The Messaging Times

The days of sending email campaigns blindly to a large group of recipients is over. Batch and blast days are behind us. That’s not to say that people don’t still use this big net strategy for their email communication. It means that the results achieved using those antiquated tactics have been proved to be less successful than when marketers target smaller groups or recipients with more precision.

According to a recent Email Marketing Metrics report by MailerMailer, open and click-through rates are influenced by the industry of the sender and the size of their lists. Generally, smaller list sizes yield better open and click-through rates.

“…Messages delivered to small and medium lists had higher open and click-through rates than messages delivered to lists of 1,000 or more subscribers. Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies…” click here (no pun intended) to keep reading

Of course, this doesn’t  mean that you have to sacrifice open and click-through rates if you want to communicate with a large list of subscribers. It means that if you have a large list, it should be opt-in and targeted to the greatest degree possible. The fact that smaller lists yields better results has more to do with the fact that those small lists are generally compiled in-house and sent to recipients who consider the message to be highly relevant to them.

If you want to see the average open and click-through rates for your industry (or list size), read E-Mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates.

If you don’t currently track the open and click-through rates of your email campaigns, you might be interested in our GroupMetrics email tracking service.

According to a recent MailerMailer Email Marketing Metrics Report, Religious and Spiritual Emails enjoy the highest open rate at 25.75%.

* Click on the image for more information about the report

So how can you get religious with your email campaigns and enjoy similar results if your messages are about medical, dental and healthcare (which is at the bottom of the list with a 7.1% open rate average)?

1. Define your email offer on all of your subscription points (web pages, etc.). Explain clearly and transparently what subscribers will be receiving, how often they will receive it, when they should expect it to arrive and how it might benefit them.
2. Offer real value in each message. Every email you send should provide real value to your recipients. If it fails to offer value, they will eventually stop opening it because the investment in time and attention isn’t worthwhile. Value can be provided by sending informative content or special offers.
3. Express the value that you are offering in the Subject Line. Your Subject Line should be crafted to prompt action – in a sense, it is the most important call-to-action because it will often determine whether your message gets read or not. It is the headline for the information in the body of your message – and headlines can either encourage or discourage people to read further.
4. Identify yourself clearly and consistently in the From field. Use your personal name only if it is known to your recipients. If someone subscribed to receive email from The Messaging Times, then they are more likely to recognize an email arriving from The Messaging Times than they would be if it was sent from Tom O’Leary (who the heck is Tom O’Leary?) If your email is related to a product or service brand, consider using the product or service name.
5. Consider your timing. According to the Email Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer above, email open rates are highest at the beginning of the week, especially on Monday. But you should also consider the time of day when messages are sent. First thing in the morning on Monday, recipients might be overburdened by the volume of email sitting in their inbox from the weekend, and might be a bit more likely to delete messages that aren’t priority – just to clear the clutter. Test your messages at different times of the day to see if your open rates increase when they arrive in the early afternoon.
6. Think about frequency. If you send too many messages, recipients might fatigue unless you are offering real value in each one that is relevant to your recipients. Send too few messages and your relationship with your recipients might fade. Twice a week might be too many. Once a month might be too few. Most importantly, your frequency should be consistent over time for trust to build. Your recipients should be able to count on you to show up on time and know to expect you to arrive every second Monday afternoon or every Friday morning, like the UPS man.
7. Keep your list clean. Your open rate is a percentage of opens in relation to the size of your list. If you have 2,000 bad email addresses on your list, then simply removing bounced email addresses will help to increase your open rate statistics. Likewise, ensure that you promptly remove any unsubscribe requests from your list. Update and maintain your list regularly to keep it fresh.
8. Design your emails so that they don’t require much effort from your recipients to find the value. Don’t overburden your recipients with too much content. Don’t make them search for value. Don’t bury your value.
9. Use the preview pane space effectively. Most email recipients see your message in their preview pane. Make sure that your value and their benefits are visible in this space. Keep in mind that many email clients disable images by default today, so if your preview pane space includes images, there is a good chance that your recipients won’t be able to see them unless they decide to enable images. Consider using text as well as images in the preview pane.
10. Make your message relevant to each recipient. Provide opportunities for your recipients to tell you what would make the content better. Let them have as much control as possible in terms of what information they receive from you. In this case, being reactive rather than proactive is good. React to their needs rather than assuming that you know what they want.

Feel free to share any tips that have helped you to achieve religious open rates.

Last year, I wrote an article about different metrics that are used to measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. I stopped short from discussing how to track conversions using web analytics tools.

“…One thing that all marketers share is their penchant for measuring things. How many people responded to a certain creative campaign? Did more people click through on our email newsletter after we changed from HTML to text? What was the conversion rate on our new landing page? The bottom line is that measuring the results of marketing campaigns is important; and not just to marketers.

Here are three different measuring sticks that you can use to keep track of how effective your marketing campaigns are, from initial click to ultimate conversion…” continue reading

Russell McDonald from iMedia Connection picks up where I left off by explaining more specifically how web analytics tools can be used to provide relevant measurements for the conversion activity of your email campaigns.