Email Inbox Placement

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 21 Apr 2010

“What words should I avoid in my email subject line to ensure I get to the inbox?”

This is possibly one of the most frequently answered (if not asked) questions in email marketing. To prove the point we decided to do a quick search “how to avoid spam” + “subject lines”

Although we had a sense that we would get a large number of results back, even we were surprised to find that there were about 8550 results for the search! Most of the articles/blogs/sites/white papers are centred around avoiding specific words or phrases that can trigger some Spam filters, or start adding “Spam points” to emails sent out.

Here is a typical list of such words taken from one such piece.

In addition to these words many of the experts also advise against using the word unsubscribe, quotation marks, dollar signs , exclamation marks, question marks (one even advises against using any punctuation marks at all), capital letters or – and this made us splutter – use a font size larger than 2!

In effect the advice to legitimate marketers who are promoting a competition, sale or great offer and know that words and symbols like free $, £, win, discount or offer work on TV, in store and every other channel they use; is DON’T! The hit on deliverability and reputation far outweighs any sales uplift you might get from using tried and tested promotional techniques.

But is this still true today?

Like the definition of soft bounces – which we have argued are in definite need of an overhaul we think that both spammers and ISP’s have moved on and that it is time we revisited the issue of “spammy” words and punctuation in your copy and subject lines.

We believe that if you have followed best practice in IP address authentication and reputation management, data collection (opt-in) and list management as well as HTML coding you can within reason use any commercially effective words within the subject line or body copy that you choose. We also recommend you make sure that post deployment, you track all metrics by domain as well to ensure early identification of any ISP specific problems.

In order to test this theory we used two decidedly “spammy”, but definitely relevant subject lines for the last issue of Email-Worx.

To begin with we deployed, two versions of Email-Worx with identical content but different, very “spammy” subject lines: As Email-Worx follows best practice in data and content and is hand coded, we hypothesised that the effect would be minimal.

Subject line A: When to use |: +;&! in your subject line?
Subject line B: It’s – the ; Great & Subject + Line : Separator ? Debate !!!

And the result?

As expected we found no problems with our results according to the standard reports provided by our ESP – in fact they were fractionally better than usual.

Less than 1% hard and soft bounces
Open rates and click rates as follows:
- 35% open rate for both messages
- 28% & 30% total click rate for A and B respectively
- 20% and 19% unique click rate for A and B respectively
No major differences by ISP

But when we looked at the reports in the delivery monitoring tool provided by our ESP we got a completely different potentially, terrifying picture.

Subject line A was received into the inbox of 45% of the test accounts; 0.28% of junk folders and missing in 54% of the accounts
Subject line B was received into the inbox of 47% of the test accounts; 0.28% of junk folders and missing in 52% of the accounts

So which if these two measures was right? If the standard reports provided by the platform were accurate our inbox delivery rate was completely normal. If the third party inbox monitoring software provided by the ESP was right on a pro-rata basis our open and click rates would have been 70% and 60% respectively – nearly twice our average!

So we decided to see what would happen if we ran the emails through a spam checker; and the result?

Subject line A passed 89% of spam filters
Subject line B passed 100% of spam filters

Curiouser and curiouser!

Finally we decided to ask YOU – the recipients; we sent out a quick survey asking the following questions:

Did you receive the last issue of Email-Worx?
Do you have Email-Worx sender address on a safe list or in your address book?
If you received it in your junk folder what did you do?
What platform (Outlook, Yahoo, macmail etc.) do you receive Email-Worx in?
How often do you check your junk folder?

We had a survey completion rate of 8% and everyone who completed the survey has already been sent the full results as a thank you.

As you can see from the above chart the respondents engagement with Email-Worx ranged from the 25% who have only opened between 1 and 5 issues to the one or 2 people who have open over 50 issues! Here are a couple of interesting stats from the survey:

87% of respondents received their message in their inbox
None of the recipients using a web based email client received the message in their junk folder.

We found the last stat very interesting indeed, the ISP’s (the people we worry about most) don’t seem to be paying any attention to subject lines at all!

So there you have it, the worrying results presented by the inbox delivery monitoring tool used by our ESP have been pretty much contradicted by all the other data we looked at, including the data provided by the spam checking tool which seemed to indicate that subject line A would get past almost 90% of spam filters and subject line B would get past 100% of spam filters. Before you ask, the spam checker and the inbox monitoring services we used were from the same company.

At this stage we are not drawing any conclusions – just reporting what happened when we investigated one email, but the result does raise some very interesting questions and we have been running a series of tests to try to answer the following questions and think you will be very interested in some of our findings:

What has the most impact on inbox delivery – sender reputation; body copy; subject line; message size; images?
Do all ISPs react in the same way as each other?
Do ISPs always handle received messages in a consistent manner?
How does the delivery monitoring software out there compare?

Without giving too much away before our findings are complete, we think that our results will challenge the way you perceive deliverability and junk mail filtering. We’ll be publishing the results in upcoming issues of Email-Worx, so let us know if you any comments on our recent experiment, or any particular concerns about email deliverabilty that you would like us to address.

Typical list of spam words:

Act Now!

All New

All Natural

Avoid Bankruptcy

As Seen On…

Buy Direct

Casino

Cash

Cialis

Consolidate Your Debt

Special Promotion

Easy Terms

Get Paid

Guarantee, Guaranteed

Great offer

Give it away, Giving it away

Join millions

Meet Singles

No cost, No fees

Offer

One time

Online pharmacy

Online marketing

Order Now

Please Read

Don’t Delete

Save up to

Time limited

Unsecured debt or credit

Unsubscribe

Vacation

Viagra

Visit our web site

While Supplies last

Why pay more?

Winner

Work at home

You’ve been selected

Who’d win in a fight: the dash or the colon?

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 8 Apr 2010

What’s the best symbol to use to separate multiple propositions within a single subject line?

Here at Alchemy Worx, we feel very strongly – supported by the evidence – about the commercial benefits of emails with long subject lines. We’ve found that emails with longer subject lines containing promoting multiple elements achieve better click to open rates, probably because recipients get to scan and choose from a range of items rather than simply accept or reject a single thought.

Those elements need to be separated, of course, which has led us to wonder about the best way to separate multiple propositions within a single subject line. And so we enter the surprisingly complex world of punctuation and ask: what symbol or word helps people to scan best between different items in a subject line?

Which of these subject lines do you think generated the most clicks?

Vote now to see which test won, as well as the results from our other subject line tests.

What sort of open and click rates should I be aiming for? (And are there any benchmarks?)

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 17 Mar 2010

These are the sort of questions we get asked very often here at Alchemy Worx, and they’re ones we’ve thought long and hard about. The answer isn’t a simple yes or no, however – for the very good reason that we think these are actually the wrong questions…

Clients are often under pressure to meet open and click rate targets, and many marketers obsessively compare their scores with the industry average. But the problem with these rates is that they are very blunt instruments, of limited value for the sophisticated email marketer. Clicks and opens only tell you about the individual campaign or message – they tell you nothing about the people you’re trying to reach, engage, convert and sell to.

Knowing, for instance, that your emails have an average open rate of 20%, 30% or even 40% doesn’t actually tell you very much about the impact your email campaign is having on your subscribers. You need to be looking not at how the campaign behaves but at how the people who got the message are behaving.

Why open and click rates and opens don’t matter (much)

For example and many of you will have experienced this, you send 2 similar email messages and one gets an open rate of 25% and one 30%, but the one with the lower open rate actually generates more clicks and more revenue. So it’s important not to get too obsessed with smashing open rate targets. After all, what are you trying to achieve: a consistent 40% open rate for the sake of it – or a significant increase in ROI? The two things are not necessarily the same, by any means.

Focus on reach and frequency

Instead of setting targets for average clicks and opens, you should be setting targets for reach and frequency – open reach and click reach, open frequency and click frequency. These metrics are easily compiled by anyone, yet they continue to be largely overlooked, for reasons that are entirely baffling to us. And the good news is that they are very easy metrics to compile. Here’s How to measure reach and here’s How to measure frequency.

Open reach

Open reach is effectively the total number of unique opens your email attracts over a given period. In website terms, it equates to unique visits – and if it’s a vital metric for a website, why wouldn’t it be for email?

The greater the number of unique opens, the greater your chances of making a sale. Measuring your unique opens and clicks over time gives you a clear picture of the cumulative performance of your campaigns. The more your uniques are growing, ideally in a consistent upward trend, the better you’re doing over the long run.

To get meaningful numbers when measuring reach, you need to track activity for at least a quarter – and it’s not unusual to track performance over a year or more. Of course it all depends on your market: if you trade in groceries, 3 month’s stats may be enough; if you sell insurance or Christmas trees, you’ll need at least 12 months’ figures.

Frequency

Along with reach, you need to measure the frequency of clicks and opens over the same period of time. Frequency tells you how many of your unique openers and clickers go on to open and click one or more additional messages in the month quarter or year.

Separating out reach and frequency in this way gives you much more insight into why and how your open rates might be falling (or rising). And because frequency and reach are very different things, and the tactics for dealing with them are different, you get a wider range of options to remedy the cause(s) of the decline than extremely limited “I need a better subject line or offer”.

The value of your email content tends to impact the frequency of subscriber engagement more than reach, for instance: the more valuable info and the better the offers, the more often people will open emails.

Reach, on the other hand, is typically increased by new subscribers and/or exceptional offers. A department store that offers free delivery infrequently is likely to see a spike in the sort of subscribers who haven’t opened an email for a long time, for instance, simply because it’s such an exceptional offer.

What do I do if my open or click rate is falling?

So if your open rate is dropping, you need to understand how much of that is due to reach and how much to frequency. Frequency and reach work together, but the trick with campaign strategy is to balance the claims of each to maximise your returns. If you’ve got low open or click reach your problems are likely to be solved by focusing on reach – increasing the number of unique openers and clickers over time; if you’ve got high open reach, you need to get your subscribers to open and click on more messages over time in other words focus on frequency.

For example, if your open reach is only 35%, you need to focus on getting that number up, because that means that 65% of your list still haven’t opened clicked or bought from a single one of your messages. So target that 65% with an engaging or exceptional offer.

On the other hand, if your open reach is 80% and your open rate starts to drop, it could be that your reach has peaked – you’ve got pretty much everyone who is ever likely to open or buy. In which case, you need to focus on frequency – on getting those people to open or buy more often.

If fewer people are engaging more than one of your emails, you need to focus on doing more to make them want to open the next message. You can do this by serialising your offer make them collect two coupons – tell subscribers what offers or content they can expect from you in the next email, give them money off offers that require them to open several emails, in other words find ways to distribute offers and information across messages.

Practising what we preach: how Email-Worx measures up

To summarise: by focusing on open and click rates, you can miss out on the obvious – on what actually sells. What makes people buy stuff is not open and click rates but strong open and click reach and open and click frequency. A case in point: our very own Email-Worx.

Take a look at the reach and frequency stats for EmailWorx for January – July 09. The open rate in January 09 was 66%, made up of 419 unique opens. If we were focusing on the open rate we’d be disappointed in the July 09 figure, which has actually dropped to 61%. But in fact there is no cause for alarm – quite the opposite, because the number of unique opens/month has risen from 419 to 543, an increase of 30%.

More interesting still, in January 09 we were sending out fortnightly emails and in July 09 we were sending weekly emails. If you send out more emails it’s a fact of marketing life that you will get a lower overall open rate, but this is more than compensated by an increase in the number of people who opened at least one email. We’ve increased reach and frequency – which just goes to show that a drop in open rates is not always a bad thing.

Even better, when we map this growing open reach against a Google Analytics chart of visitors to our website, we see that our web traffic has increased in line with this growth in open reach.

How to run a subject line test

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 3 Mar 2010

Split testing – an essential part of any marketer’s tool box – is particularly suited to email marketing; because the functionality is built into most email platforms and you can get meaningful results almost immediately. Subject lines are one of the first things your subscribers see when they go into their inbox and have a proven and measurable impact on whether they go on to open, click and convert. So it is no surprise that the subject line (SL) is one of the first and most frequent variable tests conducted by email marketers searching for that most holy of grails; the perfect subject line. But SL testing is not as straightforward as you may think…

The results can vary depending on what you test, when you cut off your analysis and what metrics you use to measure the success.

To find out why, we’d like you to tell us which of these Email-Worx subject lines you think generated the best opens and or clicks?

ISPs basing reputation scores on engagement – how will this affect my deliverability?

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 17 Feb 2010

“I have heard that ISPs are beginning to base reputation scores on engagement – how will this affect my deliverability?”

The first response I give to anyone who asks me this question is: Says Who? Swiftly followed by: You have nothing to worry about.

Before anyone gets too excited, I am not saying you shouldn’t worry or care about engaging your subscribers. What I am saying is you should focus on engaging your subscribers because you want to promote your company and/or sell more product and not because it might damage your reputation as a sender.

We first started getting asked this question in December of 2009, no matter how hard we searched we found very little hard evidence that engagement based reputation scoring is becoming widespread, or that ‘engagement’ necessarily means open and click rates.

All we found were the following statements neither of which are particularly controversial:

Yahoo is looking at any action a subscriber might take when interacting with email: opens, turning on images, immediate deletions, reporting spam, clicking links, moving a message out of the spam folder. The feature is in place today, but the system is still “learning.” The score is not linear, but rather a factor over time: Mark Risher Spam Czar at Yahoo! August 2009
“Taking this into consideration, we have modified our Enhanced White Listing (EWL) process to benefit IPs with our highest internal reputation score…..This means that IPs being added to the EWL have consistently maintained a low complaint level as well as high user engagement: Christine Borgia of the Postmaster team at AOL in November 2009

Given how imprecise both of those statements are about the meaning of engagement and the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of ISPs in the US and Europe who have never gone on the record about measuring engagement, let alone opens and clicks, it is hard to see what all the fuss is about.

In our opinion there is very little if any evidence that “People who don’t interact are becoming as dangerous as those who explicitly, negatively interact.” as some experts have been quoted as saying recently.

Now for something that you should be concerned about: ISPs are considering wholesale blocking of ESPs!

While researching this issue we came across an article by deliverability expert Laura Atkins on her blog Word to the Wise. According to Laura in the same way that spammers trying to mask their activities use web based email accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail to deliver their spam; some less scrupulous companies are using their ESP accounts to send out unwanted and unrequested email in other words spamming.

The ISP’s are seeing more and more spam coming from the ESP space and are threatening to block all email from any ESP that fails to adequately police the activities of their clients. Laura says and we agree “Many ESPs do have proactive monitoring in place, but these strategies are failing. Spam is coming off some networks, and the whole network is at risk of blocking, not just the bad customers.”

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to the ESP’s; The ISP’s have been making their displeasure felt through soft bounces for quite a while now, which is why you should take soft bounces very seriously indeed.

What does this mean to email marketers?

In the same way that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link then an ESP will only be as good as its worst client! So if the ISPs do decide to implement this strategy choosing the right ESP as your partner will be more important than ever. As Laura puts it “There is a clear opportunity here for smart ESPs to stand out from their peers and competitors”. Make sure your ESP is one of the smart ones.

Do images make any difference to email success?

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 2 Feb 2010

Including images in HTML email tends to boost response, right?

Here at Alchemy Worx we’ve always thought so. But now we’ve decided to put our money where our mouth is and put our theory to the test…

So you tell us: which of these emails do you think generated the best results?

How to make the most of your holiday season emails

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 30 Nov 2009

Quick tips for making the most of your December campaigns…

Send a card

Completely free of sales messages, a Christmas or Happy Holidays card sent by email is a valuable brand building exercise, and may actually still generate revenue. You could:

promote your green credentials and corporate social responsibility by using email rather than paper cards, and making a donation to a relevant charity.

send this also to contacts who have not expressly given permission for marketing messages as it’s a sales-free message (though you’ll want to think through the implications carefully first).

Send an incentive

This holiday season is shaping up to be more competitive than ever, with price wars breaking out all over the retail space. Offering an incentive may be an effective way to clinch that sale. To make sure your incentives work for you:

encourage purchases of products that are harder to shift, where there is more competition.

incentivise purchasing at times when capacity is generally lower.

promote additional purchases and offer discounts or free delivery on bulk orders.

Send at the right time

Most consumers will receive more marketing messages in December than at any time of the year. However, just because you’re not in the office doesn’t mean your messages can’t land in your subscribers inboxes, ready to nudge a purchase:

get as much detail into your subject lines as possible to make your message stand out and appeal to as many subscribers as possible.

consider time-sensitive offers and messages, such as “Order today for guaranteed Christmas delivery”.

schedule your messages for December 25th or 26th – last year £102 million was spent online on December 25th and with many sales timed to start on Boxing Day, Hitwise frequently reports spikes on December 26th. You may not be in the office then, but your messages can still be deployed on those days to bypass the search environment and link your existing customers directly to your site.

Don’t forget the New Year period – many office workers at work between Christmas and New Year and/or in early January have a bit more time on their hands to browse and read online. Take the “New Year – New You” concept and apply it creatively to make your content stand out from similar messages – so long as you offer value, your communications are likely to be well received.

Happy Christmas or Happy Holidays?

Every year we hear the same arguments about whether it’s politically correct to wish people a Happy Christmas. On the one hand, there are those who bemoan the decline of organised religion; on the other there are those who want to see messages that include people of all faiths and none.

What no one argues about is that for people of all creeds and cultures, this time of the year counts as a special season that’s different from any other month. Along with all the religious events, schoolchildren are on holidays, many offices close down completely, and there’s always a huge uplift in retail activity and sales promotions.

Commercially, it’s a completely different market that requires a different approach regardless of any religious beliefs. Because your job is to reach as many of your subscribers as possible, we suggest addressing them in as inclusive a way as possible.

So while we thought that “non-religion-specific celebration of the winter solstice holiday” was going a bit far, this email focuses on the phrase “holiday season” – the preferred wording in the US and increasingly prevalent in the UK too.

How to optimise your emails for search

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 16 Nov 2009

When people go back to their inbox to retrieve an email, it’s usually a very good sign of an intention to engage. So we look at how to make it as easy as possible for people to search through and pull out past emails from you…

From Nudge Effect to inbox SEO

A few weeks ago, in discussing The Nudge Effect in email, we compared the behaviour of an email recipient to the activity of the triage nurse who must make an instant assessment of what kind of attention each new patient needs. Some must be dealt with at once, others can wait a while, others may need little or no help.

Similarly, as emails fly into your subscriber’s inbox, they have to decide very quickly which ones to open and read straight away, which ones to read later, and which ones to delete.

If your email attracts some interest, but cannot be actioned straight away, it’s vital to make sure that when your subscriber does want to return to it, they can find it as easily as possible.

Today’s email clients – the programs your subscribers use to read and manage their email – make it very easy to retrieve past email in a way that’s very familiar to all from web search. Both web-based applications (like Hotmail and Gmail) and installed programs (like Outlook and Entourage) provide quick, straightforward functionality that enables users to search for emails as easily as they search for content via Google or Yahoo! This functionality, combined with increased mailbox storage and greater volume and frequency of email, is opening up a new opportunity for email marketers: optimising the retrieval of emails set aside on arrival for later action.

What are the barriers to email retrieval?

Say you are a travel company and you have a special offer on ski trips to the winter Olympics in Whistler. Your subscriber receives the email and reads the subject line or reads the email content. They’re interested, but it’s a complicated decision, requiring consultation with others, checking of calendars and budgets. So they go home and discuss the holiday with their family, and investigate their options.

By the time they are ready to make a booking, days or even a week may have passed and many more emails will have pushed your ski-trip email toward the bottom of their inbox. You want to make sure that they use your email to book through you, but there are a number of risks that stand in your way…

Google drift: after doing all the groundwork, the last thing you want is for your subscriber to go into the search engine environment, Google the ski-trip offer… and be lured away by your competitor at the last minute. Even if they search for your company name, they are likely to find tempting competitor deals in both the natural and paid-for search results.
channel snatching: even if your subscriber does go ahead and buy from your company online, your channel may not get the credit for the sale.
memory loss: if, for instance, your subscriber receives several email campaigns from different travel companies, they may only remember the ski-trip offer – but not which company was offering it.

How to make it easy to retrieve your emails

For all these reasons, it pays to make it as easy as possible to retrieve previous email. The search function is an obvious way subscribers try and do this. And if you can make this process work easily for them once, chances are they’ll use it again and again. Here’s how…

1. Make sure it is easy for them to find your message

Use your web search data and include key search terms within your emails. Make sure all variations of your company name are included, as well as key words – for example, using the inbox search function to look for emails from “Ski Ski Ski Ltd” may not return any results if your company is always referred to in the copy as “skiskiskiltd.com”. If your industry has commonly misspelt words, you can include them within your copy in clever ways that don’t denigrate your brand. Make sure your subject lines are instantly understandable descriptions of the key content elements of each email. Longer subject lines work best for messages with multiple content segments, and referencing as many of them as possible will give you more opportunities to stand out to subscribers both when the message is received and when they come back to look for it.

2. Include copy in your messages

Whilst image-only emails do work in some instances, the content within these messages will not be accessible to a keyword search.
When writing email copy:

present content in a scannable layout, making smart use of bold and bullet points to highlight key messages
make sure headings and subheads contain keywords and are instantly understandable
front-load subject lines, headings, sub-heads etc with the element the subscriber is most likely to care about or search for eg write “Winter Olympics: 10% off family breaks” not “10% off family breaks to the Winter Olympics”
lead on a strong, compelling, benefit-led standfirst (introductory promo para) for subscribers using their preview pane to review past email

3. Provide valuable content and offers that are only available through your email program

Say loud and clear that the offer is only available to email subscribers. Include a prompt in your copy to encourage subscribers to keep the email handy, and a personal link so they’re easily able to book at a later date.

4. Make the most of invisible words

Alt tags, title tags, and links are all included in searches, so make sure these include relevant, searchable words.

5. Incentivise booking through links within your email

Pass on the savings you make through subscribers booking via an email and reward them for using the email to make their booking directly.

6. Consider other ways people may use to find your emails

Different people search through past email in different ways. Some people will look for messages from a certain “from” address, so make sure yours is consistent.

Other users will sort their emails to find the one they’re looking for, so make sure your “from” name is consistent and helpful as well. See the screenshot below, which shows how British Airways make it easy to sort and identify important emails as opposed to ones I can delete.

What about SEO for your website?

Alchemy Worx have a 100% focus on email so we’re not going to start delving in to the dark art of SEO, but… You can use your email program to help with your website’s SEO by making the most of the valuable content you create for your email campaigns.
We have always advocated the use of landing pages to:

keep your email copy short and succinct
increase clicks to find out more about your subscribers
provide additional cross sell/up sell opportunities

As an added bonus, your archive of landing pages will also provide valuable content for your website’s search ranking – so make sure your landing page copy is written with this in mind.

How to maximise the full impact of email on your brand

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 9 Nov 2009

The Nudge Effect in email shows just how hard email marketing is already working for your brand, in powerful ways beyond opens and clicks. But how much more could it do for your brand if you were to develop this pure natural talent?

How to use email to market your brand

Re-define your campaign objectives.

Whether you plan them to or not, your email campaigns will inevitably communicate messages about your brand. But email content and subject lines designed to generate immediate sales may not be as effective at communicating your brand values to your subscribers as subject lines specifically crafted to do so.

This is particularly true of email campaigns for quality or high value brands where it is not advisable to put too much emphasis on “special offers” or “discounts”. Products or services where the “sale” is more likely to take place via another channel are also likely to benefit from this approach to subject lines.

Think long term. Email marketing is a quick, reactive tool that can be very effective at turning around campaigns very quickly. But to get the most out of the medium, especially when marketing your brand, your email campaigns need the same level of planning and strategy as any other media.

So sit down with your branding team and develop a set of brand messages that you want to communicate over the next 12 months. To deliver those messages via email, work out a plan for how to approach subject lines, from name/address, content and snippets.

Work with other channels. Marketing budgets and departmental evaluation are often linked all too directly to revenue directly generated by that channel. But the truth is that people often come to make a purchase as a result of interacting with two complementary channels. An email may nudge a subscriber into calling a sales rep, for instance, or popping into a store so they can touch and feel your product before buying. Use your subject line to test different calls-to-action, and embrace cross-channel collaboration as a means of boosting sales for the company overall.

Develop a branding strategy for your subject lines. Subscribers who do not open an email will not see your offer or message, but you can still make sure that they get your brand messaging. How? Create a subject-line format that incorporates a brand message designed specifically for people who are not going to open the email or act on it immediately e.g. “Acme Financial: Home Insurance for less.”

Consider every aspect of your campaigns from a brand perspective. Almost everyone factors in brand values when it comes to the creative and content. But don’t forget other, often overlooked campaign components, such as the from address/name and snippets. Too many companies work very hard to deliver a great customer-service experience right across their websites and email content… and then fall down by using an alienating “donotreply@company.com” from address.

How to measure the impact of email on your brand

Your emails have a significant impact across all channels. To identify the impact of your email campaigns, try checking for spikes in sales through all channels directly after a message is deployed. Online sales are one of the easiest to reconcile: simply check purchasers’ email addresses against your sent list. Even if these subscribers did not purchase through the email, sales within a day or two of receiving your email are likely to have been nudged by your message.

Also, check website page views, PPC search and affiliate search results. If you find peaks in channels that are costing you money, you may want to consider ways to encourage purchasing through your email programme instead. This may be a discount only available via email, entry to a competition, or even just a more user-friendly purchase process. As you already know your subscribers, the last thing you want to do is to pay for a lead twice.

Finally, conduct some market research to quantify the impact of your email campaigns on your branding initiatives. Choose a USP that is not the key message communicated in any other channel, and use email to promote it. Carrying out research before and after a 12-month campaign will demonstrate the impact of email on awareness of your brand values.

Will using email to impact brand affect my deliverability?

The short answer is NO. If you are marketing to a list of opted-in subscribers; following best practice and you don’t drastically change your frequency and list hygiene standards, it is unlikely you will see any change in your delivery. Don’t forget the nudge effect is going on already without you doing anything!

How to create emails that sell – even unopened

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 2 Nov 2009

What is the Nudge Effect?

Essentially it’s a way of influencing people’s behaviour without telling them specifically what to do. You may be frustrated with unopened emails and low clickthroughs, but be reassured that even if your subscribers don’t open your email, its presence in their inbox leads to a tangible impact on brand awareness and sales via online and other channels.

Why does the Nudge Effect work?

Think of when you ever have to visit a hospital. A triage nurse will decide straight away what kind of attention you need – how people open emails operates the same way. Quick decisions need to be made – what to open straight away and read, what to read and save, what to keep and read later and what to delete.

This is where the Nudge Effect works – when sorting their emails, your subscribers will see your brand impression first in the ‘from’ column and in the subject line. What you need to do is provide the information in the subject line that encourages the subscriber to retain the information you’ve provided. It’s a subtle yet powerful opportunity that makes even an unopened email a source of potential success across all your channels.

How can an unopened email sell?

Sending an email communication featuring your brand name, and a subject line that communicates what’s in the email and how that benefits the user, can still influence a purchase decision. This is true even when the recipient fails to open the email.

Purchase behaviour studies, which we use frequently at Alchemy Worx, show spikes over time in purchases from recipients who did not open an email.

What made us start looking at the effect of unopened emails was an increase in our clients’ natural search, PPC search and affiliate search results, after a customer email was sent. But how does it affect sales?

The chart below shows a company’s sales performance for a fortnight across all channels – the vertical embedded orange area indicates when the email is sent, the orange horizontal line shows sales from people who didn’t receive the email, while the dark blue line shows people who got the email but did not open it. Despite not opening the email, they still went on to purchase via another channel – evidence of the Nudge Effect in action.

Your message, in other words, may have been just the prompt a subscriber needed to pick up the phone or make a purchase via another channel.

How can I optimise my emails for the Nudge Effect?

Often when marketers create emails, they are obviously trying to improve on the 20% open rate of emails. Engaging content is essential – but you can still influence sales across all channels through the effectiveness of your subject line and ‘from’ address.

Consider promoting other channels in your subject line. You could create a subject line with your brand and a message like “best deals in-store this month” or “call our sales team for a 20% discount”. This way people do not even need to open the email – they remember the message that relates to other channels and can follow up your offer.

Alternatively, you could use the same subject line each email communication. “Household insurance for less – best deals online” in one email, and “Household insurance for less – call now for an amazing deal” in your next communication. The first part of the subject line is designed with the Nudge Effect in mind – it is designed specifically for people who are not going to open the email or act on it immediately.

This kind of email works 3 ways – delivers brand messages, encourages click-through and directs responses to other channels.

One other way of optimising the emails is to time your messages effectively. If your retail outlet has its busiest day on a Saturday, time an email for Friday encouraging customers to visit your store that day for a special deal. You could also send it for a day when you have less footfall to drive people in store. If Saturdays are always busy, but Fridays less so, send the email on a Thursday. Customers will retain the information and go the extra mile on their shopping trip to visit your store.

This is the Nudge Effect at its best.

How can I see if unopened emails make a difference?

The best way to see if unopened emails are making a difference to revenue is to analyse your historical data. Look for data that relates to a spike in natural search results, PPC search increases and affiliate search increases around the time you sent the email. Also check for spikes or rises in sales from other channels in the hours and days after an email is sent to your subscriber base.

Using your historical data and analysing sales from all areas will help you determine how your email activity is working. The Nudge Effect is both provable and visible.

For an interesting visual example of how the Nudge Effect works in daily life, watch the video below from the master of subliminal persuasion, Derren Brown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChvIHoag-R8&feature=sh_e_se&list=SL

You can also learn more about the Nudge Effect from the book that explored it in detail – Nudge: Improving Decisions About, Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk