Email Marketing
So, you have a newsletter. Everyone does or so they make people think. The question becomes, how do you know what will entice people to open your newsletter and begin clicking to get to your site? In a report from EmailLabs, the answer is simple ... short subject lines with tons of links and a specific message file size.
Email Subject Lines
We all get spam every day. It doesn't matter if you work at Sun Microsystems, Microsoft or Amazon you get spam. You even get spam if you have an email address you have never given to anyone before. You may even get spam within minutes of signing up for an account to access the Internet. Yes, it does happen.
So, with all the spam we get how can you get your message through to your clients? My philosophy is simple ... use a subject that identifies who you are. The subject of this newsletter is "Apple Pie Recipes of Success" followed by the date for the convenience of subscribers like you who wish to keep all the newsletters.
I won't teach you how to use unsolicited commercial email, but let's examine a few tactics they use to successfully get you to open their emails. First the subject line is plain English (English is just an example not the rule) followed by a subject of 49 characters or less. So let's see how many characters are in my newsletter subject line … oh, that would be 28 counting spaces and not counting the date. Now, how many actually open my newsletters?
You may guess that 100% open it. Unfortunately not! A mere 72% on average actually open my newsletter. The average open rate according to EmailLabs is roughly 25.9%. Their study didn't take into effect the psychological impact of certain words.
Email Click Through Rates (CTR)
While open rates are very important, that only means the person opened the email. It does not indicate the subscriber took any actions. The subscriber could simply delete the email and during the process open the email without the intention of reading the email. But, let's examine how we can drive the subscriber to click into your site.
According to EmailLabs the required number of links in the email is 25 or more before people actually pay attention. Surprisingly, though, those 25 links do not need all be links into your site. Many of them can be links within the email for page navigation. Each link, regardless of purpose, increases our total number of links.
When you sell products you want to provide links to the products you highlight in your newsletter. The purpose of the newsletter is to drive business, not just say hello. So, if you're selling peanut butter and five types of preserves on special and mention them in your newsletter, provide your clients with the easy access a link to the product page can provide. You'll get more sales from your email marketing campaigns.
Email Message Size
We've all heard the stories that size doesn't matter. Well ... sometimes it does. Ok girls, no snickering!
EmailLabs tested various email file sizes. The files sizes were grouped into categories of <3k, 3-9k, 10-19k, 20-79k, >80k.
EmailLabs reports that an email of less than 3k in file size has an open rate of a whopping 31%. That's 16.5% more often than the next highest open rate file size group. The next highest open rate was the 20-79k file size group with a 26.6% open rate. The >80k file size group produced the lowest open rate with a mere 24.4%.
While the open rates alone are interesting, the open rate is simply that. It doesn't provide useful information about the actions taken by the subscriber. You need to know how many people click through to your site.
You may be thinking that the 20-79k file size group produced the largest click through percentage. Regrettably, this would be incorrect. The >80k group provided 4.8% click through rates while the <3k and 20-79k group tied for second with 4.1% click through rates.
Ok girls, now you can snicker. Sorry guys ... size does matter ... at least in this situation it does.
The Moral
The moral of the story is simple. Content makes a major difference. The size of the content makes a bigger difference.
Contact us today at 405-321-6372 or use our contact form to find out if Apple Pie is right for your business.
