Shiny email blasts.

I was on Marketing Sherpa today doing some research on email marketing. My recent work with a client’s promo blast has peaked my interest into the ins and outs of blasting in-box’s with fun, exciting emails filled with coupons and SUPER SALE information.

What I found really interested me and sort of worried me at the same time. I found research pointing to a gradual decline in folks opening their emails. Are companies abusing their email blasting power to only turn away their consumers vs returning them back to them? As I think about my email blast history, I have to agree.

I have to admit that I sign up for any type of newsletter/email blast list that I may even slightly be interested in. I use my Hotmail account so that I can check it when I want. This makes me feel that I’m being solicited and informed with as little annoyance as possible. But, when I really look back at my activity with those email delivered to my inbox, do they really do me any good? Not really. I’ll open the legitimate senders and glance over them for any coupons or sale information. Other than that, I don’t care much about what they have to tell me. I don’t really want the quote of the day from Simple Magazine, even if I signed up for it.

In my opinion, New York & Co has completely abused their emailing privileges this season. I get an email from them EVERY DAY. No joke. Is it really necessary to send one to me EVERY DAY? It’s about to drive me to unsubscribe. The only thing that keeps me from doing that is that I’m about 93.3% sure I’d re-subscribe in a week or so because I’m terrified to shop there without a coupon. Why should I when I know they send them EVERY DAY? I’d be an idiot to purchase anything there without that piece of paper that gives me $30 off my $75 purchase (or more). 

So other than the “NY & Co” scare tactics, what is the trick then? How do companies get me to open their emails? What is the driving force that keeps me interested without making me angry enough to unsubscribe and stop reading? Let’s fight to keep email alive. According to Marketing Sherpa and Mailer Mailer, doing these things should help keep consumers opening and clicking your blast:

1. Your subject line should be less than 35 characters and extremely relevant. There’s about a 5% increase in open rates for blasts with shorter subject lines vs longer subject lines. There was a 1% increase in click rates when using shorter subject lines as well. When we’re dealing with 3.5% and 2.7% on the click thru scale, this is about a 1/3 increase. So, keep it short and make it relevant to what you’re selling. No filler or fluff.

2. Ensure that your company name is in the ‘From’ field and even the subject line. Having your company name in these fields will decrease the probability that you’ll be pushed into the junk folder. In a world of SPAM, recognition of your name/brand is everything.

3. Ensure that the images in your emails have proper, detailed ALT tags. Now that users have email clients that allow them to manually download the images, you’ll need to entice them to right-click and download to read your message.

4. Send your blasts earlier in the week. Trends for 2007 are similar to 2006, with users peaking their email interest on Monday’s. But, now they get tired after Tuesday when last year they held out until Wednesday. Interestingly enough, they come back to life Saturday’s, which didn’t happen last year.

5. Regularly clean out your subscriber lists to reduce the number of bounces. I believe that this is because if you keep sending stuff to bunk email addresses then you’ll get flagged and your chances of being moved to junk are higher. I need to look into this a bit more.

6. Try personalizing your emails. Don’t over personalize, but studies show that click thru rates increased a little more than 2% when the subject line was personalized over emails not personalized at all. And just about 2% over emails personalized in the email message only. Open rate stats for using personalization weren’t earth shattering over non-personalized for some reason. But, I think it’s safe to say that those that DID open the email felt warm and fuzzy enough to check things out further.

Typical open rates for general consumer businesses, according to Mailer Mailer, is 15.55%. Think about it. If you send out 2,500 emails (assuming there aren’t any bounces–in a perfect world), that means that only 389 people are actually opening the email. Really? What are the other 2,111 doing with it? Deleting it and not reading it at all. There is the possibility that they’re reading it on their portable device, as those become harder to track, but I’m not sure that accounts for even one thrird of them. It just makes me want to do further research into what makes them tick… or click, if you will.

I wonder how many people would open if you gave away some for free. Really, for free. I wish I could test that.