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.

In life, there are many things that we should do.

1. We should eat healthily and drink responsibly
2. We should recycle, reuse and reduce our consumption of waste products
3. We should be polite, have good manners and be ethical in everything we do
4. We should exercise regularly, floss daily and brush our hair one hundred times each night
5. We should stay within the speed limit, use crosswalks and avoid using mobile phones while driving

In email marketing, there are many things that we should do.

1. We should get permission and use double opt-in subscription practices
2. We should consider using horizontal menus rather than vertical ones
3. We should measure our campaigns using all available metrics and compile behavioral data
4. We should join email accreditation and authentication services to improve deliverability
5. We should format our messages with a growing mobile audience in mind

But in marketing, like in life, there is no perfection; and people are successful whether they abide by all of the things that they should be doing or not.

Sometimes, it’s best to avoid perfection in the pursuit of profit. To not get bogged down in the endless amount of shoulds and just get things done. Action yields results over time.

I’m not suggesting that you stop designing the mobile version of your email campaign or cancel your membership to the gym. I’m just saying that you can be successful even if you do. There is no standard recipe for success.

Email marketers spend so much time analyzing delivery times, link placement, HTML designs, open rates, click-through rates and subject line copy that they often overlook a key ingredient of successful email campaigns – value. That’s not to say that the analytical side of email isn’t important. But optimizing the mechanics of an email campaign doesn’t actually provide any real value to recipients, so it will only get you so far. In the end, email recipients are looking for one thing. Value.

What real value do you offer to your email subscribers? Are they getting something that they can’t get from your website? Is your offer sufficiently attractive to make them actually look forward to receiving your next email? Have they told their friends, family and colleagues about it?

Email-only sales add value to your message because they provide an offer that is only available to those receiving the email. This will serve to persuade recipients to stay on your list and, more importantly, read your messages to see what’s on offer each week or month. Of course, this will only work if the email-only offers that you provide are attractive enough to your recipients so that they look forward to receiving them. Just because an offer is only available to email recipients doesn’t mean that it is of any great value.

My deleted items folder is a virtual wasteland of promotional messages offering 30-day trials, 20 dollar vouchers and 10 percent discounts. These promotions are so rote that we become desensitized to them very quickly. With so many competing offers, it is getting harder and harder to get email recipients to take notice and even harder to persuade them to take action.

Recently, I received an email-only offer from a local hotel for two free nights accommodation. That’s value. But how do they win? Well, my wife and I will probably have dinner there both nights, some spa treatments and, most importantly, spread the word to others. Empty beds earn them nothing. Good value earned them our attention and business.

By offering real value to your existing subscribers, you have a good chance of keeping them on your list, generating more wallet share and simultaneously creating buzz agents who will promote your brand. Seth Godin calls this flipping the funnel. Getting your existing customers to market your brand, products and services for you is something that brand managers dream of. To make it a reality, you just have to offer something of value that is worth talking about.

When you are analyzing your next email campaign, step back from the statistical figures and ask yourself one simple question. What great value did we offer our recipients during this campaign?

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.

If you are using GroupMail email marketing software, you can add your recipients Email addresses into your GroupMetrics tracking link using a merge field. This will enable tracking reports to be generated that show who (specifically) clicked on the links in your message.