Four Potential E-mail Needle-Movers

One of the more challenging aspects of e-mail marketing is finding your needle-movers: the elements of your campaigns that, when tweaked, will generate the greatest lift in response and revenue. In a white paper titled “Five Best Practices for Increasing E-mail Program Response Rate and Driving Deeper Customer Engagement,” Lorél Marketing Group offers a few elements to consider:

1) subject lines shorter than 50 characters in length. Lorél cites research showing that subject lines with fewer than 50 characters had open rates 12.5% higher on average those with 50 or more characters. What’s more, click-through rates for the shorter subject lines were 75% higher than for the longer counterparts. One reason could be that AOL’s e-mail client displays no more than 49 characters in the subject-line field.

2) more links. E-mails with at least 25 links within them had open rates 12% higher than those with fewer than 25 links; they also had click-through rates averaging 29% higher. The link count, by the way, includes things such as links to your opt-out form and preference center, to the online version of the e-mail, to your Twitter feed and Facebook page. When you factor all that in, 25 links per message doesn’t seem so unattainable.

3) a link to your privacy policy. Lorél contends that including the link in the footer will lift response. Even if it doesn’t, including that link is no doubt a best practice. “It’s a very good idea to have your privacy policy reviewed and certified by an independent third party… to ensure you are clear in your promise to your Web visitors and e-mail subscribers,” Lorél adds.

4) prechecked vs. unchecked boxes as the opt-in default. This is something to be tested on your Website rather than in your e-mails themselves, obviously. “Using an unchecked opt-in box is the best way to ensure ‘affirmative consent’ while producing an e-mail list of truly interested subscribers,” according to Lorél. That said, you may find that among your audience, complaint and response rates are comparable among those who had to click a box to subscribe and those who would have had to click a box if they did not want to subscribe.