Improve your email response rates

The US based email list management vendor, MailerMailer has recently published the results of their annual email marketing survey. This survey is based on data collected from over 300 million email messages sent from a network of over 3,200 email marketing users.

Having read the full report, here is my take on the key findings.

1. 74% of all opens occur within the first 24 hours
Whilst this is great for measuring an instant response, don’t fall into the trap of removing relevant links, images and landing pages from your site, some recipients will still save your email for reading at a later date.

2. Best days to send are Mondays and Tuesdays
Try and plan your communications activity around these solid facts. Rather than force out a mailing on a Friday afternoon, it’s better to hold off until the following Monday. We are also seeing from our own stats that emails sent out in the afternoon have a better response rate than those sent in the morning. Therefore, try and plan your campaigns to run in the early afternoon and ideally at the beginning of the week.

3. Subject lines less than 35 characters long significantly outperform emails with longer subject lines
Previous best practice advice was to put the company name at the beginning of the subject line. This latest research shows that there is a marked difference in the response rates of emails with shorter subject lines (see below) so, try putting your company name in the From box. This will leave you with 35 characters to play with for the compelling, benefit laced, subject line.

4. Personalised emails receive higher click and open rates.
Personalising the email is good, and we have the ability to do this qucikly and easily, but avoid personalisation in the subject line as this is seen by many as a sign of a spammer, and subsequently will affect your open and click rates.

5. Emails sent to fewer people are clicked on and opened more.
Size doesn’t always matter. A mailing to a smaller list is more likely to be better targetted, contain more relevant content and use a more focussed call to action. So think about your data segmentation and how you can use this to your benefit.

Email statistics

Unique Open Rates = 15.045%

Click Rates = 3.04%

Opens by subject line length

less than 35 characters = 20.10%
more than 35 characters = 15.28%

Clicks by subject line length

less than 35 characters = 3.28%
more than 35 characters = 2.05%

If you need a little bit of bedtime reading, the full report can read online here:

MailerMailer report available here>>

I hope this helps you in planning your future email activities.