Tweak These Six Email Elements for Better Newsletter Results
By markaSilverpop, a permission email marketing provider, recently released a study examining how various creative elements of an email message effect open and click-through rates. The company collected and analyzed data on 612 emails sent by 403 companies to 100 or more recipients. If you use email as a method of communication for your church or ministry, the findings in this study may help you increase the effectiveness of your next email campaign.
According to Jupiter Research, online users receive an average of 35 emails a day. With all those other messages in your subscribers’ email inboxes fighting for their attention, you need to stand out from all the rest so they choose to open your message. The open rate is what is referred to as how many of your subscribers actually opened your email message.
Here are some techniques that this study found to increase open rates.
1. The From Line
Using a person’s name achieved slightly better results that using the company name as the sender of the email.
2. The Subject Line
Email messages containing the company name or brand achieved better results than messages without a brand or company name. The average open rate for email messages containing a brand or company name was 29% versus an open rate of 22% for messages without a brand or company name. Plan on incorporating the church name and/or the area of ministry that is the subject of the email for your next email dispatch.
3. The Preview Pane
Chances are many of your users are using an email program that features a preview pane. If the user clicks on the subject line in a program such as Outlook Express, a small portion of the email message appears on screen. The size of the preview is totally out of your control, so you’ll need to make good use of that small sliver of the message to intice the reader to open the message or scroll down to read the entire email. According to the study, placing your church’s or ministry’s logo in the upper hand left hand part of the message achieved better open rates than not including a logo.
Congratulations, you’ve used a person’s name, incorporated the church’s name in your subject line, the logo is neatly in the upper left-hand corner of the preview pane. The reader clicks on the message and scans through your carefully written email or newsletter.
If your only goal is to inform your reader, you’ve accomplished your goal. However, many of you have a purpose other than to simply inform the recipient of your email. From encouraging the reader to participate in area of ministry in your church to alerting them that tickets to a church-wide event are almost sold out, you’re hoping the recipient will respond to your message. Your readers’ responses can be measured by the rate at which they click on links in your email that lead to your site. The rate at which they click on the links is referred to as the click-through rate, often abbreviated as CTR.
Here are some suggestions to increase the click-through rate of your email campaign.
4. Images to Text Ratio
Use plenty of images in your messages. Email using more images than text had a response rate almost twice as high as messages containing only text.
5. Format Choices
The newsletter format performs the best. Silverpop’s study placed the different email messages into seven different categories of formats. The categories were: 1 column, 2 columns of equal size, 2 or more unequal size columns, postcard, letter, newsletter, and varied cell blocks.
The winner was the newsletter style. It’s a format I’m sure you’ve seen in your inbox, it incorporates just the right combination of text and images. The CTR of the newsletter was 7.1% versus a CTR of 3.4% for the all text letter format.
6. Hyperlinks in the Message
More links translates to more click-throughs. According to the study, the ideal number of links within an email is between six and 10. Incorporating more than 10 links could have a negative effect and the readers may feel so overwhelmed with the number of links, they choose to not click on any of the links.
For better results from your next email campaign, try these techniques to increase your open rate and bump up the click-through rates.
Source: http://www.silverpop.com/practices/studies/email_creative/index.html
About the writer: Mark Anderson has over 12 years in the sales and marketing field and has spent the last several years focusing on projects involving web design, email marketing, and graphic design. He’s part of the Creative Arts team at Evangelical Free Church of Naperville in Naperville IL.
Mark, great post.
Re: No. 1 — I’ve seen this in action. When I was the comm. director at Midwestern Seminary I started a weekly email newsletter. It went to all our students and was a major strategy of the website redesign project I led.
The email newsletter came from me — sent from my email addy and with my name attached to it, using many of the same points made here.
Anyway, often … I mean, many, many times, new students would come in or I would meet existing students and they would say, “Hey, I get your ‘Updates’ email and love it.”
But for the new students in particular, it REALLY made an impression on them. They had somebody — a real living human — that they felt somehow connected to instead of an “institution.”