On The Subject Of Subjects

If you don't give your email subject  lines serious consideration than your marketing campaign could well be a fizzer.

Recent research from Adestra suggests that subject line length and specific words and phrases have a major impact on your email marketing success or failure.

They took a a random sample of email campaigns, each of which were delivered to more than 5000 recipients, giving a total volume of 932 million emails sent over a six month period. As the average in one industry may not be to another they split the data down into six key industry groups – Publishing,
Events, Ecommerce, Charities, B2B and B2C.

Key Findings:

• For the e-commerce sector, character and word count results are paradoxical. The choice is clear – shorter subject lines drive clicks, and longer subject lines drive opens
• Subject lines with 70 characters provide give a significant boost click-throughs
• For Events the best click through rate comes from subject lines with 15 words/120 characters upwards
• Publishers should realise that a higher word count delivers more opens and click through rates
• If you are a Charity running a donation campaign then short subject lines are critical as these drive both opens and response
• Rather strangely they report that mentioning ‘kittens’ will increase your opens by 41% but if you mention 'children' the opening rate will drop by 28%
• For B2B's the more words the better with anything over 16 words delivering on both opens and clicks
• For B2C's a 20 word subject line appears to be clear winner

Parry Malm at Adestra who authored the report says: “Our new subject line research has produced some incredibly interesting stats. It’s only one aspect of your email marketing arsenal, but when approached in the correct way subject line optimisation can prove to be an effective, and quick, tactical winner to help drive response rates.”

Open publication 

Although interestingly these findings seem to be at complete variance to recent research by email provider MailChimp.  Their statistics from their own system released in September suggests that subject line length means absolutely nothing.

Mailchimp's analysis of 12 billion emails shows that as your subject line gets longer, nothing happens

Ian Creek of Econsultancy suggests that one email is never enough. He recommends this campaign schedule:

• Send the first email explaining the offer in full HTML. 
• Send a second follow-up email in a plain Outlook style from a named sales contact. 
• Send a final reminder of the offer (day before the offer ends), again this can be from the sales contact. Simple-not over-designed. 
• If you’re really cheeky you can even send a final email the day after the offer ends with a ‘special extension’.

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Open Sesame

This magical phrase from the story Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves may well  resonate for budding email marketers.

The place of email in the online marketing mix remains a contested topic but it most definitely has it place.  The seemingly depressing statistic is the opening rate for such communications and this can be off-putting until one realises that you measly 25% is consistent with the industry standard you represent.

Take this recently released 2012 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, for example.

The chart shows nonprofit emails have an average unique opening rates of just 21.2%.  It so happens that I have an interest in this particular figure as since 1998 I have been publishing a museum news site and send out weekly emails to subscribers.  While my opening rate is usually above 23% the aim is to get results that are in the upper quartile.  Being average is not good enough.

More important still is the Click Through Rate.  The simple act of opening an email is no guarantee of capturing a reader's interest. The better news is that while email opening rates are falling the CTR is increasing.

It is therefore essential to be using a good email marketing programme that has a robust set of statistical reports built in.  There are several in this category but one of the simplest to use (and the most friendly) is MailChimp.

One of the latest trends that is yielding very good results are email programmes that combine the functionality of social media platforms.  CheetahMail for example, has added Pinterest functionality to some of their email campaigns so that consumers can link products listed in a promotional email directly to their Pinterest pin boards. The result - 11% higher opening rates.

In the case of a furniture design enterprise the results of using this approach also showed:

• A 2.8% increase in click-to-open rates
• A 15%+ increase in Pinterest followers within the first week of deployment
• A 33% increase in pin board activity

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Mak'in Bacon

Can one make a case for Bacon?

Both SPAM and Bacon are  'meaty subjects' and this is no coincidence. As this infographic demonstrates it would take a staggering 52,000 years to unsubscribe from all of the Bacon sent to the world's in-boxes in one day.

It is projected that Bacon will account for 80% of your incoming email by year's end and no, I am not telling 'porkies'!

So Bacon may well be legitimate email but too much of it will give you in-box thrombosis.

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Is There Still A Place For Email In 2011?

As this presentation shows, email is predicted to grow from 2.9 billion accounts to 3.8 billion by 2014.

So although social networks are clearly the fastest growing communication technology, email remains a potent weapon in the digital marketing arsenal.

Business receive twice as much email as they send in a day and spam remains a constant problem. 

The rule of thumb is to try and send out 70% of  useful or fun information and 30% which could be termed hard-sell.

All email 'blasts' should integrate social media tools such as Facebook 'Like' buttons, tweet, or Stumbleupon options to push content beyond the original recipient.

Email should have click through options to build engagement and do send a welcome message or series of messages to engage new email subscribers.  It is surprising how few businesses (1%) do this at present.

A prime motivation for people to give their email address to a company is to receive discounts and promotions. More than half expect to  get a "freebie" in exchange for their address.

Old habits die hard and 58% of consumers still start their day by reading their email.  So time your email releases to hit them fresh each morning, before the drudgery of the day dilutes the effectiveness of the message.

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• Email's Demise Has Been Greatly Exaggerated ... Again (blogs.constantcontact.com)
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• Email, Social Media To See More Marketing Dollars In 2011 (webguild.org)

Mixed Reviews For Facebook's "Non-Email"

In an earlier post we revealed that Facebook has plans to launch a competitive email platform.

There have been very mixed reviews of Facebook's new "email" system since its announcement by CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

"Emailing by Facebook? Good luck" says the Guardian who describe it as fiendishly tricky.

Forbes describes it as a "big deal for business" and  social media in general as "the next big thing to improve productivity".

Gizmodo has the most practical analysis detailed the system as having every email, text, and chat in one place.

Facebook's stated aim is to automatically deliver messages where it thinks a user is most likely to see them, create a unified history of the messages, and filter the threads by relationship with the sender to create a Social Inbox.

But if the complexity of Facebook's new non-email system floors you, why not do the next best thing and follow comedian Jimmy Kimmel's advice in the video below; celebrate  "National Unfriend Day".




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Death Of A Postman

In our neighbourhood one can still see the posties cycling around making snail mail deliveries; sadly they are a dying breed.

A couple of decades ago it was possible to set the time by the regular nature of their beat but no more.

In Singapore weekend deliveries have now completely ceased as the volumes of traditional mail have dropped dramatically.

Recently release figures from the States show that at th end of June, year-to-date total mail volume was down 4.9% from 2009 to nearly 129 billion pieces.  This represents a drop of 700 million pieces in the last quarter which in the long term is simply not sustainable.  The US Postal service lost $2.5 billion in June and the revenue trends show the situation worsening.

While it may be comforting to blame this on the recession, the real reason is that one form of communication has replaced another.

I recall stock market advice given more than a decade ago to invest in courier firms.  At first glance this may seem to be going against the global trend of less snail mail volume.  The rationale is the the growth of e-commerce would see an increased need for home deliveries and so it has proved to be.

Though email has supplanted the written letter there are still quite distinct usage patterns  vary widely as this analysis from Rackspace shows.

The prevailing advice is not to send out marketing email at these peak times as the "delete" button is likely to be fully operational.  Better to time the delivery for the start of the working when the volume is less and recipient is more receptive. 

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Does Snail Mail Have A Place?

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Is there still  a place for Snail Mail?

The folks at CNN would have you believe that the tactile and personal nature of a handwritten letter will always have more of an emotional connection than its digital alternative.

They may be on to something, but the reality is that the volume of posted mail has declined dramatically and continues to do so. 

In Singapore the postal service has just stopped delivering in the weekends citing plummeting volumes of mail and this pattern is a global one.

In the States there are 10 billion less letters sent than there were 20 years ago -  that's a lot of paper and stamp revenue.

Physically writng a letter does provide more time for thought and it is true that email can be somewhat impersonal; the emotion in a handwritten letter is often easier to decipher.

There is also the vicarious thrill of opening the condo mail box to see if the postman has "left something".  More often than not the contents of the box reveal printed advertising circulars and even the power bills are now easier accessed and actioned online.

Then of course there is the mail that belongs to someone who occupied you apartment a millennium ago and has not notified the sender of their change of address.

At least with email you know that someone received it and opened it.  In a recent survey I conducted in East Asia the results confirmed that most respondents chose email as their first choice for receiving our communications.

There remains a nostalgia for the personally written word and a physical letter is a memento that has been touched by the hand that sent it. An email seems somewhat transitory by comparison.

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