Effective Emailing
I recently attended a very informative webinar that discussed how to make your email marketing more effective. The webinar shared some very interesting statistics from millions of lines of data from MailChimp, a very popular emailing service. Here is some of the information shared:
Email is homework. Most people check their email because they have to. They go through emails as though it is homework. Monday morning many people go through emails from the weekend and delete the unimportant ones. If your email is in the mix of Monday morning emails, it is more likely to be deleted, unread, and have more people unsubscribed to your email list.
Optimize your emails for mobile devices. More people are checking their emails using their phones (smart phones). If you send long emails, your email messages are likely to be left unread. Shorten your emails and be as concise as possible.
The email subject line is very important. People rely on the email subject line as they filter through to the important emails they want to read. You must make sure your subject encourages your subscribers to open it. Also subscribers use the subject line to archive their emails. If you have an informative and logical subject line, the subscriber is more likely to find your email when they need to refer back to it. Using a time frame (i.e., “Webnoxious eNews 1/1/11: Blogging”) is helpful to your subscribers. This helps them archive and keep track of your emails better.
More emails more often is better than 1 long email message. Many organizations send a monthly eNewsletter and include multiple subjects in the email. However, the current data supports sending out emails to your subscribers more often with less content. Again, people are viewing email on their mobile devices and going through email much more quickly.
More links the better. The statistics on open rates, unsubscribe rates and click through rates, are better if you have multiple links in your email. For example, if you put a link to your website, multiple times in your email, your open and click through rates go up, and the unsubscribes go down.
Email in the early morning and on the weekend. Statistics are best for sending your emails in the early morning (6am or earlier) and on the weekend. The theory is your emails are not getting mixed in with the weekly email “homework”. The statistics are the worst for emails sent on Mondays and Fridays.
Use your name as the sender. People are more likely to open an email from someone rather than a general email sender name, like info@webnoxious.com or email@webnoxious.com . Also, hopefully your subscribers recognize your email and will open it.
Survey your subscribers. I would encourage you to survey your subscribers and see if they follow these statistics.
