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’.

Related articles

• This Just In: Subject Line Length Means Absolutely Nothing

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

Related articles

• Some experts say email marketing is dead: true or false?
• Survey Reveals Changing Role of Email Marketing
• E-mail Open Rates Declining, Click-Through Rates Rising [Study]

Are Search Engine Ranking Pages Becoming Irrelevant?

If you felt secure in the knowledge that your web site ranked on the front page of Google or Bing search results and would therefore result in click-throughs, think again.

A recent survey from Slingshot clearly demonstrates that users are now far less inclined to click through and these rates have tumbled.

Back in 2006 a number one ranking equated to 42% of clicks and a number two ranking was worth about 12%. By May of 2010 these figures had dropped to 34.35% and 16.96% respectively and in December of last year Optify found that there was a 36.4% CTR for the number one result in Google and 12.5% for the number 2 ranking.

The most recent Slingshot survey charts this decline. A Click-through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of users who click on a given domain after entering a search query. In this study, CTR is calculated as total visits divided by total searches for a given keyword over a stable period.

Key Findings from the Slingshot report:

• By studying user behavior through click-through rates they  emphasised the importance of ranking in the top ten positions in search engines. A higher ranking results in a higher click through rate.
• For Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), the observed Click Through Rate (CTR) was 18.20% for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for a No. 2 rank.
• For Bing SERPs, the observed CTR was 9.66% for a No. 1 rank and 5.51% for a No. 2 rank.
• Relative CTRs across each position in the SERP reveal the importance of an increase in rank.  With an average CTR of 18.20% for position 1 and 1.04% for position 10, this staggering difference shows that a change in rank from 10 to 1 will generate approximately 1650% more traffic and associated sales.
• Slingshot observed that there was a significantly higher CTR curve for Google than for Bing, which suggests that Google’s organic results are more reliable, as many users abandon searches.  They went on to say thought that this was simply an interesting implication from their CTR studies, as they do not have actual bounce rates for the search engines

The direct correlation between these findings and the growth of social media is also an interesting one. As I wrote in an earlier article, for many people online in 2011 Facebook is the internet and viceversa.  They are increasingly finding the content they need through social media rather than relying on more traditional web sites and this change extends to search habits.

So while search remains a vital part of any online strategy, total reliance on search engine page rankings, as this report proves,  is no guarantee of online exposure to business prospects.

Full report

Related articles

• Top 10 SEO Myths... Dispelled (searchenginewatch.com)
• The New SEO Metrics You Need to Know About (singlegrain.com)