With No Negative Effect on Open Rates!
That’s what we learned in a recent test we did with several of our clients. When they switched from monthly insurance email newsletters to weekly insurance email articles, their open rates remained the same as or were better than they were with their monthly newsletters. But more importantly, they were now engaging their contacts four times more often per month than before. We also have reason to believe this resulted in deeper, more focused engagement when articles were sent weekly.
Let me explain that last point in more detail. A typical open rate for our insurance monthly newsletters is about 25% (industry average for insurance emails is 20.6%, according to MailChimp Research). We found virtually no change or a slightly better open rate for weekly email articles.
But there’s one big difference. Even though 25% of contacts open their monthly newsletters, only about 5% (2.14% industry average for insurance emails per MailChimp) of them go on to click a link to read any of the articles in the template. However, when you email a single article, there is no link to open. Recipients can read the entire article without any additional effort required.
Rather than reading a few lines of a teaser in the monthly newsletter template and deciding whether to click through to read the entire article, readers who get the entire article in a single email only need to decide whether to keep moving their eyeballs across the screen. No additional effort is required. That’s a big difference.
Necessity determined our traditional magazine and newsletter formats. When the only practical medium for publishing and delivering content was print, publishers consolidated their content periodically into a single publication. With the internet, the constraints of printing stuff on paper and the complicated logistics of how to deliver it disappear. You don’t need to aggregate a month’s worth of content before delivering it. You can piece out content now by the week, in smaller, more edible chunks.
Weekly Delivery of Insurance Email Articles Just Makes More Sense
Have you ever gone away for a week or so and forgotten to put a hold on your daily newspaper? When you return, you have a stack of newspapers that you’ll never read as thoroughly as you do when you digest them daily.
People are busy — or at least they think they are. They also have shorter attention spans. According to a study from Microsoft Corp., “People now lose concentration after eight seconds” — less than the attention span of a goldfish, which is 9 seconds.
The main purpose of email marketing is to establish and maintain top of mind awareness. If open rates don’t suffer and you can get in front of people four times more than before and engage their attention more quickly and even more thoroughly, you may want to rethink your insurance newsletter strategy.
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