Netresult Web Design

The Limitations of Blasting Out Mass E-mails

How full is your Inbox?  If you are anything like me, a high proportion of the e-mail you receive each day goes straight into the junk mail folder.  In fact, probably like you, is subject I have rules set up in Outlook to send e-mails from certain people straight to the junk mail folder so I don’t even have to read them.

But what a waste!  I ought to unsubscribe from the lists I no longer require, but like most people I haven’t got round to it yet.  And I have a sneaky feeling that in the next e-mail I will read something really useful, so I leave things as they are.  However, if you’re on the other side of the desk, how can you stop the majority of your e-mail marketing being regarded as junk?

What can be done?

The maxim I always try to use it to treat other people the way I like to be treated myself.  Where e-mail is concerned, that usually means sending out something people want to read.  If I sign up for a newsletter from a website, I usually look forward to receiving it and to reading it, but if after several weeks it turns out to be the same old thing, or worse, a blatant attempt at a sales pitch, I’ll probably bin it without opening it.  If that is true for other people, I need to make sure my e-mail newsletters are interesting enough for people to open and read.

Why the subject line is so critical

In the same way that a newspaper sells copies by virtue of its headline, your e-mail stands a better chance of being opened if the subject line is engaging.  However, beware of trying to emulate a newspaper headline in an e-mail.  Because of the quantity of spam everyone gets nowadays, anything that vaguely resembles a sales pitch will probably result in a being confined to the junk mail folder.  In a recent survey the top and bottom 20 e-mail subject lines were compared for their open rates, and guess what?  The ones that were factual and informative were opened more than eight times more frequently than the ones that look like a sales pitch.  So when it comes to E-mail marketing, you could say that the best subject lines tell what’s inside, and the worst subject lines sell what’s inside!

Tags: autorespponder, email marketing, Usability, webdesign

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Blog, Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.