Just read a very interesting report from MailerMailer about email marketing metrics. The report is well worth a read, and I’ve summarised what I’ve learned below.

Open rates have been in decline for a while now, and and are currently just under 14%. Open rates aren’t a good or accurate indicator of campaign success for many reasons, and are becoming less so as people read their email from handheld devices. Open rates were highest for emails from banking/financial companies, travel agencies and telcos.

As we’ve said on numerous occasions, click-through rates are a much better indicator of a campaign’s effectiveness. MailerMailer report click-through rates of 2.9% for the last half of 2007, down from 3.2% for the first half of the year.

As discussed in other blog posts here, you can increase your click-through rate by having a call to action (’Buy Now’ or ‘Click here’), a deadline for response, and a well-designed email that provides useful information or content.

Interestingly, they also found that subject lines with less than 35 characters had a much higher click-through rate than longer subject lines. As we’ve also mentioned in the past, it’s a good idea to test different key concepts in your subject lines and monitoring click-through rates, to see which words and phrases your audience will more readily respond to.

This report is well worth a read for anyone who’s interested in getting more out of email marketing.

I recently got an email from the Guardian Weekly (I know, he’s going on about that paper again…), and I decided I’d share it with you, because it’s a really good example of direct marketing through email. They get everything right here, and the landing page is great too. Have a look at the email and landing page:

The only problem I’ve found with this email is the use of ‘free’ in the subject line (”Explore world news with four free issues”), which might explain why it was sent to my Junk Email folder.

But apart from that it’s an excellent email. The headline font stays true to the Guardian’s ‘brand’ font, the headline is clear and obvious, and the images of the four free issues tangibilise what you’ll be getting.

The use of the ‘Click for your free trial offer’ button, both to the right of the images and at the bottom of the page, are very effective calls to action.

The copy (”The world isn’t simple…”) draws you in and is fairly straight to the point. The email gets across the selling point of the Guardian Weekly - because it’s a weekly paper, they have the perspective on the world news that dailies lack.

If you click on any of the calls to action, you’re brought to a landing page. The landing page is another classic example of direct response. The headline (”Explore the world”) restates the 4-week free trial, and the use of sub-headings (”Gain a global perspective”, etc.) really gets across the benefits the Weekly has to offer.

The landing page is peppered with testimonials, outlined in different shades to grab the eye. And the killer punch: 5 reasons to subscribe, at the bottom and in a different colour to the rest of the page. The 5 reasons uses many vintage direct marketing tactics - “no obligation”, “save money”, “money-back guarantee”, “free trial”.

The first start of the ordering process asks you what country you are in. You are then taken onto a quite long subscription process, which really could have been condensed a bit. But no matter. The email and landing page will already have done its job with a lot of people. This is how email marketing should be done.

Open rates for email campaigns are dropping every year - but is the open rate an acceptable statistic for measuring how successful your campaign is? If your email doesn’t reach your prospect, how can they open it?

To increase your return on investment from email marketing, first look at whether your intended recipients actually receive your email. Your deliverability rate, the percentage of your list that actually gets your email delivered to their inbox, is the first statistic that you need to improve. Here are some tips for doing it:

1. Use double opt-in to make sure that the recipient wants to be on your list. When a user signs up to your newsletter from your website, send a confirmation email that must be replied to (or a link that must be clicked) before users are placed on your list.

2. If some of the addresses on your list persistently ‘bounce’ (i.e. emails can not be delivered to them), remove them from your list. Service providers track bounced emails, and your email can be blocked if it causes regular bounces.

3. Choose your words carefully. If at all possible, avoid words such as ‘medication’, ‘money’, ‘poker’, ‘viagra’ and so on. There’s a good list of spam-words here.

4. The HTML code you use in your emails may be affecting your deliverability. Make sure your images use “alt” tags, be careful with tracking your emails for responses, and have a read of this article to make sure your HTML is up to scratch. If you put your email up on your website, you can validate the HTML code on the W3C Markup Validation Service.

As always, the Wikipedia website is a solid source of information. Check out their article on email spam. And be sure to keep your list, content and HTML clean if you want to get your message out.