Case: An email campaign for a cosmetics company promoting its new moisturer called “Naked Concealer”. The email marketing campaign was broadcast with the product name in the subject line and at various spots in the email body. The email copy also included the words “girls,” “ladies,” and “nude look.” (“Nude look” is a term used to describe a no-makeup look that is achieved by using lots of makeup.)

Because of the generous use of the words “girls,’ “naked” and “nude” all over the email, this perfectly executed email campaign ended up in quite a few junk folders.

Tip: There are many online tools that will run a spam check on your email – including the from name, subject line and copy. These tools are helpful to get an outside perspective on how spam friendly your email might or might not be.

If you’re looking for alternatives to the keywords you currently have, you can use a web analytics site to find out what keywords people are using to get to your website, and use those words in your email.

And if you are a legitimate company whose business it is to  talk about pharmacy, drugs, singles, or sex – umm….good luck.

(Product name mentioned in this post is fictional.)

img:Dave

If your email marketing campaign performed poorly the first time, it is worth considering resending the campaign to non-openers. Significant time, money and effort (-cover your ears- approvals from legal) goes into an email, and its always advisable to squeeze out as much ROI from it as possible. Without annoying your customers, of course.

Here is when you should definitely consider a resend:

1. If you believe the time and/or day of sending the first time affected the campaign’s open rates, and that resending the email at an optimum time will help boost performance. E.g. if the email went out on a Friday night when most people are out and probably not checking their email, or early on a Monday morning when your email might’ve got buried under hundreds of other emails.

2. If you feel confident that the subject line was the culprit the first time, and plan to resend to non-openers with a different subject line.

3. If technical errors – website was down, email servers were down during the time sending – might have hampered your campaign the first time.

4. If the main objective of your email was to get people to buy, it’s always a good idea to resend an email. This is because you can accurately determine which of your customers have not made purchases. Of course, whether or not a recipient makes a purchase depends on a lot of other factors like products, site layout and navigation, etc.

Keep in mind – don’t resend with the same subject line. This will make the customer wonder why he is receiving an email twice, and he might ignore it or just get annoyed.

img: badgreeb 

What time of day deployment works best for your audience? Test it!

What day of the week gets you better engagement rates? Test it!

Should your friendly “from” field reference your company’s name or a recipient’s name for better open rates? Test it!

Easy right? Wrong! Too many marketers cannibalise their testing by trying to do too much at the same time and not being thorough, giving them misleading statistics and conclusions. Realistically it is the small, incremental alterations to your emails that have a surprising influence on success. The best place to start testing your emails is to run A/B subject line split tests.

Studies show that 35% of recipients will open an email purely because of the content of the subject line; so it is critical to understand what style of subject line your recipients prefer. After all, time spent on creative testing, CTA placement, incentives etc. are irrelevant if people aren’t opening your email. Divide your contact records into three pots and send two different subject line versions to two of them. The last pot should receive the email with the subject line which had the greatest open rate.

Start with a 10/10/80 split approach.

Send subject line A to 10% of your list and send subject line B to a different 10% of your list.

Based on what metrics are most important to you (unique open % as a standard) send whichever e-mail performed the best to the remaining 80%.

After tracking your results in this method you should be able to tell exactly what works and what doesn’t within your subject lines. This style of behavioural testing (measuring what people actually did) provides much better intelligence than surveying people about what they would do. The benefit here is that you can apply the results immediately and optimise your campaigns on a real-time basis. The cost of execution is minimal, especially relative to the potential results that can be achieved by better understanding what works best with your own target audience and is by far the best place to start in your testing process.

When doing email marketing there are 3 things that you’re trying to achieve:

• Have your email opened;
• Have your email read; and
• Have your offer (call-to-action) accepted i.e., click & take action.

However, the thing that’s the most important is to get your email opened. Without this nothing else can happen!

Once marketers overcome all the difficulties of getting emails delivered to inbox’s, they can only hope & pray that they’re opened. However, you can improve your open rates with “eye-catching” subject lines. Think about yourself when you login to your email … what do you usually do? Browse the emails and click on the ones with subject lines that attract you the most.

Let’s start with what not to do.

• No subject. It’s actually rude not to include a subject, and it makes the reader do even more work.
• Be too wordy and try to tell a long story.
• Use a “$” sign, “free” or “new” in a subject line. These and similar words and characters are among the most common things that spam filters look for. Some people even resort to trying to fool spam filters by doing things like using “Fr.ee” in their subject lines. Avoid these tricks, they just comes across as amateurish.
• “Did you see this?” or “Please read” are red flags – they suggest spam with a capital “S”.

4 Tips for Creating Effective eMail Subject Lines:

Tip #1:  Show value in the first two words, and keep the subject line short.

Some examples of top-performing subject lines are:

• Top 12 Email Newsletter Mistakes
• Simple Email Link Change Lifts Clicks
• CAN-SPAM – Must-Know Updates
• 6 Actions to Lift Clickthroughs: New Data
• HTML vs Text: Which Works Better?
• How to Conduct Email Surveys

“Top 12,” “Simple Email,” “6 Actions” and “Your Copy” are examples of informing the readers they are “getting an actionable item”.

Here are examples of poor-performing subject lines:

• Tailor Lists to Reach Exec Moms
• Call for Speakers – Email Summit & Expo ‘09
• Your Input, Please: Annual Marketing Questionnaire
• Buyer’s Guide to Top Survey Vendors
• Turn Customer Queries Into Profit
• Alert: Analysis of New CAN-SPAM Rules

The rates on those subject lines are lower due to a lack of communicated value in the first two words. Notice “Alert: Analysis of New CAN-SPAM Rules” which did poorly. But “CAN-SPAM – Must-Know Updates” did well. The latter subject line clearly represented an immediate value over the former.

In general, shorter subject lines are associated with better email performance, as determined by opens and clicks. Simple messages that can be instantly digested are the best way to take advantage of our short digital attention span.

Also email domains often limit the number of subject line characters displayed by default in the inbox (i.e., AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail). Therefore, email recipients in some cases may not see all of your subject line. Additionally, the growing reliance on mobile devices − and their smaller screens that display even fewer characters – can be an issue as well.

 Tip #2:  Find the right “trigger words”

Certain words or types of words will trigger a response as much as or more than subject-line length. Being punchy is often key to the art of writing subject lines, but including the right words from start to finish is more important.

 A trigger can be a name, the use of numbers, the number of characters in the subject line, the use of an industry phrase, or the appearance of an unusual word.

 Tip #3:  Watch the hard sell

Results suffered when the subject lines are too self-promotional. Subject line writers should seek to provide subscribers with more value, while still promoting things like surveys and events within the contents of the email (but not in the subject line).

 Tip #4:  Hot brands work across sectors

 Putting hot brand names into the subject line isn’t just for e-retailers.

 Here are three top-performing subject line examples:

• Google AdWords: 8 Tips to Lift ROI
• Get Listed on Wikipedia – 3 Ways + Monitoring Tips
• Use Facebook to Market Yourself & Your Company

NOTE: They may have done even better by putting “Wikipedia” and “Facebook” as the first word in the latter two subject lines. Getting a hot brand into that crucial two-word window can turn a good email performance into a better one.

Summary:

Because higher open and click rates depend on many factors, marketers should keep in mind the following rules of thumb and use as many as possible:

• Front load subject lines with the most important information, especially focusing on the first 2 words.
• Keep the subject line as short as possible to ensure the message can be read and understood clearly.
• Use longer subject lines only when there is a compelling reason to do so.
• Including an offer or call-to-action.
• Highlight target audience’s pain points.
• Test, test, and test (i.e., A/B testing and analysis).
• Take the time to proofread your subject line, and make it look professional.

For all lengths of subject lines, dedicate at least a couple of hours. Play around until you have a powerful line. And don’t forget to ask a friend or colleague to give you their honest feedback.

This is part one of a 3 part series dealing with some of the nuances of email marketing. The first issue I’d like to tackle is the “When”. Right up front I’ll say that there is no universal best day or time, however there are some best practices.

Historically for B2B, Tuesday through Thursday is when most emails are delivered. This is because holidays, summer hours and busy weekend schedules were believed to put a dent in open performance for emails sent Friday through Monday – scaring many marketers away from mailing on non-peak days and leading to three days of crowded inboxes.

Some try to send late at night so as to be at the top of the inbox the following morning, but this can backfire as many people simply delete non-work related emails as soon as they begin their day, so as to focus on the messages they need to sort through.

If email performance slips, send a portion of your list on a non-peak day to test the results. Arriving as one of a few unread messages on Monday might help your message stand out more than arriving with the many the following day.

Weekends aren’t ideal. Your email is likely to get buried under the mass of email that comes in Sunday and early Monday morning. If you send Monday, allow people time to clear their inboxes from the weekend.

Often the consumer is best touched right before the weekend, say Thursday evening so they can be prepared to do their shopping on the weekend. It should also be noted that when a consumer does opt-in to receive your emails, timing may not be as relevant as the rate of consistency. Setting up campaigns that are delivered weekly or bi-weekly at the same day/time will generate anticipation, where the consumer will learn to expect your email.

Because of the lack of agreement on the issue of what day to send your emails out, many instead focus on the email subject, content and database segmentation. This ultimately will ensure you hit your desired audience and that in many cases your email gets read. For example, would it matter what day of the week an email was sent if someone received a free gift on the anniversary of them signing up for your email newsletter or flyer? 

Many companies make the mistake of sending out either too many emails or emails that contain nothing relevant except “buy this” or “special that”. The key to successful email marketing is to build awareness by providing relevant information that is compelling and useful. Don’t just try and sell – engage, educate, and enlighten your target audience and 9 times out of 10 they will buy – maybe not today but eventually. Think about the emails you’ve opted-in to receive that you expected to learn something from, and found that all they tried to do was sell you something.

In summary, the best day to send an email is the day that your email performs the best. And you’ll only know that by testing. And then, testing again. Over time it will become clear what the performance difference are for your emails between the days of the week. 

The things that will influence what day performs the best for you are:

1. Audience/demographics
2. Type of product or service
3. eMail subject
4. Messaging/call to action, and
5. Where the recipient accesses your email

Also the makeup of the list, both the size and number of inactive records, can influence your success greatly. 

Finally, if you can solicit feedback from your audience directly that will help – either by questioning them when they opt-in to your communications or by calling/emailing them and asking what their delivery preferences are.

I don’t know reason for this kind of service; is it the no of email customers or email users traffic affecting the performance.

My first email id happens to be a yahoo id and when I had opened up my first email id more than a decade back, I used to be thrilled with Yahoo messenger and other services of Yahoo as compared to Rediff / Indiatimes mail and chat services. I used to love those cute li’ll smileys so much and everything about Yahoo used to be so cool…I would say, I was quite a hard-core Yahoo loyal user but slowly their product started getting deteriorating. Then came gmail and for most of the practical purposes, gmail proved to be a better option than Yahoo. Many people like me very soon migrated to Gmail for most of their regular email interactions.

Well, I know market share wise, Yahoo still dominates the email market but I think service of Yahoo is getting more and more hopeless day by day. They have got one of the worst spam guards…on any normal day my spam counts are anytime thrice or four times than my normal email count in my yahoo inbox! I don’t know what spam guard gmail has adopted but it works wonderfully atleast for me. Also host of other benefits like security, size of the mail box, archiving options, convenience of smooth in-mail chat facility etc are just few of out of the whole gamut of benefits which gmail offers to a consumer. So for me as a consumer despite Yahoo mail launching new features everyday, its Gmail which rocks and serves my purpose anyday better than Yahoo.