Is your email marketing campaign struggling to get off the ground? Maybe you’ve spent a lot of time crafting beautiful emails with enticing copy and images, but more often than not, your subscribers are hitting delete without even opening the message. Let’s take a look at four ways to increase your open rates and maximize the effectiveness of your campaign.

Subject Line

The subject line is your first point of contact with subscribers. Blow it, and you’ll never get the results you’re looking for.

• Simplify It—Creativity is great, but getting too flowery with your subject line can make you look suspicious. Stick to the essentials: email topic, special offer, or product name.
• Personalize It—Write your subject line in terms of the way it will benefit the subscriber. Use action words such as save, enter, or win. Speak to the reader rather than at him.
• Test It—Set up an A/B test to determine which subject line produces the best results. Use test results not only to determine the actual wording for a certain campaign, but to influence the style you use for future emails.

Send Time

The time of day you send your email can greatly affect your open rates. However, the best time of day for you will depend on who makes up your primary target audience.

• Optimize It—If you send primarily to business people, for instance, avoid sending first thing in the morning or right before 5:00. Both of these times are likely to lower your open rates.
• Test It—Try sending emails at different times to find out what time of day generates the most opens among your target audience.

Send Day

• Accommodate It—The day you send will be influenced by the type of special offer you’re promoting (a weekend sale announcement might be sent on Thursday, for example). Mondays and Fridays tend to generate lower open rates than other days.
• Test It—Experiment with different days of the week to find out when your subscribers are most likely to open and read your messages.

Subscriber List

• Segment It—Acknowledge and cater to the differences in your subscribers, especially if your list is very large. Use profile information or customer surveys to develop customized special offers based on your subscribers’ interests.
• Test It—Once again, the best way to know what works for any group of people is to test. Set up a series of tests to determine what kinds of emails appeal most to the various groups in your subscriber list.

Did you notice a pattern in the tips above? eConnect Email can help you design and run tests for your email campaign, displaying detailed reports to help you make the best possible decisions.

How successful is your email marketing campaign? That can be a tough question to answer, especially since so many elements must work together to create measurable success. The real question, then, should be how you can quantify success in order to know when you’ve got it and what you can change in order to generate it. And that’s what testing is all about.

Before you start testing every metric out there, let’s take a look at two of the most important measurements of email marketing success as well as some of the elements you can test to determine how you can improve.

Open Rates

Sometimes viewed as the holy grail of email marketing, open rates let you know just how many people actually open the messages you send. There are three primary elements you can test to improve your open rates:

• Subject Lines

Test content topics such as price, incentives, benefits, and offer end dates. Also, test different wordings once you’ve chosen the content.

• Sender Name

Try using your company name, a person’s name, or a combination of the two as your display sender. Beware of making drastic changes too frequently, however, since your subscribers may not recognize you or you may be tagged as spam.

• Send Dates/Times

It’s usually best to test just one element at a time (i.e., either date or time, but not both) in order to get a true picture of when you’re likely to get the most opens.

Click Rates

Click rate refers to the number of subscribers who click on a link within your email once they’ve opened it. Here are a few elements you can test to boost your numbers:

• Link wording

Keyword-rich links tend to do better than simple “click here” links, but the important thing here is what works. Test several options to find out.

• Link color

Make sure your subscribers can recognize your clickable text as a link. Test basic blue against other colors, perhaps matching them to your overall color scheme.

• Call to action

Call to action tests can deal with wording, button size, button placement, color, and several other elements. Get creative to determine what elements you might change to produce the best results.

There are plenty of other elements and metrics you can test to boost the success of your email marketing campaign. The important thing to remember is that testing is the only way you can gather the information you need to achieve that success. Take advantage of the testing options available from eConnect Email to view vital stats in real time as well as printable reports and campaign statistics.

In a climate dominated by social media services, it’s more important than ever that your email marketing campaign is targeting the right audience with the right message. In order to avoid getting lost in the shuffle of RSS feeds, Twitter posts, Facebook updates, and blogging, you need to know that your email recipients are opening your emails and that they’re being impacted by the information contained in your messages. You can monitor the email activity of your subscribers using the reports functions available through eConnect Email, but the information will only be helpful if you know what you’re looking at and how you can use those results to modify your strategy.

What is the Significance of Open Rates?

When most people checked their email by sitting at a desk and opening each message they wanted to view, you could take open rates pretty much at face value, using the percentages to determine how many people were reading your emails. These days, however, a lot of factors can affect your open rate percentages. For instance, an email might not be recorded as opened if the subscriber checks it on his mobile phone, if he checks it without HTML turned on, or if he views it only in the preview pane without downloading images. Also, a person might keep an email in his inbox and open it several times to review the information. Or he might open it and immediately dump it. The point is that while open rates should definitely be considered in your email marketing campaign, it’s important to understand that they provide only relative information, not hard data.

What Should My Open Rate Goal Be?

While open rates can’t be relied on too heavily in terms of recording user behavior, they can still be used as a springboard to determine the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. Using the reports features offered by eConnect Email, you can use open rates in the following ways:

• Differentiate Total Opens from Unique Opens

Track how many times each recipient opens your email so you can tell if a 30% open rate means 30 out of 100 people opened your email or if only ten people opened it, but read it three times each.

• Track Clicks Per Open

Opens don’t mean much unless they persuade the viewer to take the next step and click. eConnect Email allows you to see who is clicking, on what links and how many times.

• Monitor Failed Email Contacts

Bounces and unsubscribe requests can be categorized as failed contacts since the recipient either never received your email, or they decided they don’t want to hear from you again. Keep track of these numbers and use them to determine whether your email marketing strategy needs to switch things up.