How to Make Your Email Campaign Work Harder

We all get to much email. But email is still one of the most effective and least expensive channels for advertising, so marketers are not about to stop hitting the Send button. Email marketing’s average ROI is reported to be $45.06 per dollar spent, more than double Internet marketing’s ROI of $19.94 per dollar spent, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

But not all email campaigns are successful. Some fail miserably. Why? The wrong message to the wrong audience at the wrong time. But that begs the question of what is the right message, what is the right audience and what is the right time?

The people at MailerMailer have new research that can help you get the mechanics of emailing right, so you can focus on what's inside the email.

Who Opens Email? Folks in the religious, telecommunications and travel industries are the most likely to open an email, but even they only open about two in ten. Large businesses and consumers open about one, maybe two, out of 10 emails. And dentists and doctors? Forget it, they open only one, 0k--maybe tw0, out of every 20!

As more people read emails from their cell phones, it will be harder to track the open rate, since cell phones don't trigger the mechanism that let's email programs know the email was received or open. If your open rates drop but your click-through rates stay the same, you should suspect your audience has a lot of cell phone users. Tuck that little demographic away in your brain for future use.

And, yes, click-through rates do correlate with open rates; the more people who open the email, the higher the click-throughs. Also, the more items there are to click, the more click-through you will get. Click-through rates for the second half of 2008 were about the same as for the first half, so the economy really didn't have a significant impact last year.

When do emails get opened? About 33% of the people open an email within two hours of receiving it, another 40% open it by 24 hours, and only another 10% open it by 48 hours. Which means, the results of you email campaign are pretty much in within 2 days.

Less obvious and more interesting are the facts that:

• More emails are opened on Mondays--and more click-throughs happen on Monday--than any other day.
  
• Emails with short subject lines (35 characters or less) are more likely to be opened.
• Emails with the recipient's name in the subject line are LESS likely to be opened, but those with the recipient's name in the message.

(3) Most popular words in subject lines. While the available research does not correlate the most popular words in subject lines with the most click-throughs and conversions, we have to believe that marketers use the words that perform the best when writing their subject line. (Ok, maybe they don't experiment enough and are all sheep following the same sheppard, but let's put that aside right now.) At any rate, the most popular words are: news, party, newsletter, free, night, sale, com, update, holiday and week.

Some of those aren't surprising, like sale and free--the two most beautiful shopping words in any language. And news, update, and newsletter aren't too surprising either, but I'm stumped by night, holiday and week. Go figure. Guess that just proves we do need market research to find those nuggets of information that our gut instincts could never provide.

So, what have we learned? That a newsletter updating a group of ministers about a free party and sale the Monday night before the Christmas holiday would have the highest open rate ever recorded?

No! What we've learned is there are certain patterns of behavior within different audiences that we would do well to monitor and to use as guidelines to increase our marketing success. Also, that all behaviors are not obvious (week as a most popular subject line word??), and it's that little extra information that separates the good from the best.

Keep reading. Keep learning. And Happy Marketing.