Americans received, on average, 12.18 permission-based e-mails per week last year and about 664 overall. And talk about mailbox glut, the number of weekly deliveries is expected to rise to 31 by 2003.
To get the mail through the clutter you better nail down some of the tricks of the trade, Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of Worldata/WebConnect, Boca Raton, FL, said yesterday during a session at List Vision 2001.
One tip is to order e-mail addresses by domain. Subscribers to America Online, for example, pay $20 per month and may be more responsive than subscribers to Hotmail or Yahoo, which offer e-mail services free of charge, he said.
Mailers should also seed themselves in all environments, such as both in html enabled and non-html enabled formats, to be able to view the offer the way all customers receive it. He added that sniffer technology, which routs out who can read html formats and who can’t, is only 90% accurate.
By implanting a seed, marketers can also tell whether or not the mail even gets delivered. For example, he said, Internet Service Providers like Yahoo and Hotmail will block e-mail they deem spam or if they can’t handle the volume, without notifying the sender.
As for bounced messages, one metric to use is whether more than 5% of the mailing bounces back. If so, something is probably wrong with the overall file. And any message that bounces should be remailed at least three to five times before it is deemed a dead address.
There are also some specifics for subject lines. Don’t use multiple exclamation points or quotes. Capital letters, in Internet lingo, means someone is yelling and never just say “hi”. But do identify the company, use 35 characters or less and personalize the subject line.
Finally, never pay the rate dictated by the rate card. “If you pay the rate card CPM we’re going to put you in the middle of town and laugh at you,” Schwedelson said.
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