All Posts Tagged With: "email marketing"

While most email marketers spend considerable time crafting their messages and managing their lists, little thought is given to the timing of their email. However, a recent study by Pivotal Veracity suggests that the timing of your email is equally important.

Pivotal Veracity’s Engagement Index Q1-Q309 report found that the average elapsed time between when messages are first sent and when they are first seen has grown from 23.2 hours in January 2009 to 25.9 hours in August. “If you’re mailing time sensitive email campaigns you should consider that the average consumer would not see your email for more than 24 hours,” according to the report.

The time between when a consumer sees the message and when he or she reacts is also growing longer, the company found. This suggests that timing is becoming more important than ever as email marketers find themselves competing for customers’ attention, not only against other email messages and spam but also social media and mobile phone content.

Time of day is also important in the success of an email campaign. If it is B2B, morning is an optimal time, as most desk-bound workers start their day by going through their email inbox, according to B2B Marketing Magazine. The problem with morning is that recipients could be more focused on the priorities of the day than your message.

As the day progresses, users tend to have more intermittent interactions with email – shorter in duration than the start-of-the-day episode, the magazine said. Between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., users are likely to have five individual episodes of three-to-five minutes apiece, compared to the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. period when they are more likely to have a single episode that is substantially longer. “On the face of it, this would appear not to work in the marketer’s favor, but your message may be the welcome distraction from an otherwise busy day,” according to the magazine.

Pivotal Veracity’s Email Engagement Index is based on multiple proprietary data sources that are aggregated and analyzed monthly across authenticated mailer domains.

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Want to know the quickest, easiest way to alienate you hard-earned email distribution list?

Bombard them with irrelevant, self-serving, poorly designed emails. It’s a recipe for a quick click of the “delete” or worse yet, the “spam” button.

As the email marketing industry has become more sophisticated, so too have the expectations of your recipients. They want to be educated, informed and entertained. If you do that consistently, they won’t mind the occasional sales pitch dropped in, especially if you are offering products and services they need and want at a price that meets or exceeds their perceived value.

Here are five tips to keep in mind when planning and executing your next email campaign:

Focus on being relevant and offering value: Keep your customers’ needs in mind. Will they appreciate what you are sending? Will they understand its value? Keep the message simple and the layout clean so there are no distractions.

Make It Eye-Catching: The process of getting someone to read and react to your email starts with an intriguing Subject Line and a familiar From Line. Even if those two critical components are on target, you still have only a few seconds to catch and hold your readers’ interest. Think of it like a billboard on a superhighway. Make sure your brand is easily identifiable, the offer is clear, and the call to action strong.

Be a Tease: Use only one or two paragraphs from a longer article, then drive traffic to your website by including a “Read More” tag. Snippets are easier on the eye and don’t discourage readers by forcing them to plow through dense mountains of information.

Opt-Ins Are Like Gold: The temptation might be to build your list quickly with unscrupulous tactics on the theory that bigger is better. Resist that temptation at all costs. Better to send your emails to a smaller list of people who actually want to read them than to a bunch of faceless email addresses. Consistently poor deliverability is a no-no for most email service providers.

Take Time to Build Your List: Highlight the benefits of being subscriber, then give people an easy way to sign up to receive your emails. Offer an incentive — a special report, a discount, or some other tangible product – to encourage people to subscribe. It may take longer that buying lists or using using shady tactics to harvest email address, but the results will be far better in the long run.

Here’s the bottom line – quality will be rewarded, quantity will not. If your ISP doesn’t flag you as a spammer, your recipients will ignore you. Either way, your email campaign will fall flat and you’ll be left wondering why.

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