E-mail Marketing Tips, Part III

Boost Your Open Rate

Getting People to Open Your Newsletters

In a newsletter campaign, your “Open Rate” refers to how many people open your e-mail, and is defined in a campaign as the number of total or unique opened mails divided by the total number sent out. That number is then multiplied by 100 to get the percentage. So, if you sent out 500 e-mails and 75 were opened by unique recipients, your open rate would be 15%.

(75 opened / 500 sent)*100=15%

You may wonder what kind of a percentage you should expect for your campaign, or what benchmark you should shoot for. The average open rate for newsletter mail campaigns varies by industry, and by segment. There are a lot of factors to consider, as Mark Brownlow points out in his article “Average email open rates,” but he finally arrives upon a benchmark of 25%, with an accompanying plea to not be quoted on that. (Sorry, Mark.) Some of those influential factors include—

• quality of the recipient list

• how busy your targeted segment is

• variations in the open rate formula

• frequency of delivery

The e-mail campaign company ChimpMail recently shared open rates they tabulated from a test campaign they ran. They sent out 273 million e-mails to small businesses with up to 10 employees or owners. Their results were then segmented into over forty industries and tabulated for comparison. (See E-mail Benchmarks for Small Business.) The industry with the best open rate was Food at 36.62%, and the lowest was Entertainment at 15.42%. If you take the average of the two extremes, it is 26.02%—which is very close to Mark's 25% figure above.

Subject Line a Key Factor

In the book Sign Me Up! written by Matt Blumberg, Tami Monahan Forman, and Stephanie A. Miller, the subject line is identified as one of the key factors that determines whether or not your e-mail will be opened. Here are some suggestions they make to improve your subject line and other factors that will increase your open rate. (See pp. 37; 44-46)

Keep it Short: Long subject lines sometimes get cut off, and most people focus on the first 15 characters, so get to the point quickly.

Avoid Spam Words: Some words have been used so much by spammers that spam filters refuse to let them through. You know what they are: “free,” “act now,” “special offer,” “discount,” and so on.

Don't Use All Caps: Spam filters automatically stop e-mails with all caps in the subject line, so avoid using them. Also, a big pet peeve is the deceptive use of “RE:” or “FW:” in a subject line to make it seem like the e-mail is part of an ongoing conversation you are having or a forwarded message from a trusted source.

Accurately Reflect Content: Deliver the message or content your subject line says you're going to deliver. Misleading subject lines are illegal.

Here are some other suggestions to improve the open rate of your e-mail campaign.

Make Sure You are Recognized: Maintain a consistent look and feel, and make sure your company name is readily apparent. Don't keep switching things up; remain constant in your approach so readers will grow accustomed to your design style and branding.

Test Your Messages: In a recent blog article from the HIT Writing Department, Joe Astle wrote about how important it is to test your messages to see how they look when they get delivered. Read his suggestions at Testing Your E-Mail Marketing Campaign.

Get On A Publishing Schedule and Stay On It: Your subscribers will grow to expect your newsletters over time. For instance, if you send out coupons every Thursday for the weekend's enjoyment, your readers will make a point to look for those newsletters. Don't disappoint them!

The open rate for your e-mail campaign is a key indicator of how your image is being received on the other end, and how people perceive the value you are offering them in the subject line. By paying careful attention to consistent branding quality and subject line effectiveness, you can increase your open rate.

HIT Web Design offers an effective tool to create and manage e-mail newsletter campaigns called Stay-N-Touch. For more information, see Stay-N-Touch.

• Open Rate is influenced by good, relevant subject lines.

• A reliable, predictable schedule for your e-mail newsletters keeps people looking for you.

• An open rate of 25% isn't half bad.

• Use HIT Web Design's Stay-N-Touch marketing tool to create effective newsletter campaigns.