In a May 2009 study, The Radicati Group determined that worldwide email traffic would total 247 billion messages per day in 2009; a figure that will almost double to 507 billion messages daily by 2013. Further, the study put the number of email users at 1.5 billion in 2010—of which three-fourths are personal accounts and the rest are corporate email addresses.

 

That’s a lot of users and a good way to reach them. However, just pressing the send button will not guarantee a message to a prospect, client or business contact will be opened, read and acted upon. In fact, the average open rate of emails generated by businesses across 16 industries was a measly 22.2 percent in 2009, according to Epsilon, a Dallas-based market research firm. 

 

There’s a science and art to mastering email. For those whose business’s sales and marketing efforts rely on electronic mail messages or bulk email blasts to convey timely information to clientele, an open rate of at least 50 percent is necessary to be effective.

 

Getting to this open rate will mean:

• Dealing with spam filters and finding ways to penetrate them,

• Spicing up subject lines and the body of messages to evoke action and emotion, and

• Choosing the best time to transmit and regulating send-frequency.

 

Halt… who goes there?

Ever spend hours composing what you believe is a dynamite email—complete with vivid imagery, psychological trigger words and a compelling call-to-action—only to get a painfully-slow response, or worse, none at all? Fact is, it matters not how earth-shattering or creative one’s email is if it never reaches the addressee’s inbox. Spam filters are the culprit. 

 

Email marketing campaigns should expect 10 to 20 percent of sent messages to end up lost in cyberspace—mostly due to overzealous spam filters. Unfortunately, there’s no sure-fire way to avoid them, but understanding how they work is a start.

 

Generally speaking, spam filters look at a long list of criteria to judge whether or not a particular email message is likely junk. For example, one might look for suspicious phrases like “Limited time only”, “Act NOW!” or “FREE!!!” They assign points each time one of those phrases is used in a message. Certain words get more points than others.

 

Though, according to Andy Horner, Chief Architect at Ace Of Sales (www.aceofsales.com), it is the subject line that causes emails to be tagged, the body of the email is fair game for spam filters as well and accounts for 10 percent of problems getting your message delivered. If the text of the email contains salesy words, an overabundance of links, CAPS and/or images, brightly-colored fonts like red  or green, or is too long (more than 500 words) or too short, a spam filter could nail it. The list of criteria is constantly growing and changing which makes it hard to say one should never include one of the examples above. Just understand the concept of the spam score threshold.

 

Some good practices for the body of the email include keeping sentences to fewer than 15 words and paragraphs short. One sentence paragraphs are okay. Bullet lists with generous white space are much more reader-friendly than large blocks of text resembling a busy wallpaper design.

 

What’s my (subject) line?

Let’s say you’ve successfully evaded an intended recipient’s spam filter. Now, you need them to open, read and respond to the email. “How would I ever know,” you ask? Email management software—such as, Ace of Sales and iContact.com—can provide feedback about what percentage of emails were opened, how many bounced (and the reason they did), and how many times it was opened.

 

Having this feedback is not akin to playing Big Brother with clients. It’s about improving open rates and your chances of getting the business. When you send an email message or e-newsletter, the first thing one sees is who it is from and the subject line, so it stands to reason that making those welcoming and appealing is important.

 

If your company has a monthly newsletter or e-zine, give it a catchy name and stick with it. Jeffrey Gitomer has published more than 475 “Sales Caffeine” weekly newsletters so far. Horner advises e-marketers to use the Four Ss when writing subject lines and emails: simple, short, specific and straight-forward. “And,” he says, “avoid being overly promotional, overly-clever, too abstract or relying on the shock-factor.”

 

MailChimp, a leading do-it-yourself marketing service, pitches in with this secret to success—“When it comes to email marketing, the best subject lines tell what’s inside, and the worst subject lines sell what’s inside.”

 

One final rule of thumb: Make the audience want to keep reading–either out of respect for you and what you mean to them, or because of the opportunity you present—and preferably both!

 

Timing is everything

Studies show that the time of day and/or day of the week an email hits an Inbox can often determine if it ever gets read or is deleted unopened. Emails received between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. and/or between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. on a business workday have a much better chance of being opened than one sent at night or during the weekend. Midweek emails have better open rates than those sent on Mondays or Fridays. 

 

Of course, these guidelines are based on averages. Use your intuition and knowledge of your particular markets to gauge when people are most likely to have the time and interest to view your email and go from there. Then test alternatives and see how they work out. If you have the option to schedule when an email blast or e-newsletter is released, take advantage of that option.

 

Some closing thoughts about the optimum frequency of marketing emails: Send too much email and people lose interest; send too little email and people lose interest. So, what’s the right amount of email to send out? It depends on the situation and customers’ needs. Don’t forget that responses to your marketing emails are affected by all the other correspondences your business sends out to clients—automated reminder or status emails, letters, invoices, catalogs and others.

 

Suffice it to say, it’s hard to achieve healthy open rates when you send more than two marketing emails a week to a recipient. Ditto at once a month or less.

 

Hungry for more on effective emailing? I can recommend the following:

• Google “Mark Brownlow” and check out his articles about benchmarking metrics for email marketing

• Go to iMediaConnection.com and read Barry Stamos’ article “Higher Email Open Rates (Top 10 Checklist)”

• Check out MailChimp.com/Resources

• Try ConstantContact.com and search for Gail Goodman’s piece titled “Open Sesame!”

 

Good luck!