🚀 Orange Marketing's Best Performing Email of All Time

Written by Rebecca Gonzalez | October 26, 2022

🤓 Geek Alert This blog post is for marketers who get into the nuts and bolts of email in an almost FRIGHTENING 👾 way.

Orange Marketing sent its best-performing B2B email newsletter last week. This email newsletter achieved an astounding (for us) open rate of 42% with a 13% click-through rate. Because email has been a challenge for 100% of our B2B SaaS clients, we wanted to share what we changed to increase performance.

Unfortunately, we didn't do a scientific test. We changed everything we could, so we aren't 100% sure what caused the big lift. Our fellow marketers can judge for themselves. The email volumes in start-up B2B culture are small, and typical A/B tests are inconclusive. Sometimes it is just best to test and pivot. We knew the email geeks in our audience would enjoy a quick synopsis of what we tried.

Quick Back Story

The Orange Marketing newsletter goes to an opt-in subscriber list and is scheduled to send on Wednesday mornings whenever we have new blog content. We encourage our customers to use the HubSpot Blog Subscription email functionality because it creates a professional automated newsletter email effortlessly. Because we are sending to a small (but mighty) list of B2B SaaS customers and prospects, we need our email newsletter to perform as well as possible.

Results

We are most concerned with Email Open Rate (% of delivered emails that open) and Click-Through Rate (% of clicks in the email from all the opens). We also closely watch bounces and unsubscribes. The Click-Through Rate of what amounted to a general marketing communication was the highest we have ever seen. We compare this in the table below to a regular, reasonably well-performing newsletter a few weeks prior.

The unsubscribes 👻 were surprising at double. Was it the utterly unabashed nature of our philosophy in the content or the click-bait picture? IDK. But we are keeping our eyes on that.

Before Changes

View the email here (3-story newsletter).

After Facelift

View the email here (3-story newsletter).

What did We change?

Now for the geeks. We aren't sure what caused this massive click-through rate because we changed many things based on the advice we gained in a HubSpot workshop we attended during HubSpot's Inbound 2022 (hosted by Jay Schwedelson details in this blog).

Here is a summary of the changes:

Send Date Time - Instead of Wed. 7 AM, we switched to Thurs. 11:15 AM (2pm ET) with the idea that later in the week/day is better for people who are reading educational email (no data, gut feel).
Overall Newsletter Banner - We made our banner colorful, fun and more on-brand (dogs) versus our previous corporate look.
Emoji in Subject Line - We are told an emoji in character position "1" can increase opens. We have been also told it causes readers to view it as spam. Who knows.
Email Copy - Added more copy above the "read more" line in the email newsletter so people would get a feel for the story on the email and decide if they want to click through.
Blog Picture - Halloween-themed blog post picture acted like a "thirst trap" (we think).
Tone/Manner - The tone of the content was wholly irreverent (not unusual for us but up a notch with this post).
Subject Line - Short, punchy subject line.

View the two emails in the inbox below and note the emoji

We will keep playing around and see if we can achieve these types of results for ourselves and our clients as 2022 draws to a close. It is clear that email's effectiveness has plummeted sharply due to changes by the big ESPs (email service providers), and we have to break out every idea and trick 🎃 in the book to continue improving results. 🖖

Additional Resources

The Truth About B2B Email Deliverability — AN ABSOLUTE MUST-READ FOR B2B MARKETERS!