The Messaging Times

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.

Dear !*FIRSTNAME*! Readers

Like many email marketers, you might be tempted to personalize your email campaigns with the first names of your recipients. On the surface, it seems logical that if someone sees their first name in a salutation, they will feel that they have a relationship with the sender. Unfortunately, unless you actually have a relationship with the recipient, they might actually consider it smarmy, presumptuous or even downright spammy of you.

Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath shares some insights about the slippery slope of getting too personal with your recipients.

“…Assuming too much familiarity too early in the relationship may have the reverse affect intended. Consumers may be off put by the forwardness, and tune out this message and all others to come. This is especially risky early in the relationship. Be careful with personalized salutations in welcome messages, as well. If the subscriber has only provided name and email address to sign up for email newsletters, then there is not much of a relationship there yet. Once you’ve earned the relationship (e.g.: after a purchase), then personalization may be more welcome…” keep reading

Of course, personalization done correctly can be very effective. It’s just important to think about the value of the personalization that you are providing. Rather than trying to misrepresent your relationship to your recipients by using their given name, think about ways that you can personalize the content for each recipient – to personalize their experience with you based on their actual needs and preferences. And in order to do that, you actually have to spend some time getting to know them first.

Lovingly Best regards

Your friend Tom

MarketingVox provides 13 tips for effective email marketing. You may have heard most of these before, but it is certainly worth taking the time to reacquaint yourself with them.

The following posts from this blog add to the list:

Email Marketing: Call to Action Tips

3 Quick Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns in 2008

5 Holiday Email Tips

5 Tips to Increase Email Subscription Rates

Email Marketing: 4 Ways to Help Recipients to Take Action

19 Tips for Getting Email Delivered

Email Design Tips (while we eagerly await HTML email standards)

The most important tip regarding email marketing tips is to implement them after you read them. Tips are only useful if you actually incorporate them into your campaigns.

Sometimes, your lovely HTML email arrives with your images not displayed (see image below.)

So what can you, as a sender, do to get your images to display without requiring your recipients to take the extra step of clicking to download the images?

Mark Brownlow breaks down the image suppression issue in his post What is Image Blocking?

Here are a few easy-to-implement tactics to help improve your email marketing efforts this year:

1. Create a calendar for your email marketing campaigns so that you have a visual representation of your recipients, content and frequency (Who, What, When). Paste it on the wall in front of your desk or save it as your computer’s background image.
2. Design an email marketing checklist and use it every time you send a campaign. Airline pilots do it before taking off. So should you. It’s even more important to use a checklist after you’ve been doing it for a long time. Attention to detail is the cornerstone of successful email marketing.
3. Test your campaigns against as many email clients as you can prior to sending (include testing on your email marketing calendar). You can either establish accounts yourself with Outlook Express, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc. or you can use an email design testing service and have them test your message for you.

These simple tactics will help to keep your email marketing efforts organized and consistent in 2008.