Is Your Email Being Delivered?

JupiterResearch found that more than half, or 54%, of email marketers do not use an email delivery auditing tool to proactively improve results. The rate increases to 65% for those marketers who use in-house systems as oppose to email service providers. The report says that many marketers rely on post-campaign methods to identify delivery problems. JupiterResearch executive interviews revealed that investing in delivery services/solutions can improve email delivery by 10 to 20 percent.

Another recent report, Delivery Auditing Tools: Justifying the Investment, made a conservative estimate that marketers using an email delivery service will reduce their costs for delivered mail by two to 10 percent, in addition to increasing revenue by delivering more mail successfully to the inbox.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Tip of the Day – Email Length

When sending out an e-mail, try to keep your communication between 20 and 60K in file size. Also remember many people do not scroll. Put your best offers “above the fold”. For long e-mails, consider inserting a hyperlinked Table of Contents or Index at the top so recipients can quickly click and jump to where they want to go. Also try to keep the width of your newsletter to 500-600 pixels. Any bigger and you may cut off relevant information.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tip of the Day

Tuesday is the most popular day to send out e-mail. Wednesday is a close second and then Thursday. Two recent reports have come out and stated that Monday is becoming the best day to send and the best time of day to send out a mailing is between 6 and 10 am. To determine what best works for you try pre-testing a small group of users, evaluate the statistics and then apply the knowledge from this to future e-mail campaigns.


If It’s Tuesday, Press the "Send" Button, emailLabs, 12/16/2003

Email Deliverability Rates Impacted by Time Campaigns Sent, ReturnPath, July 2004

New Email Stats Reveal Monday is Best Day to Send Campaigns, marketingsherpa, 07/22/2004

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Study Finds Marketers Have Under-Performing Campaigns With Out Testing

A recent InternetRetailer.com article citing Juptier’s report, Effective E-mail Marketing, states that many email marketers have under-performing campaigns because they fail to take such steps such as segmenting offers to groups of consumers and conducting A/B tests to determine the most effective promotions. The article gives a couple of interesting stats.

• 40% of marketers employ email testing strategies
• 31% use email click-through data
• 47% of email testers realize average conversion rates of more than 3%

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Using the Deadline or Scarcity Factor

Jim McCraigh wrote an article, How to Make Your Ezine Readers Take Action – NOW, talking about how you need some kind of deadline or scarcity factor to make your prospect take action. Jim points out that deadlines work better if they are specific and relatively short term. He also mentions using limited availability only when it is absolutely true. When you have an unlimited supply you can always offer a fixed number of units for a special price.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

The Importance of Segmentation

In ReturnPath’s January eNewsletter they give three tips on improving your customer relationships with segmentation.

• Bucket your audience. Analyze your best customers, worst customers, and everyone in between.
• Break up your list. Depending on product or service, our list could be divided by demographics, purchasing history, interest levels, etc.
• Speak directly to your various target audiences. Send each segment a unique content set for maximum impact and response.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tips to Keep Your Email Error-Free

Karen Gedney wrote an article, Prufread Those E-mail Messages, giving tips on how to ensure you are producing an error-free email. Her are the tips she gave:Ask the copywriter to review the initial design

• Put email through the same proofreading process as print collateral
• Send a test email to yourself and all parties involved in the approval process
• Proofread online in different formats (Mac, PC, AOL, Outlook…)
• Print out the email
• Create a proofreading checklist with all must-have information
• Make sure you can actually do the desired action
• Use a spell checker, but don’t rely on it
• Read once for meaning and once for typos
• Pay special attention to subject lines

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Segmenting Your Rural Shoppers

Paul Soltoff’s recent article, Fuel-Efficient E-mail Marketing, talks about how to segment you email file for the shoppers in your rural districts. Paul makes the conclusion that since rural customers do not have the access to a wide variety of retail stores that they are more likely to buy products via the web. Paul supplies an interesting statistic…”rural Americans account for 38% of total Internet visits, they accounted for 44% of visits to shopping sites”.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

How to Drive Shoppers Back to Abandoned Shopping Carts with Email

MarketingSherpa has a case study from iPrint.com that is free to access until January 31. The case study talks about iPrint’s email efforts to reactivate shoppers who have abandoned their website shopping cart.

eINFO – a collection of articles and case studies about email marketing

Spam Reduces Email Use

Osterman Research found that 4 out of 10 email users reduce their use of email because of spyware and spam in the last 12 months.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing