There has been a lot of discussion in various places recently about subject line length and how it affects email marketing. There have been multiple studies done on how the subject line affects opens and clicks. (Mailchimp, Alchemy Worx, Mailer Mailer, Adestra). The discussion has even spilled over into Ken Magill’s newsletter today. I’ve had a couple people ask me my opinion on...
Most regular readers know I think open and click through rates are actually proxy measurements. That is they measure things that correlate with reading and interacting with an email and can be used to estimate how much an email is wanted by the recipients. The holy grail is, of course, having ISPs report back exact metrics on what a user did with an email. Did the user read it? Did it stay open...
Most email marketers want to see their open rates go up. This particular marketer has come up with a new way to force recipients to load their mail. I’m not sure how successful this approach is going to be. I can see how this might increase open rate, as people who are interested in registering but may not load images by default actually load images. On the other hand, how common is it to...
Vertical Response talks about email metrics that are useful on a dashboard. Metrics are an ongoing challenge for all marketers. The underlying need for metrics is to evaluate how effective a particular marketing program is. Picking metrics involves understanding what the goal is for a particular program. If your goal is brand recognition then perhaps sales and click-through figures aren’t a...
Tom Sather has a good summary of the problems with inactive email addresses and why data hygiene is critical to maintain high deliverability. These recommendations are some of the most difficult to convince people to implement. Some of my clients even show me numbers that show that a recipient that hadn’t opened or read and email in 18 months, suddenly made a multi-hundred dollar purchase...
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