5 Things (I Learned before 7am) That Will Revolutionise Your Email Marketing

It was still dark when my alarm went off. Why was I getting up so early again? Oh I remember. On the other side of the world Dan Zarella was presenting a webinar on the Science of Email Marketing. A quick (large) coffee later and The Copy Detective was ready to learn. And I am so glad that I did.

Here are my top 5 takeaways from Dan’s presentation, and they will revolutionise your email marketing.

The first revelation was that 88% of people don’t separate their work emails and their personal emails. This dramatically blurs the lines between B2B and B2C email marketing and how you should approach your target market using email.

1. Try sending emails on the weekend

Dan’s research showed that click-through rates actually doubled on the weekend, and unsubscribes peaked on Tuesday, the day when people were trying to eliminate items from their To Do List. So try and hit people in their downtime and see how your results change.

2. Send your email marketing very early in the morning

Readers tackle their inbox first thing in the morning and open rates peak before 7am. 7am! That means your email must be delivered and waiting to be read before the day begins.

3. Use lots of links in your emails

The data showed that the more links you give the reader, the higher the click-through rate. It sounds obvious, doesn’t it? The most interesting result was that unsubscribe rates were not affected. So give your reader lots of opportunities to access your content.

4. Don’t be afraid to send too much email

This was a big surprise for me as I’ve always been cautious of not wearing my reader out. But the research showed that once you send more than 3-4 emails (per month) the unsubscribe rates dramatically reduced. So sending 3 emails or 30 makes no difference as long as you provided targeted and valuable content.

5. Optimise your email marketing for mobile devices

Most of us are getting very used to accessing the internet on our phones, it’s so very important to make sure your content can be read on the go.

Some other revelations to improve your email marketing were:

• New subscribers are your best. Don’t worry when activity tapers off.
• Ask people to “follow you” on social media, not “share your emails”.
• Give your subscribers special access and tell them it’s exclusive.
• Populate the sender field with a recognisable name.
• 28% of readers didn’t believe the unsubscribe link worked, so provide some assurance that it will.

Where did the email marketing data come from?

Dan partnered with MailChimp to use the data from over 9 billion emails. Bill-lion. He also held focus groups for more qualitative data, along with surveys. He was quick to remind us that our own target markets might be different but you have to agree, it’s a pretty solid basis for his conclusions.

However I think it’s more important to know your target audience and do what works for them, and analyse your own stats to see how you’re doing!

There were more conclusions, and lots of graphs to back it all up. You can read the slides from The Science of Email Marketing here.

But tell me, are any of these points a surprise to you? And which ones will you action in your email marketing?

Belinda (AKA The Copy Detective)

Image credit: Alarm Clock by Alan Cleaver Flickr Creative Commons