720 Strategies

720 Blog

It’s wise to personalize your e-mail messaging strategy

Mon, May 5th, 2008 by Tom Cochran | 0 comments

E-mail as a platform for mass communication has been dogged over the years by low deliverability rates. Not only does your organization have to address this deliverability hurdle, you have to entice the message recipient to open your e-mail. There isn't a magic elixer to solve all your mass e-mail needs, but there are a few tricks that can get you one step closer to having your message read. The key is message personalization.

In the fraction of a second it takes a user to scan his or her e-mail inbox, the only thing that will help prevent your message from an instantaneous delete is an intriguing subject line.

At 720 Strategies, we communicate with our clients and prospective clients via e-newsletters and have run numerous experiments to determine our own effective messaging strategies. The results of these experiments are compelling and provide empirical evidence for success of personalized messaging. Our own aggregate open rates hover around 20% and our click rate is approximately 5%. These numbers are right in line with the industry average for corporate marketing e-mails, but the pièce de résistance is the personalization click rate. Our open and click rates are uninspiring when using generics subject lines and content; however, when we personalize the recipient's subject line or content, we see 180% increase in our open rate. What really astounded our team was the 340% increase in click through as a result of personalization.

The simple conclusion we draw from these metrics is that personalization works. 

In addition to personalized communications with your supporters, follow these best practices for your e-mail campaigns:

Concise subject lines — Try to keep your subject lines to 35 characters or less. E-mail clients like Outlook and webmail providers like Gmail and Yahoo frequently truncate subject lines at approximately 35 characters. 

Delivery metric analysis — Follow your e-mail statistical trends, understand them and above all, know your recipient. If your message campaigns show a statistically significant bump in open rates on Wednesdays over all other days, then you should target that as your primary sending day. 

• Above the fold content — In a world where people can receive hundreds, it's highly likely the user won't even bother scrolling down to read your message, so it is imperative for you to catch their eye with content of interest above the fold (i.e., content that is at the top of the e-mail not requiring the user to scroll down).
  
No generic spam lists — Refrain from purchasing generic, commercially available e-mail lists. These untargeted lists are of little value to your organization because these are extremely cold contacts. People on these lists have likely unwittingly signed up to multiple lists and are not highly engaged users, or their e-mail addresses have been harvested by spam bots crawling the Web.

Building a valuable e-mail list is hard work should be done organically and intelligently from the ground up. Have a sign up form on your website and reach out to other like-minded organzations to send e-mail on your behalf to their lists, pointing their supporters to your form. We continue to learn new lessons from our personalization experiments and always communicate these findings to our clients. Does your organization need help with its e-mail messaging strategy? Contact 720 Strategies.

Comments

There are no comments