How 6sicuro uses emails to attract new blog readers

Founded in 2000, 6sicuro was Italy’s first online car and motorcycle insurance comparison site. Since then, the site has helped millions of people to find the cheapest option that suits their needs. Thanks to the site’s blog, 6sicuro offers its users daily news and insights about savings, finance, tax and technology.

Open rate
+2%
Total clicks*
+47%
Organic blog visits*
+15%

 

Salvatore Russo

Marketing Manager, 6sicuro.it

Thanks to MailUp’s BEE editor, I was able to significantly improve our Email Marketing campaigns, especially in the implementation phase. Creating a message is something that everyone can do, even those who are unfamiliar with HTML. What’s more, being able to share my creation with my collaborators allows me to immediately visualize the changes that we’re experimenting with

Objectives Strategy
Alongside the development of the company’s Content Marketing strategy – involving the expansion of its editorial plan – 6sicuro set itself another goal for the third quarter of 2016: to widen its pool of blog readers using newsletters while simultaneously increasing the number of articles read by each individual recipient. All without compromising delivery times.

More specifically, 6sicuro’s goal was to increase the open rate of its emails and the click-through rates of the blog posts included in the messages. These two key indicators could then help the company to achieve two further objectives: increasing traffic to the site, and potentially attracting ads from other brands (to be featured in the newsletter).
MailUp helped 6sicuro to redefine its Email Marketing strategy, starting with the design of the newsletter, whose dated and impractical layout was replaced with a more modern and lightweight look allowing the reader to interact more easily with the content. More specifically, 6sicuro needed a structure that was modular and complex yet easy to read, evoking the layout of an online magazine. The goal was to offer the right mix between readability, thoroughness and a logical hierarchy of content, covering all the topics that readers care about while also assigning them an order of priority. 6sicuro decides on its topics and subsequently defines its editorial calendar by carrying out regular Analytics studies, cross-referencing news statistics against seasonal search peaks for a given topic.

In terms of the composition of the newsletter, three substantial changes were made:
  • The number of news items was raised from 6 to about 20, divided into categories and topics
  • The number of banners was raised from 1 to 4, thus giving rise to an organic Email Advertising strategy that allows 6sicuro to host ads from other brands in its emails
  • The hierarchy of articles: previously, all articles were equally prominent, but in the new layout certain items are given a greater visual impact in order to focus the recipient’s attention on specific content.
Another equally important tool in order to guarantee the success of the strategy was the A/B test, which helped 6sicuro to determine what type of subject line encourages recipients to open the newsletter. In particular, the brand discovered that recipients are more likely to react to subject lines that contain their name as well as those in the form of a statement rather than a question.

Results

The solutions offered by MailUp allowed 6sicuro to increase the average newsletter open rate from 15.8% in 2015 to 17.6% in 2016, with a consequent surge in the average click-through rate, which rose from 15.9% to 29.9%.

After consolidating the positive trends of the previous year, 2017 saw 6sicuro experimenting with new sending solutions whose results will be periodically analyzed by the company.

We can summarize as follows:

  • The open rate increased by 2% in one year: a significant statistic in the context of Email Marketing metrics
  • Total clicks increased by 47% compared to the newsletters sent in 2015
  • The production of articles – which are then inserted into the newsletter – increased, leading to a 15% rise in organic visits

Best Practices

If you have a consistent Content Marketing program, start researching the topics that are of most interest to the recipients, cross-referencing Analytics data, news and seasonal search peaks.
Define email templates that can satisfy different communication requirements. There are two fundamental characteristics: a modular structure and a totally responsive design.
Develop A/B testing that allows you to understand which topics receive the most interest, which type of subject line encourages people to open emails, and which call to action generates the most clicks.
Before sending a message, share it with Collaboration in order to request approval to send or to allow other members of your team to contribute to the campaign.
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