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Email success formula: horses for courses Thursday, December 4th, 2008

What can you do to guarantee your customers will open your emails? The answer is: try lots of different things and go with what works. It seems that different solutions work for different audiences at different times. Here are some highlights from a piece Leah Messinger published this week on iMedia:

“The first two rules any professional email marketer will tell you are this: Keep it short and don’t be afraid to use your brand name. Your “subject line” and your “from” line are the only two spaces — at least for those emailers who don’t use preview panes — in which you get to distinguish yourself and your brand, so get to the point and do it quickly.”

“[E]mailers should also consider what’s going on in the world at any given moment. Currently, messages related to the financial crisis in particular and the economy in general are likely to get snagged by spam filters. Even legitimate pharmaceutical sales messages should receive careful vetting.”

“Although many marketing experts suggest sticking to a 30- or 40-character subject line (because those are the maximum characters displayed by common email providers such as Yahoo and Hotmail), they also point out that users of BlackBerrys and other mobile devices can only see 15 characters of a subject line. That’s another reason to have your brand name up front.”

“[M]arketers [should] carefully consider their audience when determining email frequency. If your marketing message happens to revolve around the weather, then you can probably justify sending out a daily email. If you’re a stockbroker… you can even get by with two emails a day — as long as they’re short. But if your content doesn’t specifically dictate a frequency, then you should probably only contact your audience on a monthly basis.”

“Believe it or not, going negative can also bring an increase in readers. ‘We’re sorry to have to say goodbye’ got a 21 percent open rate for one Lyris campaign, while ‘Take action to keep receiving Intevation Report email tips’ and ‘A better Intevation Report is just one click away’ both ranked significantly lower.

“Then again, going positive can work, too. Ryan Buchanan, CEO at eROI, found that ‘Want Fresh Email Campaigns That Increase ROI? Talk To Us Now’ brought both significantly higher opens and clicks than the more negative ‘Is Your Online Marketing Stale? We’ll Show You How to Make it Fresh.’”

The article concludes: “In all cases, the best tool for honing in on subject lines that work is testing. Lyris’s [J.D.]Peterson often uses what he calls the “wife test.” He’ll take three subject lines home and show them to his wife, another family member or a friend. The email they open first is the one he’ll often use.

For a more scientific approach, Return Path spokesperson Tami Forman recommends using a larger sample size. Choose two subject lines and send each to a portion of the emails in your database. Go with the subject line with the best response rates.”