks to 11%.
Last week I had an experience working with a client helping them launch a virtual event. And the findings and what happened with results in the emails were very interesting. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. How's it going everyone? Here we are. It's the end of April and we are rolling into May. I don't know where where you are, what the weather's like, but here in Canada, we came out of winter and spring is officially in action. And I feel good about just the weather. It just makes me feel great. And I can tell there's a lot of momentum in the business community. It happens every year this time. And if you are enjoying that, welcome to spring. And if you've been in nice weather all along, I'm completely envious of you. Now you heard in the intro that I wanted to talk about an experience that I had last week helping a client launch their virtual event. So the idea behind this was they had partnered up with another business in the same kind of niche area and put on this virtual event. Now their connection wrote all the email copy for the pre-registration nurture, the post-registration reminders, and all that kind of stuff. My role in this was simply to take that, build the landing page, implement all the content, build the automation, the registration, and all those different elements, the nuts and bolts to bring everything together. Now the The key thing that I want to focus on was the email copy. The email copy that they have provided that we used for getting registrations was very long in my opinion. Now if you looked at the email on a phone, it was probably 5 or 6 finger scrolls to read through all that content. No visuals, basically all text with the link in there a couple times. Post-event, we looked at all the results. Now I'm going to tell you about a last email that we include in the sequence in just a minute. But all of the emails had really good open rates. So the subject lines and the audience was very much in tune with who they were, and that's because we weren't sending it to an audience that didn't know who these people were. So there was some trust that was there. So open rates of high 40s to 50% in all 3 of these pre-event nurture emails. Now the click-through rates were fairly low in the 1 to 2%. Needless to say, they did have the event. They had, I think it was about 50-some people register for it. So that was okay. They're happy with those results. Now what I said to my client was, let's try to send out a last email that is extremely short. And I know that we were sending emails to her list, so they know who she is. So we actually did the last email, which was literally like 1.5 sentences. In length, right? Very short. It was something to the effect of, hey, you know, I noticed you haven't registered for my live virtual event. Here's the link to check it out, right? Very short, very concise. And what we saw in the results of that was that it had as equal of open rates, so that was good, but the click-through rate on that email alone was 11%. Okay, so I mean, looking at the metrics, looking at the data, that tells you a couple of things. One being, first of all, how we displayed the link was we didn't put a button in there, right? So if you're building an email in a system like Keep, you can put a button in the email and then make the button say click here to register, click here to learn more, and then you embed the URL in behind that button. What we did is we actually put the URL to the site and landing page in there, which had their company name in it because it was a branded URL, and that, in my opinion, provides more credibility and ups that click-through rate versus just a button because you don't know necessarily what that button is encoded to take you to. Now the other part was the fact that we kept it short. They are in a B2B type of business. People are busy. People don't have the time to read long emails. So if it's like me, if I got an email that was short from her and said, hey, here's a virtual event that I'm doing, click here to check it out. If I felt that I wanted to learn more about it, that would give me that information right away versus a lot of marketing long-form email copy and content that's there. Now you might be listening to this saying, you know what, I disagree with you. I think the long-form copy works, and because it works in my business, great. If it's working for you, don't change anything. But what I'm going to really say here is if you don't know, split test. We were able to do an inline split test by adding that to the last one in the sequence. What we could have done also, and what we will do in future ones, is we will completely split test from the get-go, which means we're gonna run two identical parallel sequences at the same frequency to a split of the list. So if there's, let's say, 100 people on the list, 50 are gonna get the long-form content, the other 50 are gonna get the short version of each of the emails, and then we can compare apples to apples. So in recap with this, that's what I wanted to share with you today, is the fact that we were able to look at the data and see not only did the shorter content work because it was able to just be concise and speak to the person opening that email, but also by just putting a link in there made it seem as if it was sent from her, from her email, versus a marketing system. Another tactic we also did was we put a couple spaces in there and drove the unsubscribe link further down the page because if you're opening on your actual phone, you won't necessarily see the unsubscribe if there's a couple blank blocks in its way and it seems more legit. Now you can't delete that and remove it. It has to be there to be compliant with the spam and sending laws, but you can modify it and push it down a bit further, which we do all the time. And that works really well for us. So my suggestion to you is if you're trying anything to launch a product, launch an event, launch, uh, you know, a system, whatever it is, try to split test if you don't know what's going to resonate and work with your audience. We did it in the end. We're going to do it more full in next time. And that's our lessons with this week. So until we talk next week, which we're going to have a great episode coming up with Scott Moran from SamCart, the co-founder of SamCart, a great system. And if you're building content in your business, you're selling courses online, you're selling digital products, you will not want to miss this episode that's going to release next Friday. Take care everyone and have a great time growing your business.
Running your own business is hard. Those long hours, the doubt, the challenge to meet demands. But you're resilient, strong, dedicated. You do all of this for more than profits, success, or money. You do it because you care. You care about the people who shop here, eat there, drink here. You care about your community. You care about your team. Despite all else, you care. No matter what life throws your way, you power through it with grit and perseverance. You are the epitome of dedication. You are a small business owner. For this reason, Blue Cow Marketing salutes you.
Julie Vanexan recognizes Shaun Whynacht from Blue Cow Marketing at the Nova Scotia House of Assembly
