I’ve now seen 2 email marketing authorities in the last 2 days cite 2 case studies saying that the best time to send your email marketing missives is on Tuesday. Marketing Sherpa & Mail Dog Papers (published by Mail Dog Manager) both described case studies where a Tuesday morning mailing provided the highest open rates. Mail Dog’s report also found that “Subject lines with a strong call to action out performed a subject line with shorter characters.” Hmmm, what an interesting concept, give your subscribers a compelling reason to open your message. Sounds good to me…

Marketing Sherpa gives us an early peek (available free until 10/23/07) at the critical factors that will boost your email open and click-through rates according to a report to be released later this week by MailerMailer.com:

What’s the most critical component of an email marketing campaign after the list? Subject lines. That’s the findings from MailerMailer’s new Email Marketing Metrics Report, which will be released next week.

“We are seeing the trend of open rates going down continue across industries,” says Raj Khera, CEO, MailerMailer. To contend with this, subject lines are gaining importance. “Shorter, personalized subject lines that contain your brand name consistently outperform everything else.”

You’ll be able to download the entire report next week (10/22/07) from http://www.mailermailer.com/metrics/.

My Own Experience
I recently signed up for an email broadcast service that offers a weekly state-of-email-marketing report from their CEO. The problem? I kept deleting his missives because he was broadcasting them using his name rather than his company’s. I don’t use a preview pane so I’m looking at the From Line and thinking, “Hey, I don’t know this guy, must be spam!” DELETE. I still have to catch myself from deleting his messages. The solution is simple. Unless you are the brand (think Seth Godin) use your brand to mark your messages.

E-Mail Broadcast Lesson: Make sure you’re sending out your important e-mail messages using an address and a subject line that your subscribers expect.

Marketing Profs published an article by Jordan Ayen of SubscriberMail that lists the one hundred sure fire words and phrases guaranteed to get your emails blocked if you use them in your subject line (and often in the body of your posts as well). The seven they reference are George Carlin’s infamous list – I guess they still have legs in email if, increasingly, nowhere else. Funny, huh, that email is so prudish.

Interesting that while Cialis and Levitra made the list, Viagra was not to be found. Hmmm. Spam blockers as market research tool … you know that your product is hitting the skids when it can’t even make the list of top spam terms!

My favorite on the list was, you’ll never guess, online marketing, followed by search engine listings… No wonder I can’t get any of my clients to return my emails!

Common sense advice for email marketers:
Read the list. Post it at your desk or your online copywriter’s desk. And, at the end of the day, never use terms in your subject lines that you would block if you saw them in your email inbox!

Does your email have great graphics, great content and great offers but nobody’s opening it? Maybe it’s because you’re making a lousy first impression.

Here’s some statistics (if I could have done the math, I’d have been a statistician):

49% of all respondents to a MarketingSherpa survey report using preview panes. The little window at the bottom or side of your email software that gives you a sliver of a view of an email’s content.

85% of Business to Business email users use preview (also known as reading) panes.

Why does this matter and how does it effect your email campaigns?

Here are a few graphics to illustrate (I would have been an artist except I can’t draw):

The Bad Preview Pane Example…

As you can see, the preview pane (2) shows no content because the email was constructed with all images and no text and, as with many email clients, images are turned off by default (1). At a minimum they should have used the alt image tag to describe the image content.

The only thing that potentially saves this email is that its subject line, “Do You Know What Great Managers Do” (3) is fairly strong. But if I’m visual and making decisions based on initial look I may decide that clicking the Show Images button is too much trouble particularly when my inbox is full as above. Knowing that this email described a Harvard sponsored seminar from management guru Marcus Buckingham might have positively influenced my open decision but this information is not available because it’s delivered graphically.

The Good Preview Pane Example…

The Mequoda Daily, on the other hand, does almost everything right…

Images are off (2) but the content of the email is clearly described in the preview pane friendly text box (1) that leads their message. Combined with a compelling subject line (3), I have all the information I need to make a positive open decision.

The final image shows what you see with the images on. The descriptive text remains constant and you have a glimpse of what appears to be an attractive title graphic heading the main body content. But the point is this:

1. An attractive graphical layout to your email communications only works if it’s seen and
2. To be seen it has to be opened and being opened is primarily a function of
3. A strong subject line coupled with decisionable information in the 1.5 inches typically allowed for the preview pane. This is particularly important with Business to Business messages where the recipients curiosity is tempered by an often overwhelming volume of email and the desire to actually get productive work done. The preview pane – at 85% usage with this audience – appears to be a key filtering device for making open or delete decisions.

So do yourself a favor, check out how your emails look with images off in the preview pane and examine the strength of your subject lines while you’re at it.

Online marketers use email marketing more than any other tactic with close to 73% favoring this medium. It’s no surprise that email newsletters (ezines) are the second most popular tactic at 61%. (What’s your most effective online marketing tactic? Vote below…)

Other tactics listed include

• Banner Ads
• Blogs
• Online Promotions
• Social Networking Web site promotions
• SEO
• Viral campaigns
• Podcasts
• etc…

You can see all the online marketing tactics cited and their relative popularity at eMarketer.com.

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For those who answer ‘Other’ I invite you to leave a comment about what online marketing tactic you find most effective and, optionally, why. Thanks.