All Posts Tagged With: "email"

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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Everyone knows that the subject line in an email is critical in motivating the recipient to open it. Being descriptive, provocative, witty or mysterious are all ways to catch someone’s attention.

Now comes word that shorter is better.

Most email readers limit subject lines to 45 characters. But a recent study by MailerMailer shows that subject lines that are 35 characters or less have a click-through rate of 3.8 percent.

By comparison, e-mails with subject lines over 35 characters have an average CRT of only 2.1 percent.

Source: Catalog Success, June 8, page 37.

A few more tips :
Act like a headline writer: newspapers know how to catch readers’ attention with snappy headlines. Do the same.

Personalize: talk directly to your recipient.

Create a Sense of Urgency: give the recipient a reason to open the email now rather than later.

Avoid Spamese: all caps and lots of exclamation points are bad ideas. Use a content checker to identify phrases that might get caught in a spam filer.

Be Honest: you can be creative but don’t be misleading. You know the old saying “Fool me once…”

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Newsletters continue to grow in popularity as a subtle but effective marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. If it is well-designed, full of useful content and delivered on a regular basis, a newsletter can be something customers look forward to receiving.

Note the key words: well-designed, useful content and regular basis. Fall short on any of the three and your newsletter won’t be worth the time it takes to produce.
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