Worried about the response rate to your email campaign? If so, you’re not alone. Over 90% of email subscribers have unsubscribed from a list they initially opted into. Of those, the majority have done so because they felt the content was boring or irrelevant.

Did you see those numbers? Go back and read them again. That’s a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the way businesses are marketing themselves. Most likely, those unsubscribes started out as non-responses. If you can reach the non-responders before they opt out, you may be able to salvage some valuable contacts. For everyone who has ever sent out a boring or irrelevant email (let’s just all admit that we have), it’s time to consider these strategies for keeping your subscribers engaged.

• Value, Value, Value

Why should anyone read your email? Does it provide useful information, special offers, discount codes, or other incentives? Is it personalized? Do you use list segmentation to target your offers even further? If you don’t know what your audience considers valuable, try sending them a brief survey asking what their expectations are.

• Optimized Subject Lines

Subject lines that appear cutesy, overly clever, or use gimmicks to grab attention (exclamation marks, all caps, strange punctuation) will often be viewed as spam. Keep your subject lines clear and straightforward, incorporate your keyword, and try to communicate the overall value of the email.

• Other Communication Channels

If certain subscribers don’t respond no matter what you do, try reaching them through other communication channels before you purge them from your list. Direct mail and social media can provide opportunities to entice subscribers back with special offers or incentives.

• Set Frequency Expectations

Another reason people unsubscribe from email lists is that messages arrive too frequently. Communicate up front how often you’ll be sending your messages and stick with it. If you plan to change the frequency (around a holiday or before a big sale, for instance) let readers know so they won’t feel deluged.

• Credible From Address

If the from address looks spammy, your message may not make it to the inbox. Be careful with abbreviations and try to stick with a from address that is immediately recognizable.

eConnect Email can help you at each stage of the process, whether you’re improving the design of your email, segmenting your list, tracking user behavior, or testing alternate versions of a particular message element.  If all else fails and you can’t re-engage the non-responders on your list, it may be time to let them go, clean up your list, and move on.

I can hear some of you groaning now. Testing, you say? Please, don’t talk to me about testing. I know. The very thought of testing is enough to send some of you into hibernation for the winter. But before you settle down for a long winter’s nap, let’s take a look at how testing can benefit your business.

• Testing for Increased Sales

Testing your email campaigns can increase your sales by as much as 25%, according to www.whichtestwon.com. Especially during the holiday season, 25% is nothing to be sneezed at. And with the natural surge of email in the weeks leading up to Christmas, it’s the perfect time to start implementing a testing program as part of your email marketing strategy.

• Testing Pinpoints Successes and Failures

Okay, you say. Testing can increase sales. How? By pinpointing the specific elements of any given email that cause measurable changes in user behavior, testing can help you design messages that encourage subscriber response. For instance, does Subject Line A or Subject Line B result in more opens? Only testing will tell. Does blue or red work best for the call to action button? Should you use a button at all? Maybe linked text will work better. There’s no way to know apart from testing. A rigorous program of testing enables you to discard what doesn’t work, showcase what does, and build a customized email strategy that best appeals to your target audience.

• Testing the Right Things

Yes, you can test the font of the link to your privacy policy at the bottom of the email, but it probably won’t result in measurable changes. What, then, should be your focus as you seek to build a successful email campaign? Let’s take a look at five elements you can use to kickstart your testing program:

1. Subject Line—Test various wordings and appeals to make your subject line stand out from the crowd.
2. Call to Action—Wording, font, button color, placement, size—the possibilities are endless when it comes to designing the perfect call to action.
3. Offer—Which offers will most appeal to your target audience?
4. Graphics—Size, subject matter, and placement of graphics can all influence subscriber response. Find out what works best by testing your options.
5. Copy—Test wording, format, appeals, and style in order to choose the copy most likely to persuade.

eConnect Email can help you design reliable split tests to determine which elements appeal most to your target audience. Take advantage of our customizable templates, design integration, and image management as you design each test, and make your holiday up to 25% merrier this year.

A couple weeks ago I received an email from my favorite aquarium store. Being a fish geek, I’m always interested in fish store sales. But this particular email caught my attention with an explosive subject line that read “Fourth of July Blowout Sale!” Sadly, the subject line was all that was explosive about it.

Upon opening the message, I discovered that the image did not display in my email browser and there were no text tags to give me clues about this fantastic sale. Not even a link to the website. Being a sucker for fish sales, I typed fishstore.com into my browser and came up with nothing. After trying a .net extension and landing on a fish taxidermy site, I Googled said store and discovered that their website was “fishstore.us.” Okay. But here’s the real kicker. Nowhere on their site could I find anything about a Fourth of July Blowout Sale. Slightly disgruntled, I closed the tab and deleted the email.

So what’s the takeaway from this experience? I think there are several things to be learned about what to do and what not to do as you’re developing an email marketing piece.

1. Subject lines aren’t everything. We tend to talk about them like they are the holy grail of email marketing, but a fantastic subject line accomplishes nothing if it’s not supported by the email itself.
2. Always, always, always include alt text tags and links that communicate your message even if your image fails to display.
3. Don’t forget to include a link to your landing page in the body of the email, especially if your website has a weird extension like .us.
4. If you’re going to send an email about a sale, make sure sale information can be easily found on your website.
5. If you’re advertising a blowout sale, it better really be a blowout. If it’s not, people will begin to be skeptical of your email pieces and may skip them altogether.

Creating a stellar email goes beyond dotting all your i’s and crossing your t’s. You need a certain amount of creativity in order to be in touch with what will speak to your target audience. eConnect Email can help you design customized email templates, organize and integrate images, and test your emails before sending to ensure that they display correctly and accomplish the goals you have in mind. Don’t make the mistake of losing customers to a poorly designed email. Take the time to work out the kinks before you send, and you’ll not only increase sales, but also build loyal customers who look forward to your messages.

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.