Pop Quiz! What’s the #1 way people share information found on the internet?
Social Media sites like Facebook?
Email is still the top way people share information they find online; it’s particularly the case if you’re trying to reach a business crowd. And, for most businesses, it still drives significantly more clicks, calls and visits than social.
But as spam filters become more rigorous marketers need to make sure they’re following email marketing best practices to avoid the spam bucket. Worst yet, 21% of email recipients will report email as spam even if it isn’t.
So in the spirit of giving here’s a 12 point checklist to make sure your email marketing messages end up on the nice list.
1. Do You Have A Simple & Safe Sign-up Process?
Did you reassure people? 50% of people unsubscribe because they think their address is being shared or sold (source: Epsilon, 2009). So be transparent and keep it simple; no more than 4 fields in your sign-up form. Any more than five fields and completion accuracy drops to less than 40%.
2. Are You Sending It The Right Time of Day/Week?
The right time & day can vary widely depending on the business so syncing to their calendars – not yours – is vital as is testing & learning. Most studies show that you should start by avoiding Friday & Saturday. Monday and Tuesday at 10:30 or 1:30 are much better and even Sunday evening is starting to show potential.
3. Are You Optimized for Multiple eMail Providers & Mobile?
Last year 9% of people checked their email on the go. This year it was 30%. Open up test accounts on all the major service providers and view it on a variety of handsets to ensure your email marketing is effective.
4. Do You Have A Good Clear ‘From’ Sender Name & Address?
Naughty List:
Nice List:
(This example is from America’s Test Kitchen which regularly gets a 45-50% open rate.)
5. Is Your Subject Line Irresistible?
It’s 30% of the reason people open email so keep it compelling. Pre-test it even if that means doing a simple ‘hallway test’. And keep it short: subject lines of 35 characters or less have been found to have higher open & click-through rates. Here’s some great inspiration from Chad White at Responsys.
6. Is the Content Concise, Relevant and Compelling?
Irrelevant content is the #1 reason people unsubscribe (so say 67%) so know what it is that excites people about you. Being educational vs. promotional is shrewd marketing as well as good educational emails are kept for 2 years on average! And we’re all busy so keep it under 3 minutes to read
7. Is It Shareable?
While email still is the number one way of sharing, Facebook and the others are now close behind so putting share-to-social buttons at the front and end of every piece of content is an easy way to amplify your content.
8. Does It Avoid Being Treated as Spam?
Follow simple best practices such as including ‘Add me to your address book’ terminology at least and functionality at best.
9. Is It Measureable?
The email marketing business needs to involve from the ‘blast’ mindset. One way is to ensure that is adopting an iterative learning philosophy and make each individual piece of content measureable so you can improve your performance by finding out what works and what doesn’t.
10. Are You Too Frequent Or Infrequent?
Tricky call to get the balance right but keep in mind that too much frequency is the #2 reason people unsubscribe with 64% claiming that as the impetus.
11. Is It Integrated Into Your Other Media?
I shared some recent stats on the increasing necessity of Integrated Marketing Communications that suggest if you’re not achieving this you’re siloing yourself and hurting your company. It not only saves the organization time & money to share content across platforms but a recent case Marketing Sherpa case study showed a 12X response rate when print and email and email were used together. Here’s a brilliant Apple example of integrating email marketing within a receipt. I’m sure the open rate is huge and the click-through rate makes it worthwhile.
12. Is Your Database Segmented To Allow Personalization?
I put this last as too many marketers chase this holy grail while ignoring the important basics above. However, one example of the power of personalization in email marketing best practice is that ‘winback’ emails to lapsed buyers can generate response rates north of 60%.
Spam filters know when you’ve been bad or good so be good for business’ sake.
Ho-Ho-Hope this helps.
Bob Nunn is an award-winning email marketer based in Toronto and founder of Brand Mechanics; an internet marketing consultancy.
Companies seem to ignore the single largest online branding/advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?
You have a website.
You send emails.
Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?
No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.
WrapMail offers a solution that is server-based (i.e. compatible with all email clients), has a complete back-office with a WrapMaker, click tracking etc and it is FREE!
WrapMails arrive without the RED X so all images display without clicking!
See http://www.wrapmail.com for more information.
It’s a good enough point I’ll approve your shameless promotional plug : )
For me, I would prefer this as nice because I think the checklist will be helpful when it comes to email marketing and it will really provide some profits to every users. Good thing you were able to share this very interesting post because it really makes a sense.
All 12 of these points are essential, but number 9 sticks out the most. Failing to measure performance has to be one of the biggest errors in marketing, and it’s as important in emails as it is in landing pages, etc.
Yes it’s amazing isn’t it? Maybe somehow we don’t want to know the results or we don’t like them when they go against our instincts?