My Money Blog

Emails with frosting

Posted on 09. May, 2009 by Casper in Advertising, Marketing

The battle of getting customers attention has reached the inbox a long time ago, and it doesn’t take more than four seconds before the recipient may have deleted your email. This also applies even though the receiver has signed up for your newsletter or email service, and actually is looking forward to see what you have to say this week. Even if your email gets opened it doesn’t have to be long before it gets closed again. No matter how exciting you think the message is. Therefor it might be worth taking five minutes to read this article about open rates, click rates, number of links and more.

The Silverpop study “Email Creative That Works” identifies what any email marketer should consider when working with emails. Among the conclusions are:

• Messages that has the company name or brand in the subject line, has a significant higher open rate.
• Text-links has an average of 3% higher click-rate than links in graphic.
• B2B emails in postcard-format had higher average click-rates, while high click-rates in B2C came from    newsletter-format

Let us take a closer look at some of these conclusions.

E-Mail Sender Fields and Subject Line

Silverpop compared and analyzed 612 email messages from 430 companies. 147 email where B2B and 465 where B2C. The focus was exclusively on emails that reached 100 or more recipients, and the average subscribers that received the messages was 28.820 on B2B and 906.045 on the B2C addresslists.

In average 27% of the sent email where opened (there where no real difference between the B2B and B2C opening rates). The first thing that the recipients see is of course the Sender Field and Subject line. It has always been a golden rule to put the company- or brand name in the sender field – 92% of the send emails where send like this.

Surprisingly, there was a 29% open rate for email that DID NOT use branding. That is 2% more than emails that had company or brand name in the sender filed. In emails without branding in this field, a little more than half used the name of a person instead, which resulted in a open-rate of 30%.

We all know how crucial a strong subject line is, and an earlier research, from Jupiter Research, came to the conclusion that 35% of email recipients opens an email by what the subject line contains. However, the Silverpop research showed that email campaigns would receive a significant higher open rate, if the company- or brand name was in the subject line. In B2B emails the average open rate was 32% and only 20% for emails not mentioning the company -or brand name in the subject line. In B2C campaigns the numbers where 29% and 22%.
The difference on open rates are huge. In B2B the increase of 12% can be translated to, that 60% more emails will be opened! In B2C the increment on 7% will result in a 32% higher opening rate if the company -or brand name is mentioned in the subject line. To put it in raw numbers, a B2C company sending out 50.000 emails and the open rate is 20% then 10.000 emails will be opened. If the Company name or brand is put in the subject line the rate grows to 32% which would mean that 16.000 emails would be opened.

6-10 links Works Best

The number of links in emails does count. At first it seems logical that the more links an email contains the higher click rate. But there is a limit where the click rate starts to drop. Judging from this study, most email marketers placed somewhere between one and three links in their emails, but there where also some who just couldn’t stop putting links in their message, having more than ten links in pure promotional emails. Silverpop concluded that the magic number for links in emails is between six and ten. This amount gives the highest click rates.

Not only the number of links counts. It is also important what type of links you use. In both B2B and B2C, it is most common to use text-links, which could have something to do with many recipients have problems viewing graphics properly. This could be a reason to use textlinks, to make sure the link can be view, and clicked. Even though links in graphic and pictures didn’t seem to have any effect on B2B emails, a combination of text links a graphic links resulted in a higher click rate when it came to B2C. The reason could be that most emails aren’t studied close. The emails are just skimmed through and the decision on clicking a link is made in a few seconds. Graphics can help catch the attention of the reader.

The Icing On The Cake

So how much should I put into these studies. It should be said that what is best for one company can be fatal for another. It is about testing what works for you.

When all is said, the bottom line is all about sending out a message, that is relevant for the recipient. Without relevant content – this means relevant for the recipient NOT the sender – there is no reason to waste the recipients time, no matter how great the design, layout and the entire package would be. When it is time to send out the emails, it is still a good idea to optimize the things that counts.

It is the icing on the cake, and fancy icing sells a lot of bland cake

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Tags: Advertising, Email Marketing, Marketing