October 08 2006

Email success - focus leads to success

Recent research (quoted via e-Consultancy.com) shows that the greater the focus on targeting your customers and the more concise and relevant the message, the greater the conversion. Whether you call this "focus" or personalisation is a matter of scale - either way, the results justify the gut feeling that relevance leads to conversion success.

Graham Charlton, a researcher at e-consultancy.com, kindly summarises the report's findings for us:

The report was based on over 200 million emails sent in the first 6 months of 2006. It revealed that emails sent on Mondays, Tuesdays and weekends achieved higher open and click rates, and that most recipients will open an email within a few hours of delivery, meaning that companies should expect the majority of customer responses within 2-3 days.

Subject lines were significant: 28.03% of recipients opened emails with personalised subject lines, and 6.23% clicked on them. This is compared to the 19.10% open and 3.28% click rate for average emails.

Shorter subject lines are also important, emails with subject lines of 35 characters or less were be opened by 24.02% of compared with 16.93% for those with longer subject lines.

Targeted and well-managed lists emerged as a key factor in the report, with higher open and click rates achieved by campaigns targeted at fewer than 500 recipients.

In the internet category, 41.96% of emails targeted at fewer than 500 customers were opened, and 26.79% were clicked on. This contrasts with 13.81% opened and 5.2% clicked on for campaigns of 1,000 or more recipients.