Email Marketers Guide to 35% Higher Read Rates and 50% Lower Spam Rates

Guy Hanson, Director of Response Consulting at Return Path, recently presented some very interesting data around email open rates. This research was centered around marketing emails sent in the Daily Deals market. Although specific names aren't mentioned in the study, top brands that come to mind are Groupon, Living Social, and Scoutmob. Some of this data will surprise you.

Best day of the week to send - the argument continues!
Although you need to do your own testing, in this study the worst day to send was Monday and the best was Wednesday.  The rate that recipients actually read your email was 12% higher on
Wednesday. And, the rate at which internet service providers (ISPs) filter email as spam was 20% less! Why did ISPs mark less email as spam on Wednesday? Probably because Wednesday is $1 sushi day at the restaurant in the lobby of the Google building, and they are too busy eating to bother with your email. Actually it was because the read rates are so high. The more Gmail customers that open and read your email, the better. So the ISP filters less of your email out as spam. On Mondays, since the read rate tended to suck, the ISPs marked a lot more of your email as spam.

"Campaigns with “free” in their subject lines have read rates that are 12% higher than those without."

Yes, you read that correctly. I've told my email marketing clients for years that you should watch out for words like "free" in your emails because ISPs tend to flag it as spam. But, based on this study, I've been made into a big, fat liar. And I'm not fat. There is a new normal that is forming in email marketing and that is  if recipients open, read, and click your emails, that indicates engagement. The ISP stops automagically filtering emails that contain a particular word (like "free") if the engagement rate is high enough.  Heck, if enough recipients engaged with an email containing the word "Viagra", Gmail would likely let it through to the inbox.

Wednesday also means less spam filtering
But there's more about this magical day called Wednesday. Not only is it a day where Loraine in the cube next to me didn't kill another ficus tree*, its also the day that ISPs are less likely to filter your email as spam.

Wednesday generated 1/3 as much spam filtering as other days

Subject line positioning
Which of these do you think would make a better subject line?

• 20% off all ficus trees today through Sunday
• Now through Sunday save 20% on ficus trees
• Loraine, don't come to our store, you'll just end up killing that ficus tree anyway

Does it matter which of these you choose? The first one might just result in a 35% higher read rate. Let me explain. Since the first words of the subject line are the first thing that the recipient sees, placing the discount immediately at the far left of the subject line resulted in:

• Read rates 35% higher
• Subscribers are 4 times less likely to register a spam complaint
• They are also twice as likely to re-classify false positives as “Not Spam”
• Spam Filtering levels are almost 50% less

(Discount) size matters
Be careful! When you add a discount offer into your email subject line don't get too carried away. Subscribers are not interested in giant discounts. They simply do not believe in giant discounts and are not likely to open the email.

Smaller discounts generate higher average Read Rates than larger discounts.

On top of that, ISPs applied a much heavier hand when filtering your email as spam. If your discount was 75% or more, the ISP blocked 50% of it. How's that for a waste of your marketing time and money?

Test for yourself
Since this study was centered around emailers sending out Daily Deals email blasts, don't just assume this applies directly to your business. Every industry has a different set of best times of day and day of the week to send email. If you are just starting out, it is fine to use this data as a starting point. Just test and retest to see what happens with your emails.

Suggested: Really sneaky HTML problems in your email marketing campaigns and how to fix them 

Need help with email marketing terminology? Read The Noob's Zen Guide to Email Marketing and Social Media Speak

* Sorry, you've just been drug into our office humor. Our faithful employee Loraine has no proclivity to keep a ficus tree alive. Her tales are legendary though-out our blog.

Gmail users vote for Obama, Yahoo users vote for Romney!

Vote for Kermit! Political parties don't know
how to manage email marketing

Return Path put out a great infographic about the use of email marketing by both political parties during the 2012 presidential election. The results are interesting and somewhat funny. Both candidates use email marketing strongly, but just take a look at the differences!

• Obama has five times the number of email subscribers as Romney
  TweetThat's a telling stat. But, I'm not surprised by this since Obama is a sitting president who's had 4 years in office to grow his subscriber list. Do you suppose he personally manages his email lists? Yeah, you're right. He probably has someone to do that for him. But, I just checked our customer list and no, he's not a customer of our email marketing software product. Go figure.
  
  
• Where inbox placement is concerned, Obama is beating out Romney at 68% inbox placement vs. 50%. So where does the rest of that email go? To the spam box. That's what I've been harping on small businesses about. You've got to really appeal to your subscribers if you want to stay in the inbox.
  
  Suggested: Flush your email marketing job down the toilet with this one big mistake
  
  
• Vote for spam!You don't get to just cast your ballot in the 2012 presidential election, you also get to vote on who's email gets sent to the spam box. In this case, Obama loses with a whopping 5% of all recipients taking the time to manually mark his email as spam. Ouch. Romney is at just 0.8%. Not bad for a political party.
  
  Suggested: Double your Gmail inbox placement rates
  
  
• Deleting email without reading it
  This metric isn't the same as marking an email as spam. If your subscribers aren't opening your email at all, that is not good. Again, Romney has the edge.
  
  Suggested: Your email open rate may not mean what you think
  
   
• Gmail subscribers vs. Yahoo subscribers. This is the most interesting stat!
  
  
  Gmail users vote for Obama and Yahoo users vote for Romney!Tweet 
  
  I honestly would have had no idea if you had asked me to predict this one. We do see stats that say more technical people prefer Google products as compared to Yahoo products, so maybe Obama has appealed to the tech nerds? But that's OK. This is America. You tech nerds can vote any darn way you please. Click the infographic below to see the stats up close.

Hey nimrod, stop abusing your email subscribers
Last year I did some consulting work with a political party (and they shall remain anonymous) about their email marketing strategy. I must say that I will not relish the opportunity again. Political parties are motivated so strongly and on such a finite timetable that they push way too much email to their subscribers, resulting in the poor statistics outlined here. They just have not gotten the message about how to use email marketing without abusing it.

Are you wasting your money with email marketing?

Click to
enlarge

Just think about how different the influence of all these political emails might have been had both candidates had 98% inbox placement (a deliverability metric to which you should aspire). How much voting influence has been lost because they sent out too much email, too quickly, in excess of what subscribers were expecting? And just look at the results. First of all, large amounts of money have been spent to send huge volumes of email that ends up never reaching the subscriber. And more importantly, just think about how much money was not donated to the political party since so much of that email did not reach the subscriber. You still have to pay for email that never reaches the inbox.

Email that doesn't reach the inbox means less revenue for your organization

So what should be your take-away from reading this article?
You need to be convinced, or convince your executives, to stop looking at things like the number of subscribers and how often you can email them. Instead, focus on email marketing best practices. What do your subscribers want from your emails? How often do they want to receive it?

Have you been bombarded by political emails? What was your favorite one? Tell us in the comments.

Image credit: Walt Stoneburner under Creative Commons

Really sneaky HTML problems in your email marketing campaigns and how to fix them [INFOGRAPHIC]

Click to view

Litmus* created a really swell infographic to describe common problems that marketers have with the HTML in their mass emails. If you fall into one of these HTML traps, your email may end up in the crapper, or in the spam folder at least. I've taken it upon myself to "liberate" the content from their infographic and discuss it for you here below. Those guys at Litmus love me, so I don't expect any backlash or gnashing of teeth.
Tweet
Embedded media that doesn't play well with others
Litmus Marketing Director Justine Jordan says, "one of the most common problems we see is the inclusion of certain types of media within an email that aren't supported in that environment. These are things such as video embedded in the email itself, flash, rollovers (and other types of javascript), and even simple surveys." Most of these types of media need to be avoided when sending mass email. But, if you really want that funny cat video embedded in your email (and by "funny" I mean stupid), why not just embed an image that looks like a (stupid) embedded cat video instead? When the image is clicked, the recipient is taken to a website where the actual video exists and can be played. Where surveys are concerned, instead of placing the survey in your email content you should simply include a link to the website that hosts the survey.

Instead of embedding a video in an email, place an image
 like the above in your email body, recipients will simply
click it and visit the webpage to play the video

Problems with images going AWOL and such
The most common issue with the display of an HTML email is that images are blocked or don't show up due to some boneheaded HTML coding : ). Actually, some of these HTML mistakes aren't boneheaded at all. There are some hidden reasons why you have a problem with displaying images in your emails.

1. Don't put text on top of background images
   Background images aren't supported in Outlook 2007 and beyond. Why? No one knows, or cares. But what we do know is that some nimnod at Microsoft decided to be a pain in the background images. Instead of using a background image, and then typing text in the table cell across the top of it, why not just use Photoshop to add the text onto the image itself? If you insist on using a background image, as a precaution you could use a background color to help protect you when background images are misbehaving. That won't solve your problem, but it will look better and it is better than receiving a sharp stick in the eye from your CEO.
2. Image blocking
   Many email programs disable images until the user clicks "Show Images". You could avoid this whole problem if you ask your recipients to add you to their address book. Once in their address book, your images should display fine. Tell your recipients that if they don't add your From address to their address book that they won't get to have a cookie and hear a bedtime story. That ought to show them.
3. Gaps under images
   Every once in a while you'll see an email with a large image where the image is visibly split into parts. If you need to slice apart your large image so that it loads better, and you see a gap between them, add this CSS code:
   <img src="http://www.thoughtreach.com/images/logo.jpg style="display:block;">
4. Blue hyperlink borders around images
   Sorry, this one has been around for so long that if you are still seeing this in your HTML emails and don't know why it happens, you are a nimbleweed. This happens only when you are using an image as a hyperlink. If you didn't specifically tell the image to not have a stupid blue border around it, an ugly blue border will appear. Simply add code like this to your image hyperlinks
   <img src="http://www.thoughtreach.com/images/logo.jpg border="0">
   
   Sorry about the whole "nimbleweed" comment. I wanted to apologize before you went off and told the teacher on me.
5. Image file not supported
   This one is actually not too boneheaded at all. It's not uncommon for a marketer to want to use a .png image in their HTML. Why? Because it's such a small file size compared to .jpg and loads quickly. Unfortunately if you want all email clients to display your images, you need to use only gif or jpg images. Don't use png, bmp, or tiff, no matter how pretty they are.

Fonts displaying incorrectly 
While we all appreciate your CEO's love for fonts like "Jester" or "Kidsprint", any font you choose for your HTML will only display if that font is also installed on the recipient's computer. Since your recipient doesn't hold the same appreciation for your CEO's quirky love of those fonts, you'll need to stick to using normal-person fonts (and by "normal" I mean boring). The more boring fonts are highly supported in all email clients. These include Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Trebuchet.

Silly fonts in your HTML email
don't show up that way

Gmail can be a pain in the head tag
Using CSS formatting in the head tag of your email will cause your email to not display properly in Gmail. The gods over at Google will take it upon themselves to strip out any CSS formatting in the head of your emails. To have your formatting display properly at Gmail (and everywhere else), use inline formatting in your HTML code. Your HTML email will display properly and you'll have fresher breath too (not sure what that means but that's what Loraine in the cube next to me told me to write).

Example of what not to do:
<head>
     <style type="text/css">
     hr {color:sienna;}
     p {margin-left:20px;}
     body {background-image:url("images/back40.gif");}
     </style>
</head>

Instead use this CSS code inline with your paragraph:
<p style="color:sienna;margin-left:20px">This is a paragraph.</p>

Default values
Some email clients will decide layout options related to borders and spacing for you. To prevent this, be sure to specify them first. For example, go ahead and set a table's cellspacing and border to be equal to zero such as
<table cellspacing="0" border="0">

That way, you're telling the ornery email client to not mess with your spacing, and to shut up about it.

Validate your HTML code
Some email clients are picky about the validity of the underlying HTML. If your HTML isn't exactly formed as they expect it, they will go off and cry in a corner. To validate your HTML use W3C's HTML validator tool. I'll be honest with you, this validator tool can be a pain so don't say I didn't warn you.

If you've read all the way through this article, you either are really serious about your email, or you wish you could get that ten minutes of your life back. You deserve a cookie. Since I don't have one, "liberate" one from the break room.

Read next: Learn how to save time by posting to multiple social networks quickly using one simple tool.

* About Litmus: Litmus has great toolsets for previewing your HTML emails across many different email clients before you even send it. They also have spam filter tests and email analytics. Not bad for a company made out of thin paper that changes color when you dip it in a liquid base solution...... : )

How to double your Gmail inbox placement rates

We all talk about the little tweaks we can do to help increase our inbox placement rates at the major ISPs like Gmail. But what if you are having trouble getting into the inbox at Gmail at all? What if we asked the question "how can I DOUBLE my inbox placement rates at Gmail"? AND, what if I further asked "why can't Loraine at our office not keep a simple Ficus tree alive?" Well it is possible to answer the first two questions, anyway. If you are willing to incorporate some personalization tactics that specifically target Gmail subscribers with their own campaign (and yes, this means doing some extra work), then you may be successful. If you aren't willing to do any extra work, then I've got a great piece of advice for you--> read someone else's blog : ).
Tweet

Double your Gmail inbox placements
If you have been paying any attention to your inbox placement rates at the ever-fickle Gmail, you have noticed a decrease which means your readers aren't reading your email anymore.
Two B2C retailers that depend on their email newsletters getting through to the inbox are ProFlowers and Shari's Berries. The Magill Report witnessed these retailers start sending out personalized emails intended just for Gmail subscribers. The subject lines of these emails were things like "Gmail Users Weekend Sales Event: 59% off a Gift Mom will Remember Forever". The results from these highly targeted campaigns were quite impressive. ProFlowers' Gmail inbox placement rate jumped from 35.9 percent to 71.8 percent (eDataSource).  And, in subsequent campaigns, the inbox rates were at 95%! Shari's Berrys also provided graphical instructions on how to report the email message as Not Spam (see the graphic below).

Click to enlarge

If you are having trouble sending to Gmail
First set up a few free Gmail test accounts to monitor what happens when your campaign are sent there and then try the below:

• Remove any subscriber from your list that has not opened/clicked one of your messages in the last 90 days
• Be sure your email service provider doesn't send your emails too quickly to Gmail.  A good ESP will know the appropriate speed.
• Use email authentication
• Use a spam check tool prior to launch to help spot problems
• Check with your ESP to ensure they participate in feedback loops*
• Check your Gmail test accounts and be sure that the emails are received, and that images are displayed.  If emails are not in the inbox, stop!  Don't send the rest of the campaign until you know what the problem is. You may be able to narrow down the problem:
• Send your campaign in small segments, dividing the content into two parts. 
• If both sections of your content fail to reach the inbox, continue dividing the content into smaller pieces and resend. Repeat this process with subsequently smaller sections of content until what content is driving the spam filtering issue. 

If your campaigns are still not reaching the inbox at Gmail, consider engaging the tools and services of inbox placement companies such as  Litmus, Email on Acid (yes!, that's actually the name of their company), Return Path, and Pivotal Veracity (IBM Unica Email Optimization).  They can help you see exactly what is happening with your emails and provide advice on what else you can do.

Read next: Gmail gives marketers a second chance
If you are still trying to send your bulk emails using Outlook, you may want to read this article

* Feedback loops are where the ESP receives the complaint list from the ISP of any recipients that clicked the Report Spam button. These subscribers should be automatically removed from your list. Gmail does not participate in feedback loops, but this is an important fact to know about your ESP.

ESP- email service provider
ISP- internet service provider