Last month in the first of our three part series, we mentioned that there we’re always getting asked about how to judge the performance of an email marketing campaign. We’ve come to refer to these questions as The Email Big Three. The first question we addressed was “What kind of a response rate should we expect from our list?”
The second question of The Email Big Three is, “How often do you think we should send emails to our audience?” The answer is similar to our answer for the first question in that it is sufficiently vague and is best answered by the answer everyone hates, “It depends.” The answer depends on what you are trying to accomplish, and even more what your audience is expecting to receive.
Email best practices related to content demand that you send what is relevant to the recipient. When they opted in, they probably told you how frequently they would like to be sent messages. Frequency of email communication is a hot-button issue at the moment. If you don’t send often enough, your audience may forget about you, and if you send too frequently you run the risk of over-mailing, and having subscribers opt –out.
So how do you determine the optimal frequency? If possible, you can set up varying frequency preferences within your email platform. Another way is to test for optimal frequency to your list as a whole. Testing various sending patterns and analyzing their impact on open/click through rates and opt-outs, will provide you with the most insightful information on your recipients.
Regardless of what you think you know about your audience, testing will tell you straight from them how often they want to receive your email messages. The key is to test it, quantify it and then re-test it periodically to ensure the results are still valid.
If you ask your subscribers what they want, chances are they will tell you. If you don’t stay inline with what they have stated as their preference be prepared for their backlash in the form of unsubscribing, and that piece of string will probably be long enough to trip you.
Stay tuned for the final question of The Email Big Three next month!
So how is Gmail’s new Priority Inbox going to affect you? Well, the concept is not new, we’ve been hearing about engagement and relevancy for a while now. The new Hotmail, general smart filter implementations and now the new Priority Inbox at Gmail all reinforce the need for relevant and engaging content in your campaigns.
If the release of Priority Inbox tells us anything, it’s that the challenge to get your email messages seen by subscribers will become increasingly difficult. Over time, most email clients will give the ability to categorize mail or mark some as relevant and leave the rest to decay. That cold and lonely decay box doesn’t sound very appealing. You want the heated seats while you wait for your clicks and opens, and the way to get there is by supplying relevant content.
The new inbox consists of 3 tiers, an ‘Important’ section, followed by a ‘Starred’ section and lastly an ‘Everything Else’ section. Gmail uses your recent mailbox behaviors to decide what gets flagged important. Your email priority can be manually raised by the user, allowing emails that Gmail missed to be placed in the important folder. The priority function works on a simple ‘+ or -’ system, allowing the user to raise or lower the importance of an item. Items rated with high importance will display with a small yellow tab next to the subject line and moved to the ‘Important’ folder after refreshing.
The second tier down is your ‘Starred’ section. Only emails that you manually mark with a star will show up here. Moving an email to the ‘Starred’ section does not place it in the ‘Important’ category.
Lastly is the ‘Everything Else’ section, which will consist mostly of email messages that are not interacted with on a regular basis.
The main topic that stems from all of this is, of course, how to keep yourself out of the “Everything Else” category. Check back later this week for part two, to learn about the best practices that you can utilize to keep your messages important in the eyes of the recipient.
As email recipients quickly scan their inboxes, seeing the right offer or incentive can lead them to pause just long enough to give your message a chance at being successful. It may seem strange to think about, but that split-second pause is a tremendous victory for your campaign.
The content most likely to catch recipients’ interests is the subject line, which is obviously why marketers place so much emphasis on trying to craft the most appealing subject lines possible. However, emails I’ve recently received from Horchow illustrated what can happen when a sender falls in to a “subject line rut.”
Over a span of less than 10 days, I saw the following Horchow subject lines in my inbox:
10/19: FURNITURE & RUG SALE with FREE SHIPPING
10/20: LAST DAY: for FREE SHIPPING on FURNITURE and Rug Sale…
10/22: FREE SHIPPING TODAY ONLY + save on Marcus bed & bath
10/22: Time’s almost up for FREE SHIPPING
10/26: FREE SHIPPING on almost everything, 2 days only
10/27: LAST DAY FOR FREE SHIPPING
There are a few things about this strategy that I don’t like. For one, that’s a lot of email over 10 days. But beyond that, how much incentive is FREE SHIPPING at this point? Horchow tries to make the recipient think that free shipping is for a limited time, but it’s obvious that the offer is nearly always on the table. So, by consistently recycling this same offer in their subject lines, Horchow is doing nothing more than limiting the amount of characters they can use in their subject lines to promote actual products.
A great subject line can cause your subscribers to take that split-second pause where they consider whether or not to engage further with your message; re-hashing the same subject lines and tired offers is a good way to make that decision for them.
My approach to saving money has changed drastically as the economy has entered into its current recession, and my recent birthday provided further evidence that I’m becoming a Grade-A tightwad. As the big day approached, rather than plan a party, I consulted my email inbox in an effort to unearth the best birthday deals I could find.
Of course, no one emailed me a coupon for a shiny new bike, but I did get a few offers that got me interested. Here are a few of the brands who reached out to remind me that not only is it okay to get older, it’s okay to be a cheapskate:
Do you know your email marketing priority? Are you blasting out messages, or sending more personalized and targeted emails? Watch the latest Email Marketing Minute and see if you have the right email priorities!
Last month in the first of our three part series, we mentioned that there we’re always getting asked about how to judge the performance of an email marketing campaign. We’ve come to refer to these questions as The Email Big Three. The first question we addressed was “What kind of a response rate should we expect from our list?”
So how is Gmail’s new 
As email recipients quickly scan their inboxes, seeing the right offer or incentive can lead them to pause just long enough to give your message a chance at being successful. It may seem strange to think about, but that split-second pause is a tremendous victory for your campaign.
My approach to saving money has changed drastically as the economy has entered into its current recession, and my recent birthday provided further evidence that I’m becoming a Grade-A tightwad. As the big day approached, rather than plan a party, I consulted my email inbox in an effort to unearth the best birthday deals I could find.
