29 Jul 6 myths about email marketing: #3

Open rate, clicks, spam… You need help?

3. ALL CONTACTS WHO HAVE OPTED-IN EMAIL AND CONTINUED, ARE MY LOYAL READERS

This is not entirely true since there are many possible reasons why readers are ‘with you’. They could just be inactive (therefore your emails are graymail), some of them may opted-in through proxy forms for incentives or in a misconception.

Also a very useful information to keep in mind when looking at the statistics is that approx. 25% of your contacts on your email list will expire every year (due to switching jobs, email providers etc.). So your open rate may be affected by that and also know that the length of time of a particular consumer on a list can grow the possibility of spam complaints (longer the time, higher the possibility of complaint).

There is also a common belief that if your OPEN rate is good (depends on the industry but usually 25% and higher) that you have a lot of loyal readers and customers on your email contact list. Not completely true. Some people are drawn to a particular email because of the subject line (especially when there’s a discount or gift mentioned), others are still in the group of uncomplicated users who open the majority of emails they get daily and of course there’s black traffic to consider.

Although statistics are usually a great indicator of what is going on with your email marketing you should still add all these other factors to the equation.

Here are a few tips to improve you statistics:

1. Keep track of your hard bounces and soft bounces. Soft bounces are usually linked to holidays, business trips, and other situations when recipient is temporarily unavailable. You should still keep these emails and try them again later. SQUIZ MAIL detects soft bounces and after a number of them in a row the system automatically marks them as hard bounce. Hard bounce means that the user is unavailable (email address does not exist etc).

2. A lot of readers might not get you email, at least not in their inbox due to the spam filters. To avoid that, try not to use common spam words and phrases, CAPS and symbols such as “!”, “?” or “%%”.

3. Subject line, subject line, subject line. Try not to be too obvious by selling the product/site/whatever you want to sell. Try informing the readers and explain what’s waiting for them if they open the email. If they’ll sense in your subject line that you only want to sell – you’re doomed.