DMA Email Marketing Council Blog

Latest research suggests your subject line test strategy needs a complete overhaul!

Last week infobox, the DMA Email Council’s newsletter featured the UK launch of a free white paper on subject line length published by my company Alchemy Worx.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read it yet the main findings of the research were pretty startling and run counter to conventional wisdom.

The research suggests that although subject lines with 60 characters or less make more people open your message (the traditional view) these people are less likely to then go on and click on content or offers within the message than people who open an email with a longer subject line. More opens = less clicks! There seems to be an inverse relationship between opens and both click and CTO rates.

As you might expect, we monitor a large number of UK email campaigns, from a cross-section of sectors and companies including British Airways, figleaves, Apple, Amazon JD Sports and Reuters; so I thought it might be interesting find out what subject line lengths email marketers are using and was astonished to find out just how are following conventional wisdom!

Out of 700 subject lines we monitored in the last 90 days, the vast majority—87% of them — were under 60 characters in length. A further 7% fell into the ‘dead zone’ between 60 and 70 character where neither opens nor the CTO rate is optimized, and only 6% of the subject lines were over 70 characters long and therefore likely to optimize click and CTO rates.

Does his mean that everybody out there is only interested in opens and doesn’t care about clicks?  Perhaps we could conclude that email marketers, having extensively and regularly tested longer subject lines, know for a fact that they don’t work?

Somehow I think not.

What’s more likely to be the case is that as an industry we’ve done such a fantastic job of believing the hype that we have stopped testing outside of the accepted norms.

Our whitepaper also found subject lines with a higher word count also optimize clicks and CTO rates. So how do the numbers break down when it came to word count?

The numbers are equally amazing. Only 13% of subject lines monitored contained above 10 words—where clicks and CTO are optimized. 60% fell into the ‘dead zone’ of between 6 and 10 words, where neither clicks nor opens are optimized; and 26% of the subject lines contained fewer than 6 words, and therefore optimized open rates.

What I have learned from this exercise and would like to share with you all is that email marketers need to completely overhaul their subject line test strategy:

● Subject line tests should be more granular—long and short just isn’t good enough. Subject lines need to be broken down into more character groupings (1-10, 11-20, ...91-100).

● Introduce word count testing. Words are a much better way of conveying meaning than characters.

● Assess the impact of the number of propositions contained in the subject line on your campaign performance.

● Finally, open rates are just a small part of the story. Your tests should assess the impact of subject lines on clicks, CTO rate and conversions, as well as sales.

My greatest fear is that the people reading the whitepaper will be looking for a simple answer such as “when it comes to email subject lines, short is best”, when in fact the central message is keep searching, keep optimising and keep on challenging assumptions.

Dela Quist
CEO
Alchemy Worx

Email marketing – making it customer centric

The better we understand our customers the better we can communicate and use the power of email more effectively.

Sounds blindingly obvious doesn’t it, but just how many companies do communicate effectively ‘one-to-one’ with their customers, with a channel that allows them to do it, cost effectively. Not that many as most see email marketing as a cheap or free communication channel that can produce short term results. Sounds great doesn’t it, but there is a but! We run the risk of alienating the customer, who we’ve worked so hard to obtain, who has the power with one click of a button to unsubscribe or add us to their junk mail filter. Not a pretty picture is it.

Well last week’s Email Marketing Conference at London Zoo focused on that very issue: Customer Focused Email – Marketing to people not lists. The conference brought together industry experts to show how we can treat our customers as individuals and not as a collective mass, who we bombard with email offers.

I chaired the day and thought it would be useful to summarise the key learnings that I took away, that I believe we can all apply in our organisations:

1. Data is key – collect enough but not too much as you risk customer disengagement. Use the data you collect and continually ask your customers questions to build up a richer picture of their attitudes. Also gain an understanding of why people no longer want to hear from you, so that you can apply those learnings to your strategy.
2. Protect your customers and protect your brand. Change the perception of the value of email within your organisation. Use email to drive long term growth and not continued short term offers to generate short term results. Continue to do the latter and your at risk of losing your customers and diminishing the value of your brand.
3. Make your email campaigns customer driven not marketing driven. Remember there is an individual at the end of your communication. Put yourself in their shoes, think about what’s in it for them and what they need to do to respond. Build an experience with your customers and give them value back. Remember that customers judge you on each and every email you send.
4. Make your emails relevant. Relevance makes your email work harder for you. Segment your customers, use triggers, personalise, add interactivity and continually test. The more relevant you are the more often you can communicate.

By applying these key learnings we can achieve our goal keeping our valuable customers engaged with our organisation so that we can build long term profitable relationships.

Jonathan Burston
Director, Customer Solutions Group
CACI
www.caci.co.uk

Email Preference - text or images?

It might be worth giving your email designers the week off occasionally.

It might be that something different grabs people’s attention or it could be that people can read text emails.  Recent text only campaigns Data Media and Research have sent out have seen results as good as the emails with images. However with further investigation it appeared that although the number of people responding was similar it was a different group of people.

This then led to undertaking some research (as part of a bigger study) to ask people how they preferred their marketing emails to be presented.

The outcome was as follows:
Of the 1072 people who recently participated in our survey...

The majority (46.60%) would prefer just images. However, this is shortly followed by 43.50% of people preferring just text.

The figures above are quite interesting, especially when you consider that only 8.70% would like both & 1.20% have no preference at all.

The highest results came from respondents aged between; 35 – 44 & 55+. A majority of which would just prefer images  This relates back to the previous mentioned figures, these two age groups are amongst the highest in the “just images” & “just text” categories.

What would you prefer?

Are you one of the 93 people that would like to have images & text?

Interestingly females would prefer “just images”  but a majority of males would prefer “just text”.

What does this research mean in real terms?  Well if nothing else it might be worth either asking people how they would like to receive emails and/or test an alternative to what you are using at the moment.

The sample used for the survey is representative of the UK population

Research conducted by Zussi Research

Sara Watts
Managing Director Data Division
Data Media and Research Ltd www.dmri.co.uk

Congratulations to the eec

Jeanniey Mullens, founder of the Email Experience Council recently wrote about the successes of a Project they did for the women's Bean Project. Led by Stephanie Miller of Return Path, the aim of the project was for peers and competitors of the email marketing industry to put their expertise to use and work together to help a good cause.

Not only does Jeanniey detail the successes of the program, but she also reveals the details of the program the experts designed - which is a great insight into how a typical, well constructed email program should look like. It includes Content Strategy, Design, Infrastructure, List Growth and a Wireframe Sample.

So congratulations to the eec and the volunteers of this project - by all accounts it was a great success and a fantastic example to us all.

You can read the full details of the project here.

Generating a demand

If automated demand generation is to be more than just the latest ‘craze’ sweeping the marketing sector, then we need to get back to basics – and fast.

Ah, for the days when direct marketing was easy! You identify the best prospects for your product, create a wizzy direct mail campaign, print, enclose and post it out, and wait for the responses to roll in. Now you need to think multi-media, web 2.0, push and pull, and get a space on Face Book for the campaign, which now involves a film shoot as well as the usual folding stuff. You need to make sure those emails are ‘compliant’- and hope that you’ve got the right combination of elements to create a hot hit that’ll get your target audiences (there will be more than one these days) gossiping around the legendary ‘water cooler’. And, of course, you need to be able to measure the responses – from whatever direction they happen to come – from hits on your website to sales calls. No wonder the days of direct mail look simple.

Hardly surprising then that so many are turning towards automation as an answer. Rather than just pull your audiences towards your product or service with complicated and complex email campaigns, how much better to identify the key triggers that make people buy, and then, having identified the crucial actions, slip out some carefully crafted responses which hit the customer or prospect before they’ve even realised they were in the market to buy. Once again, life looks manageable.

But hold on a minute. To make this really work, you need to know just who you are selling to…and by that I don’t just mean a carefully segmented prospect list or pool. You need to agree and prioritise just what makes a lead a lead – and to do that in B2B you might just have to talk to the sales team. Sounds straight forward enough, but recent figures suggest that 52 per cent of marketers don’t work with their sales teams to define just what a lead looks like. That’s a lot of people running marketing campaigns to generate business when they don’t even agree what that business should look like. No wonder a lot of in-boxes remain stubbornly closed to the well crafted inducements that land in them from time to time!

Automation does sound like an answer to a dream, but to stop that dream tuning into yet another data nightmare there’s a lot of basic groundwork to do first. If we are to make sure that increasingly complex campaigns really deliver – and in ways we can effectively measure and assess – we need to get back to the fundamentals first. Until we do that, I’d suggest, the miracle cures of the brave new multi-media world will remain just that – miracles.

Liz Woodbridge
Business Development Manager
Mardev

DMA Conference Feb 08 Takeaways

Earlier this year in February, the DMA Email Marketing Council held "Effective Email Marketing" conferences in Bristol and Edinburgh. The events were very well attended and feedback was extremely good. As chair of them both I had the pleasure of attending both conferences and here are some of my 'takeaways'.

Phil Singh, emailvision gave some great pointers on building your list, database management and segmentation.

• In answer to a JupiterResearch quesion: "how do you acquire email addresses for your email marketing efforts", 83% of respondants selected 'web site registration'.
• Make it quick and easy to subscribe
• Give newsletter examples when subscribing
• Always obtain permission with affirmative consent (i.e don't use negative tick boxes "If you don't want to recieve emails, tick here")
• Let them know the 'From address' so they can add it to their address book
• Only 32% of forms had privacy policy highlighted (JupiterResearch executive survey 2006)
• Remove spam flag addresses: go through your database and remove all addresses which contain abuse@, postmaste@ or nospam@.

Tink Taylor, Dotmailer and Nick Cole, Blonde shared how to create effective emails:

• Rendering: 19% of recipients  assume  an email is spam if it fails to render properly and 19% of recipients delete mails entirely constructed from images assuming it is blank
• Friendly 'From' address: For B2B, a known contact may work best. For B2C, company branding is extremely important.
• Subject line: 35% of email users open messages because of what is contained in the subject line (JupiterResearch) and consider the length & key message
• Consumers deal with more than 250 emails per week (Forrester 2007)
• 32% of consumers thin that email is a great way to find out about products or promotions (Forrester 2007)
• Email delivers the most value when they offer a timely, coherent message in a tone the  reader can relate to.
• There should be a clear call to action above the fold, (i.e within the preview pane) with other paths elsewhere in the email to entice the user to take action.
• Image Blocking: The message should be able to be read without graphic aids.
• 83.2% of marketers listed email as #1 advertising tactic (Datran Media 2007)

Kath Pay, Managing Director, Ezemail

Beyond opens and clicks: why it’s time for new email metrics

What would you do if you found out that 1% of your email list was generating 20% of your revenue? You might target your big spenders in a different way or develop products aimed specifically at them; alternatively, you might look at ways of persuading the other 99% of subscribers to buy more.

Both of these options rely on knowing which customers are your most valuable – but with only the blunt instruments of open and click rates available to you, you simply can’t tell. When we rely on these metrics to measure success we end up with “one size fits all” communications: any serious knowledge of our audience begins and ends with the registration process.

By focusing on customer behaviour rather than campaign performance we have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of what customers do when they read our emails.

Informed planning = improved ROI

Let’s say your monthly newsletter has an average open rate of 25%. Are the same people opening your newsletter every month?

One month the open rate falls to 15%. Have you lost people who normally open every mail (a drop in open frequency), or just attracted fewer casual openers (a drop in reach)?
In fact, our research at Alchemy Worx has found that falling open rates are most likely to be the result of regular customers opening your mails less often – and the tactics demanded by a drop in frequency are very different from those required by a drop in reach.

This is the kind of insight that customer-based reporting can give you. It gives answers to crucial questions such as:

• which customers respond to pricing offers, and which to promises of added value?
• how long is it since a particular person opened one of your messages?
• what proportion of your audience opens every one of your messages, and how many never open a single one?

Answering these questions opens up exciting new strategic options for measurement, campaign planning and customer targeting – all leading to improved ROI for your email marketing.

I will be delivering a seminar at Internet World which will show you the metrics you should be tracking, strategies to help you implement them and the tactical responses that can turn your understanding into increased ROI. You’ll see your email marketing in a whole new light.

Dela Quist is CEO of Alchemy Worx. His seminar “Beyond Opens and Clicks: Using Customer Based Metrics to Drive Performance Improvement” is at Internet World on 1/5/08 in the Masterclass Theatre.