As usual, the good folks at Marketing Sherpa give us the insight we need about why we’re losing email subscribers …

You can’t do much about #5 – Situation Changed – but by making sure that you get #1 and #2 right … email relevant content with the right frequency, you’ll be taking care of unsubscribe reasons 3,4 and 6.

Where to start? In your own inbox. Ask yourself…

• Which emails do you always open and read?
• Which do you set aside for later?
• Which do you automatically delete or unsubscribe to?

Compare your email messages to the email you always open and read and this comparison should, if you’re honest and objective, give you a direction to pursue in improving your email campaigns as well as retaining and gaining new subscribers.

Oh, and it’s always a good idea to question and poll your subscribers on what they find most relevant, least and what they’d like to see that you aren’t offering.

High ROI B2C Marketing Tactics

• Paid Search,
• SEO
• Email Marketing

Aren’t all these tactics supposed to be dead?

Twitter gives me 140 characters to make my point and capture an audience. Marsha Egan’s new book, Inbox Detox, provides several examples of (my description) email diaherrhea where correspondent’s go on for paragraphs and pages when a few succinct sentences would do quite nicely.

Here’s a Twitter/Inbox Detox mashup: Try writing your email messages as though they were Tweets.

The shorter the email message, the better.
Marsha Egan, Inbox Detox

By the way, Marsha also cites a statistic that claims we only read about 50% of the email messages we receive so by practicing shorter, more succinct message composition we’ll insure that more of our message gets heard. Not a bad outcome, eh?

Online retailers might want to take a look at Atlas Solutions’ Holiday Online Shopping Report: 2006-2007 when planning your advertising and promotional spend for the upcoming holiday season.

A couple of things that stand out about online holiday shopping behavior:

• Monday’s rule as far as online shopping goes and the peak time is between noon and 4 p.m. EST (correspondig with the workweek lunch hour)
• Tuesday’s are close behind in online shopping volume in the weeks leading up to Christmas
• The second Monday (tagged Cyber Monday) before Christmas has established itself as the busiest online shopping day showing sales activity almost 90 % greater than average. This year’s Cyber Monday will fall on December 15th if the study’s data holds true.

Strategies for getting your share of the online shopping dollar?

1. Plan your online advertising or email promotional campaign to coincide with the Monday & Tuesday workweek lunch hour buying rush
2. Emphasize guaranteed shipping delivery as the clock winds down to Christmas

Click Atlas Solutions’ Holiday Online Shopping Report to access all the details…

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…