A recent article released by Internet Retailer offers some insight into how consumers respond to email.
Here are some interesting statistics on how people react to email campaigns:
- 75% of consumers have opted out because an email campaign was irrelevant to them.
- 73% of consumers have opted out because of the high volume of email that was sent to them.
- 59% of consumers spend more than twenty minutes per week on email campaigns that they opted-in to.
- 59% of consumers say that an email campaign has influenced their brand perception.
- 30% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company because of poor email etiquette.
- 55% of opt-in email is deleted by consumers without ever being opened.
- 26% of consumers’ email time is spent reading opt-in emails.
In an entertaining article, Jake at Succeed at Email Marketing starts off offering a free list of email addresses for marketing to get people’s attention. He quickly moves past that and explains why actually using a list like the one he offered (he didn’t actually have one) is a bad idea.
He suggests that people try to grow their email list naturally by applying the concept of link-baiting to their email list building efforts.
He also mentions this list of seven useful ways to grow an email list without resorting to worthless compilations of free email addresses:
- Contests
- Tip/Guide Newsletters
- eBook & Mini Report Giveaways
- Members Only Website Access
- Discounts & Deals
- Exclusive News or Information
- Limited Event Registrations
Including video inside of email is an emerging trend, but there are still technological hurdles to deal with. MediaPost’s Email Insider explains the three best ways:
1) Include the video as a static image.
“A static image simply features a still of one of the frames of the video, using strong visual cues (such as the ubiquitous sideways-triangle “play” symbol) to encourage subscribers to click through to Web-hosted video.”
Pros:
- It’s simple to add to your email and it’s cheap.
- It’s the most common method, so readers will be used to it.
Cons:
- There’s no eye-catching movement to attract reader’s attention.
- Readers have to click-through to watch the video.
read more…
According to MediaPost’s EmailInsider, if you’re going to include a video in your email campaign it’s best to keep it around 30 to 45 seconds in length. However, video inside email is a newer strategy and best practices have not really been figured out yet.
If you’re running a large email campaign and you expect a lot of click-throughs to your site, you may not want to hammer your website all at once.
It’s a nice problem to have though!
Email Garage points out that a good way to avoid overloading your website is to split your campaign into multiple segments (e.g. splitting 100,000 email addresses into four groups of 25,000) and gradually release them over time.
This will allow you the flexibility to protect your website from overloading with new visitors.
Laura at Word to the Wise highlights a new tool from Mickey Chandler of Spamtacular.com that helps to analyze bounced emails:
“Mickey published Bounce P.I. where senders can paste in an error message or bounce and it will tell you what filter generated it. If the rejection is unrecognized, it will flag the message internally and it will be researched to see if the filter can be identified.”
Bronto Blog recently conducted a poll that asked their users to vote on the best unsubscribe form of the five options provided.
The feedback from this poll inspired Kelly Lorenz of Bronto Blog to come up with these six tips for effective unsubscribe forms:
- Make the unsubscribe language clear, concise and user-friendly.
- Allow the subscriber to unsubscribe in one click and manage their user preferences in one place.
- Set explicit expectations around next steps: How long will it take to confirm my unsubscribe? & Will I be receiving any additional email from you?, etc.
- Promote benefits of signing up for other newsletters as a cross-sell opportunity.
- Provide opt-down opportunities around frequency and subscriptions.
- Periodically evaluate the landing page to optimize the user experience and increase the opportunity to keep subscribers.
The Retail Email Blog has a good example of what not to do with the landing page that you’re sending your subscribers to.
Getting readers to click through to a page on your website can be a difficult task in itself. But even if your email design leads to a huge number of subscribers clicking through to your site, it won’t matter if your landing page doesn’t provide them any value.
Just like your email, your landing page should give visitors a clear idea of what to do next. Failing to do so will always lead to poor results for your campaign.
Most of the time, it’s best to avoid using animated GIFs in your email. Although they look cool — and can sometimes help your email get noticed more by subscribers — they also have a downside.
If you rely on an animated GIF to carry your email’s core message, you may be disappointed. Any user who doesn’t automatically load images will simply see a blank email from you. Or a mostly blank email with an unsubscribe link.
This makes the email look quite a bit like spam so you’re likely to see both your unsubscribe and spam complaint rates rise.
Designing for email can be dramatically different from designing for the web. These five tips from the Sign-Up-To Blog are good to keep in mind:
1) Use Tables Instead of Divs
“Nested tables form the basis for your layouts, whether you stick with the basic header/body/footer design or go deeper and add sub tables, these will be the building blocks of your email.”
2) Use Inline CSS Instead of Putting CSS In The Head Section
“No CSS declarations in the <head> of your emails. Well you can but most webmail clients like Hotmail strip that straight out, so you should declare your CSS inline.”
3) Javascript, YouTube & Twitter Feeds Don’t Work In Email
“Back in the early days there was no fancy Javascript, no YouTube videos or Twitter feeds, it’s the same in the email world. So sit back with your favourite cuppa and don’t worry about all that fancy stuff, it’s not going to work anyway.”
read more…
