How often should you send? How often is too often? Is it better to send more or less? Is there a ‘just the right amount’? With email marketing one size doesn’t fit all which makes this whole question very complex and multi-faceted. One thing we can say is that experts may not all agree on everything, however they do all agree that it is not recommended to send more frequently to every address on your list.

“We’re of the opinion that treating everybody the same with frequency is not the right approach” says Forest Bronzan, CEO of email marketing strategy-management firm Email Aptitude.

He says by increasing email frequency to those who are engaged, they make more money. And in the same token, by decreasing frequency to those who aren’t engaged, they also win that way too.

OK sounds great in theory, but how do you determine which subscribers should be in the ‘increase email frequency’ basket, and which should be in the ‘decrease email frequency’ basket? Optimising email frequency requires analysing all your email campaign reporting metrics to see where people are sitting on the spectrum.

Email Aptitude looks at opens, clicks and measures who is consistently opening, reading and clicking through their emails…. these go in group A – the engaged group. And for those subscribers who do nothing with their email they go in group B - the unengaged group. The big caveat here is that this can change so you will need to keep monitoring your reports, as one week someone could be really engaged, as your emails could be really relevant for them at that time, yet over the next couple of weeks this may change and you find them dropping into the unengaged group, so you need to adjust accordingly. One thing to note is that if you see a trend of subscribers moving into the un-engaged territory, you may need to revise your content and make sure that it’s relevant to your audience. Also, check that you aren’t just over-emailing people either.  One thing you could do is send a survey out to all your subscribers and ask them to give you feedback. You need to be prepared to listen and act on that though – don’t ask them what they think unless you are prepared to make some serious changes.

Email Aptitude applied this philosophy to men’s clothing retailer Bonobos’ email strategy and was able to increase email frequency to highly engaged subscribers by two to three times.  They increased the revenue for that group of highly engaged subscribers, and they decreased the frequency to the more un-engaged subscribers and that ironically had a positive impact as they suddenly started to become more engaged  by becoming more interested in the emails as they arrived less often, as opposed to being overwhelmed and deleting emails. So over the course of a few weeks, those people became more engaged and thus the email frequency to those subscribers started to increase.

In the land of email marketing it’s critical to continually be testing to ensure you are constantly adjusting all aspects of your campaigns to your subscribers needs and wants.  One of the best ways to find out what people want apart from analysing email metrics and data is use a preference centre. Some of my favourite email campaigns have a link at the top of every email saying ‘don’t love this? click here’ and this takes me directly to their preference centre where I can tell them that I like animals, but I’m not interested in food, I do want emails about art and homewares but not sports, and that is exactly what they deliver. In a weeks time if I decide I want to get emails about food again I simply have to click that link and tell them. And I love them for it.

Basically it all boils down to sending the right message to the right person at the right time which we have said many times before – basically that sending targeted, relevant, and timely emails wins every time.

Credit for Email Aptitude Case Study: McGill Report

You’ve spent all that time planning customer segments and creating targeted content for them – so it makes sense to test, to ensure you’re hitting the mark. And the best way to do that is with an A/B test. An A/B split test basically compares two versions of one email campaign where some elements can be different so you can test which is the most effective, and find out what works and what doesn’t for your audience.

Select some key elements and segment groups and A/B testing will give you immediate and clear feedback on how well you’re matching content to subscriber segments. Some of the most crucial attributes you can test are:

- Subject lines: Test everything from your choice of words, to the tone of the language, use humour or be serious, test symbols vs. no symbols, etc.

- From name: A company name may work better than an individual’s name, or vice versa.

- Feature article:

- Offer or Promotion: Test whether having an offer in your email boosts open rates or clickthroughs, and see if your audience respond to discounts or promotions - it may not suit everyone. Keep in mind the experts recommend that you use an incentive only after the 3rd re-engagement or cart abandonment email, so don’t offer things too easily – however when used appropriately they can be effective.

- Send time: Yes there are the well known and much favoured ‘best days to send’ and ‘best times to send’ however it may not necessarily be relevant for your campaign or your audience, so test both these factors.

- Calls to action: The size, colour, placement, and design of the call to action can all have an impact on the effectiveness of your CTA. Too small and people won’t see it…. to bright and colourful and it may look like spam to your readers. The wrong words and it may not appeal to your subscribers. This is an element that can be done in so many ways it pays to test all possible variations.

- Landing pages: Landing pages are perfect for hosting additional content, which means your email can stay nice and brief. Test whether linking to landing pages that hold extra content works for your campaign.

- Email length: Some companies opt for short emails, some longer. Again it depends on your communication, the audience, etc. as to what is most appropriate.
With A/B testing you can test two different subject lines (Or test using any of the other elements mentioned above) and then send that to two test groups and then deploy the campaign with the most successful subject line (or whichever element you used that performed better and this will help maximise your open rates and clickthroughs and you also learn what works with your subscribers for future campaigns.

The A/B testing tool in SmartMail Pro is designed to be managed entirely independently by you. Read more on this here.

Marketing Sherpa recently released the 2013 Marketing Benchmark report. It’s the latest and most comprehensive collection of email marketing research stats and insights in market.  We bought it and whilst we can’t reproduce it for you due to copyright reasons, we are happy to share some of the findings.  You can also get an excerpt of it here.

As Marketing Sherpa says, “email is a venerable tactic that is often dismissed as being too rudimentary for today’s focus on real-time information. Yet, email continues to endure, and even thrive, under such scrutiny, continually proving its worth through better delivery practices, more advanced design, and strategic integration with other channels”

A few of the key insights from the report are:

60% of organisations using email reported that email marketing is producing a positive return on their investment (ROI)

83% report they are involved with tracking, reporting and analysing their email metrics – yay – no ‘set and forgets’ around here! And the metrics that organisations track the most? Clickthrough rate and open rate are the most popular by far, both sitting at around 90% – the next most measured metric is unsubscribe rate at 75%.

It appears that content is still king – the most effective tactic of all is content and in particular for B2B marketers, whitepapers and other premium content was considered the most effective of all. As we have said before, it is still not worth sending an email unless there is content worth reading, sharing or discussing. And this is shown as a key goal as 67% report that the top goal for the next 12 months is to deliver highly relevant content.

And for the biggest question of all – which is the best day to send? Well the results are in! Tuesday (At 26%) and Wednesday (At 23%) were, by far, considered the most effective days to send overall.  We find that this depends on the business you are in to some degree – read our earlier analysis here.  Further, retail email with a mobile friendly design is showing good results when sent on a Saturday or Sunday.  We see that while the open rates may be slightly lower, the click through and action rates can be very strong indeed.

Despite the rise of ‘mobile’, 58% of people are still not designing emails to render differently on mobile, let alone mobile specific versions of their emails.  However that same 58% recognises the pervasiveness of smartphones and tablets and they expect that mobile will dramatically affect or change their email marketing program in the next 12 months.   And with the continuing rise of the use of mobile as our primary device, it is not surprising to hear most say that they realise all their email designs and strategies need to be revamped for mobile compatibility.

But mobile isn’t everything – Social Media is only 1% behind mobile at 57% as the next most important aspect, and most recognise social media as a primary communications tool and is becoming one of the main ways they interact and engage with their audience.

82% believe their list is growing slowly or not all.  Data ages, people change and your list shrinks.  Without a process for active planning for acquisition and a continual focus on growing your list, your list will shrink and the quality will deteriorate. Keep in mind that both paid search and co-registration programs performed poorly in comparison to other list growth tactics such as offering exclusive content or using the good old website registration page.

And in terms of improving your email deliverability? This area is lacking somewhat. 60% of you provide an easy unsubscribe process, (But that’s still 30% of you who don’t) And only 50% of you remove bounces, and worse still only 40% report they regularly clean their lists. There is some work to be done here!

What about triggered emails? This powerful area of email marketing often brings the greatest results however it is sorely underutilised. Just 50% of respondents report they deploy welcome emails. That is 50% of people who don’t! And most other types of triggered email activity are only being used by 19% – 35% of respondents. Overall, surveyed marketers did not appear to commonly re-engage subscribers, as just 15% indicated their organisations sent win-back emails, and just 9% sent shopping cart abandonment reminders. That leaves a lot of room for improvement.

One of the biggest things that may be stopping people achieving all their email marketing goals is the fact that 54% report inadequate staffing resources, expertise or time, as noted in this comment: “Our greatest challenge is time. We have been doing email campaigning for about 18 months, so we are still learning. We have a robust database but lack time and resources to mine it like we could.”

One other area of concern that came out of this report was a lack of capability to properly segment and target recipients, as little more than half of respondents indicated they could segment their lists by email engagement behaviour (55%) or purchase history (53%), and just 38% said the same about user-declared personal preferences. Even fewer (28%) could segment based on user device habits. “This is telling, as it shows a distinct gap between marketer actions, and the wants and needs of subscribers”

So what’s the bottom line? “Email remains a marketer’s most effective tool in terms of content reach. But, even the widest-cast net won’t produce results if your readers aren’t compelled by your content, or, even worse, aren’t receiving it at all. Proper list growth and management, alongside engaging, consistently delivered content, are the keys to maximizing email effectiveness.”

20 Questions is game for you, your boss, your team members, your clients, your data team, your digital marketing adviser… ask, answer, think, act.   Print it, copy  it off into a spreadsheet or just read, bookmark and check back.  On your marks, get set, go!

What is your overall strategic goal for the use of email marketing?

e.g. we want to be the number one supplier of equipment and the strongest brand in the market.

What actions do you ultimately want?

e.g. we want people to buy our equipment and look first to us as their supplier

What activity supports these?

e.g. content rich communications to support our position, regular product releases, support for our channels

What actions will bring about your key action goal?

e.g. Click to landing page, click to website, click to enquire click to buy, tell other people, forward to the right person,

Who is your target audience(s)?

What type of people read your emails?  What are their roles?

What databases do you have permission market to, what type of emails do you send now, and how often do you use email to speak to them?

How clean would you say your databases are right now?

How do your databases grow?  Is that growth keeping up with, or surpassing, list attrition?

What percentage of your total CRM database do you have email permission for?

What processes do you have in place to manage hygiene such as when people mark your mails as spam, when they unsubscribe, and when they change jobs or their email address changes?

How many regions/variations do you need to communicate with?  What ways do you add regional or segmented personalisation to ensure those recipients feel that you are aware of where they are, who they are, and what they need from ?

How do you currently manage email marketing?

How do you currently measure the results and outcomes of email marketing?

Do you use best practice frameworks such as allocated sub-domain and white-listed IP isolated sending addresses?

What gets in the way of you doing a great job now?

What is good about what happens now?

What is bad?

Where do you see ways to improve it?

Do you have support from upper management to do the best job you can or is email relegated to the ‘tactics only’ list?

Do you think email could deliver more revenue for you now?

So – once you have the answers to these – what are you going to do about it?

The Year of The Mobile? 

Industry pundits have been predicting for some years that “this year” (whichever year they happen to be in) is The Year Of The Mobile. We’re not sure that any year is going to stand up to that sort of hype, but let’s label 2013 “The Year That Mobile Really, Really Matters”.

Why?

Let’s overwhelm that simple enquiry with a deluge of data:

In October 2012, Statistics New Zealand announced that more than half of New Zealanders are now accessing the Internet via a mobile phone. That official benediction confirms what other researchers have been reporting:

• 36% of Kiwis have shopped online via a mobile device during the past 12 months (NZ Online Shopping Survey, PwC and Frost & Sullivan, July 2012)

Nielsen New Zealand’s “The Year That Was” report on 2012 notes that smartphone ownership has grown by over 11% in 2012 (1.7 million New Zealanders now have a smartphone) and there has been 52% growth in the number of people using their smartphone features. Tablet ownership has more than doubled to reach 395,000 and electronic book readers are now owned by over 5% of New Zealanders.

And from the study “Our Mobile Planet New Zealand”, Google/Ipsos OTA Media CT, May 2012:

• 59% of smartphone owners access the internet on their smartphones at least once a day
• 80% of smartphone owners use their phones for communication
• 55% to stay informed
• 86% for entertainment
• 38% of smartphone owners search on their mobiles every day
• 66% have researched a product or service on their phone
• 53% have searched for product information
• 35% for information on restaurants, pubs or bars
• 27% for travel information

International research (reported in the book Go Mobile by Jeanne Hopkins and Jamie Turner) confirms that mobile means money:

• 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action
• Over half lead to purchase
• Mobile coupons receive 10 times higher redemption rates than print coupons

And fast:

• 70% of mobile searches lead to action within one hour (mobilemarketer.com)

As you’d expect, mobile searches are used for enquiries on the go:

• 74% of smartphone users use their phone to help with shopping
• 79% ultimately make a purchase as a result

All in all, it’s now not merely nice to have but essential that your website is mobile-friendly.

How does your website stack up ?

• Do you have a mobile version of your site that’s designed for today’s modern cellphones? Early mobile versioning software was very text-based, but today’s searchers (the post-iPhone generation) expect visual pizzazz, even on the ultrasmall screen.
• How does your site actually look on a mobile phone? Does it support or denigrate your brand?
• How quickly does the site load? 60% of mobile web users say they expect a site to load on their mobile phone in three seconds or less — and 74% won’t wait more than five seconds before moving on.
• Are there any broken or hidden images? iPhones and iPads don’t display Flash files, so if your website relies on Flash you have a problem.
• Is the site easy to read on a small device? Users hate having to zoom just to read the basic content.
• Are links easy to click on with thumbs? We live in a touchscreen world, but human thumbs haven’t shrunk.

A few more numbers to shape your thinking. Yahoo! has assembled a collection of compelling statistics:

• 75% of customers prefer a mobile-friendly site
• 76% want mobile pages to fit their screens better
• 74% want the option to navigate to a full site
• 69% say they want mobile sites to have bigger buttons
• 52% say they’re less likely to engage with a company if their mobile experience was bad
• 48% of users become annoyed with sites that have not been optimised for mobile devices
• 48% say that if a mobile site isn’t working well, it’s an indication of the business simply not caring [which, when we think about it, is a horrible thing to say]

Okay, we think you get the drift.

Once your website is a mobile wunderkind, however, what else can marketers do to take advantage of mobile opportunities?

According to xAd‘s “Mobile-Local Performance 2012 Year In Review“, advertisers now have the power to reach audiences in the following ways:

PLACE-BASED
When users are in or around specific businesses or locations

POI (POINTS OF INTEREST)
Ability to target users that are in or around areas of interest which may or may not have a stated postal address available for the entire target area such as airports, colleges and universities, marathon routes, etc.

BEHAVIOURAL
The ability to leverage anonymous geo-specific behavioral data, such as past mobile searches and visitation behaviors to target users at the exact moment when they are in need of your products or services.

EVENT TARGETING
Ability to serve targeted ads to audiences that are attending a specific event such as sports game, concert or industry conference.

In 2012, xAd found that the most popular form of mobile audience targeting in the U.S. was, unsurprisingly, Place-Based (67%) followed by behavioural targeting (20%).

What Categories Are Best For Mobile Marketing?

According to xAd, the most-searched-on-mobile categories of 2012 were:

1. Restaurants
2. Travel
3. Health & Beauty
4. Retail
5. Professional Services
6. Financial/Insurance Services
7. Auto
8. Real Estate
9. Entertainment
10. Business Services

So how effective can mobile marketing be?

From xAd:

Calvin Klein used place-based and geo-behaviour-targeted advertising to promote the availability of its products at local retail stores. The resulting campaign exceeded the client’s CTR benchmark by 26% while helping to increase local sales during the campaign period.

From The Drum:

Debenhams UK reported that it had generated an additional £1m in sales in five months through a smart phone app that allows customers to scan QR codes in advertising and store windows, and ‘snap’ product barcodes to display information such as customer reviews.

From MobileMarketer.com:

H&M saw a click-through rate of 2.3 percent when it geo-fenced (i.e. served mobile marketing messages based on the geographic boundaries of) stores locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York to generate excitement around the David Beckham Bodywear line.

Credit: Michael Carney, Marketing Monitor

A February 2013 analysis of email marketing messages distributed by Vision6 on behalf of Australia-based companies found that open rates had held pretty steady at around 22% over the preceding two years.  The study is produced twice per year for the preceding 6 month period.  In the graph here you can see the four periods compared shows some fluctuations.  Open rates hold steady, while click to open rates, bounce rates and overall click through rates all show slight declines.

The most popular day to send email was Thursday for the first three periods, and then Wednesday overtook for the last period reported on July – December 2012.

While the overall CTR was 3.83% in industry splits, the Retail and consumer products had better luck than most, registering a CTR of 4.6%.

Vision6 also found sharp growth in the use of mobile devices to access email, a reminder that marketers should take care to ensure their messages are properly formatted for smartphones and tablets. In the second half of 2012, one-third of email marketing messages were opened on mobile devices. That’s up from the first half of the year, when mobile accounted for around one-quarter of email opens.

Are birthday emails really as effective as you say they are?

Yes indeed, a really good birthday email can not only help you stand out, create a positive brand impression with your subscribers,  increase revenue and customer loyalty,  birthday emails on average get a 300% higher open rate and a 100% higher click through rate than normal email campaigns!

In the email marketing world we call this type of email ‘Event Driven Email’ because it’s triggered off a specific event or date. It’s also a marketer’s favorite type of email because the results speak for themselves.

So who is showering their subscribers with birthday love? 

ASOS for one.  Their angle? They are offering a 10% discount, which is very enticing, and the call to action button is straight forward and says ‘shop now’.  So it’s still a benefit to the recipient but their intent is clear. See their email below.

Event Driven emails can be sent for other reasons apart from birthdays. Think about other celebratory moments that could work just as well such as anniversaries.

It’s never too late to start gathering profile information about your subscribers. The key is to be smart about it and don’t be creepy….  Combine it with another offer or promotion and clearly explain what they will get either now or later and tell them straight up the what, why etc. For example I would be happy if you sent me an email that said ‘Do you like free cake? If you update your birthday information we will send you free cake on your birthday’

The other great thing is a birthday email is a great way to drive traffic to a store, shop, movie theater, restaurant…  Think about how many people head to Valentines for their birthday because they get to eat free!

Are you using your customer’s birth date to good effect? Read our previous post about how to use birth date fields in your database to send personal and relevant eDM’s to your clients…

And here is previous roundup of great birthday email marketing campaigns !  Share!  Tell your friends!  Happy birthday!

In contrast to it’s deserved place as winner of marketing channels all time great cash cows, there has always been a challenge to get email the resourcing it deserves.

Don’t they love to talk about the demise of email.   Yes, everyone is talking on social media and instant messaging each other.  Yes, inboxes are crowded, and people are filtering more.

However despite all the rumours, email remains one of the most profitable and favoured marketing channels today and will remain so for the future.

Remember anyone who wants to buy anything online, connect with any social networks, use apps, message, needs the magic key – an email address!   If you need some ammunition to justify email marketing in your company, here are the facts.

• An impressive 77% of online consumers prefer to get permission-based marketing messages via email versus any other marketing channel, according to a recent study by ExactTarget — The 2012 Channel Preference Survey.
• This same ExactTarget study also showed that email drives consumer purchases more than any other marketing channel.
• The Direct Marketing Association’s Response Rate 2012 Report showed that email has the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing channels.
• The technology marketing research firm The Radicati Group, Inc., predicts the number of email accounts will increase from about 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in 2014. This compares to a current 1.1 billion Facebook users, 1.5 billion Twitter users, 175 million LinkedIn users, and more than 10 million Pinterest users.
• Email is the top activity on smartphones and tablets, accounting for 41.6% of U.S. mobile Internet time, according to a recent Nielson survey.
• According to the Forrester Research Email Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016, the amount spent on email marketing in the United States is predicted to increase from about $1.7 million to nearly $2.5 million in 2016. The use of email marketing is growing because it works.

So, email remains the most effective way to deliver your message, it’s the #1 actvity on all smartphones and tablets, it drives the most conversions and consumer purchases more than any other marketing channel, and it’s the preferred communication stream for consumers.

Here at Jericho we really can’t stress enough how beneficial an effective email marketing program is to your business.

We also know you should be enhancing your email strategies by coordinating campaigns with other channels, such as social media, mobile, advertising, direct mail, (DM) and search engine optimization (SEO) and consistently testing everything so you know that your emails are hitting the mark.

Good on Australia’s ACMA for issuing this timely and detailed reminder that set and forget for email marketing best practice isn’t enough – you need to plan, set, check, plan, set… Here is there great clear minded advice on ensuring your email program is high quality and effective.  The ACMA blog post is here.

Many businesses use email marketing templates that automatically incorporate their contact details and an unsubscribe facility; information that is required by the Spam Act. But it’s still important to test your campaigns to make sure everything is working properly. All too often, we encounter e-marketers who don’t know that their unsubscribe or contact details have ‘dropped off’ their template.

One of the most effective ways to protect your reputation is to do regular quality assurance checks of your e-marketing campaigns and processes.

Quality versus quantity

How you conduct quality assurance will depend on a number of things:

>       the nature of your business

>       your systems and resources

>       the nature and number of e-marketing campaigns you conduct.

Ideally, every e-marketing campaign would be quality-assured, but in some cases this may not be possible. You need to weigh up the risks to your reputation if you breach the Spam Act and with the number or percentage of messages that you consider appropriate to review.

Quality assurance 101

Having overseen a number of enforceable undertakings and conducted a lot of investigations, we have a pretty good idea of what you might want to include in your quality assurance. Think about including the following steps.

1.    Audit your campaigns

Your business may not have a single department or person handling all of your e-marketing activity, making it a real challenge to keep on top of the e-marketing rules. So we strongly recommend that your quality assurance includes an audit of all campaigns conducted:

>       Record the total number of messages sent in the period.

>       Keep a copy of each campaign (if possible), including the number of messages sent, format, date, sending address, subject and content.

>       Keep records of which messages were sent to specific electronic addresses.

2.    Confirm consent

A fundamental rule of the Spam Act is that your e-marketing messages must be sent with consent. Consider:

>       how you gather consent

>       what information you give to recipients when you collect consent

>       how your system handles and records subscriptions, unsubscriptions and re-subscriptions

>       how long you’ll rely on consent for, blacklisting, the consequence of making a purchase and your account management tools.

You should also review your current records. They should clearly identify if:

>       A person has given consent—and also show that you have proof.

>       A person has requested to be unsubscribed in the period—and if any further messages were sent more than five business days after that date.

>       There are any patterns to be aware of—like someone consistently re-subscribing and then quickly unsubscribing.

>       A person has bought an item from you—and the date of the purchase.

>       A person has contacted your business.

3.    Show your identity

Each e-marketing message must clearly identify who authorised the message and provide a way to contact the authoriser—either through information in the message or a direct web link.

4.    Test your unsubscribe functionality

Defective unsubscribe facilities are one of the most common reasons people complain to the ACMA. It’s always a good idea to check (and check again!) that your unsubscribe facility is working properly:

>       Confirm that each message includes a functional unsubscribe facility.

>       Establish a process and timetable for testing the unsubscribe mechanism (and listen to complaints to identify any corner cases that your testing might not cover).

>       Keep records of when you tested the unsubscribe facility and the outcome of the test.

5.    Review complaints

Complaints can be a great source of information about potential problems and a chance to engage in direct conversation with your customers. Consider how you investigated each complaint and what you have done to fix these issues.

6.    Offer training

Often problems with e-marketing arise because staff are not aware of the Spam Act. Do your policies, procedures and training need updating?

>       Keep a note of any relevant training you or your staff have undertaken in the period.

>       Consider the need for further training in problem areas identified through your quality assurance.

7.    Form conclusions

Writing up the outcomes of your quality assurance gives you an ongoing record of when you got things right—or wrong. It demonstrates to your management—and to regulators like the ACMA—that you take compliance seriously. Follow these steps to make sure that your business’s e-marketing is above board:

>       Record details of any issues identified in the audit and any necessary changes.

>       Draft an overall outcome/conclusion of your quality assurance.

Any questions?  We can help!  Email us or call Jericho today.

Following on from our post about how your From Name and Subject Line act as the gatekeepers to your email campaigns, (Click here to read) we are now going to tell you the formula for creating the ultimate subject line so you can increase your chances of your campaign standing out, getting opened, and getting read.

As we’ve said before, prompting the open by getting past the first ‘gatekeepers’ is the primary goal, because you can’t count clickthroughs – much less sell something -  if no-one opens your email.

So with so many people receiving many emails, deleting and filtering, how do you get your subscribers attention? A great subject line gets your email opened.

SUBJECT LINE MYTHS

Spam filters can be triggered by a variety of reasons, rarely will specific words like ‘sale’ or ‘free’ get you a one way ticket into the spam folder – filters are changing and it takes a combination of things to really mark your email as spam. So don’t be afraid to put in the odd exclamation mark, you can use all caps, even the word free or sale is fine.

The key is to use these words sparingly. Spam filters assign points to ‘spam’ words, and if the points exceed a certain threshold then the email is considered spam.  However if you just use one or two of these words and symbols throughout your email or even just in the subject line, they won’t automatically mark your email as spam – you may have heard us say before that while content filtering is important, there are now other factors like your sender reputation and engagement metrics that are much more important.

WHAT WORKS

You may have heard a lot of talk about geo-location lately – well collecting and using geo-location data to create more relevant and personal emails and subject lines can increase open rates.  For example, the same email content can come to life when the subject line suggests it’s especially relevant for you.  American retailer Urban Outfitters does this well with subject lines often calling out to me ‘Hey New Zealand – here’s our best sale yet’  or ‘We ship for free to Kiwis every day!’.  Extrapolate that out to your regional customers and – well you see our point.

Subject lines framed as questions have often performed better in tests. Of course you won’t be asking just any old random question – consider your audience, their interests, what your campaign is about, and frame a question around that which will pique their interest and even better if they can respond in some way you can increase engagement.  ‘How many ways can you wear this scarf?’  ‘What’s the best way to show the world you care?’.

Email marketing company MailerMailer found that longer subject lines had lower open rates and click through rates than those emails with shorter subject lines.  They found emails with 28-39 characters in the subject line had the highest open and click through rates. Considering that is about how many characters of a subject line smartphones display, that is no surprise. So the golden rule of thumb is keep it shorter than 50 characters, or at least make your point early in the sentence!

STRATEGIES WITH A CAVEAT

✓ There has been a craze of sorts lately with people using ✶symbols✶ in clever ways in an effort to stand out in the inbox. If used appropriately and cleverly, ✈ symbols may get you more opens, but too many symbols might start driving people crazy so again use sparingly ☂ and only if relevant ☀.  You can read our article about using symbols here.

We’ve heard recently that contrary to previous advice, using the recipient’s name in the subject line does not significantly improve open rates. If it clearly looks like a mail merge then it’s not very personalised at all and will probably have no effect, however if you use their name cleverly and in a relevant way, it may increase opens. In their July 2012 study, MailerMailer saw significantly lower click through and open rates for personalised subject lines compared to non personalised ones.   We have many clients who use this technique every time and it works very well – the answer for you is TEST it!

GET THE OPENS

Keep it useful – why would your recipient want to open your email?  Tell them.

Keep it short – remember the golden rule of 50 characters.

Keep it specific – make sure it is relevant and valuable to the recipient.

Keep it timely – with everything being instant now there really is no place for old news, old jokes, or old memes – keep it fresh.

Always have a call to action – people will respond when you tell them to do something. So ask yourself why are you emailing them? What do you want them to do?  Make your CTA’s easy and ensure they make sense.

Test test test – use the A/B split test send function and test out different subject lines and learn what works for your audience.

Set expectations – clearly state what’s inside the email, and why the recipient should read it.

This advice along with the previous post on From Names and Subject lines will give you some things to work on, and we’re here if you want to talk about what works for you, what doesn’t work and how you might grow your response rates, and deliver great emails to happy customers!