• May 5, 2015
• Content, Demand Generation

How to Increase Email Marketing Response by 108%

Courtney Kay

VP of Field Marketing

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Priority Engine is a product we announced in January that essentially opens our massive database of IT buyers (along with their solution interests and vendor activity) to your database.

Why you ask?

So that you can 1- extract more prospects 2-see which accounts are in the market for solutions like yours in real time and 3- prioritize the accounts and contacts from both our database and yours to build more effective marketing programs.

Sounds too good to be true right?

Don’t tell our product team, but I thought so too and decided to put it to the test.

Putting our email marketing to the test

At TechTarget, we have learned a thing or two about email marketing and how to do it over the years. The emails we send are all based on the activity of our members against the topics they’re most interested in. For example, if someone has been researching on the network reading articles like this:

Is all-flash array storage right for you? (SearchSolidStateStorage.com)

or like this:

Moving to all-flash? Think about your data storage infrastructure (SearchStorage.com)

the emails he or she gets feature flash content.  We monitor that activity and switch up what we promote as topical activity shifts and changes.  So our emails are pretty targeted to each buyer’s interests.

Now if we look across all those buyers we can identify 1,598 accounts actively researching flash right now (remember, the volume and composition of accounts changes daily).  What Priority Engine can then do is tell us, this week, the ranking of all those accounts based on their cumulative activity, number of researchers, and types of content being consumed.  That means, in addition to being super relevant topically, we can be pretty precise with the timeliness, and even lifecycle stage, of our offers.

We segmented a series of emails based on Priority Engine’s account ranking. Each email presented a relevant, consideration-oriented editorial piece like: Features to Weigh When Choosing an All-Flash Array and this: Learn to Accelerate Storage for VMs With Flash

When we compared the performance of the emails distributed to members within the top 200 accounts vs. the accounts ranked higher than 200 we saw an increase in email marketing CTR of 108%.

Of course we didn’t want to stop short of the goal line here: conversions.

So all of the content we promoted was actually gated. Here’s the real mind blow… of the top 100 accounts we messaged, we converted 27%.

The power of prioritization

What did I learn? The power of prioritization can create immense efficiency and frankly, opportunity to get more out of outbound strategies.  It’s also got me thinking about other ways to use the data:

• Banner targeting and retargeting
• Optimizing local face-to-face event recruitment
• Implementing scoring algorithms through activity insights

Just to name a few.

I’ll share the results of tests like these as we go so you can get an idea of just how powerful purchase intent data is in optimizing your own marketing (and even sales) activities.

Email marketing image via Shutterstock

email marketing, messaging, Prioritization, Priority Engine, retargeting, TechTarget