I've often had people coming to me trying to understand why a certain campaign worked or why it was a failure.
I decided to shed some light on what your stats actually mean and why most of them is not worth the paper it's printed on
I want to look at the 4 main elements of any email blast / eshot:
1. From email address
2. Subject line
3. Creative (Images)
5. Layout
6. Body Copy (message you are trying to get across)
I also want to use the following success criteria's:
1. Delivery rate
2. Open rate
4. Click rate
I deliberately left out any website / landing page success criteria's as I want to focus on email.
Ok so lets first look at delivery rate.
Delivery Rate.
A successful delivery is when the email sender's server gets a "message accepted" from the receiving server. However this is often a false statistic as accepted by no means mean delivered.
Between acceptance and delivery a number of firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spam devices can intercept and quarantine your message.
This is one of the few places that the creative and bad design can have a major impact. Most anti-spam devices uses "spam signatures"and various holistic scanning methods, first it looks at the from address, subject and the body text. Some will also weigh the content of your email with the amount of coding (HTML) and the ratio of image to text.
So if you have a spam like subject from an invalid email address with overly complex HTML or big images with very little text... well then there is a high probability your message will not be delivered.
So Pretty much all of our configurable can directly impact on the delivery, however a good compliant design will not, but bad inexperienced design will.
Open Rate.
So lets say your email made it past all the anti-spam an anti-virus gauntlets, now we can look at open rates.
Yet again, open rates is a red herring. Why you may ask? well lets look at how you measure an open rate.
Most images are linked in an email, that means the image is stored on the sending email server and a URL link to the image is embedded into the email. Each image will have a unique URL. The moment you open up the email and the image is downloaded the sending server records an "open".
Where is the red herring?
Some people have their email clients set up to automatically download images. So if they have the preview pane on, it will count as an open.
Others, myself included, have automatically download images turned off, so I get a "please click here to download images" message. I often read the email but hardly ever download the images.
So here is the problem, we have some people flagged as an open that never reads it and others flagged as non-openers that actually reads it.
What makes me open the message and download the images? A good, strong, relevant and informative subject line which ties in with the body copy. It does more to get me to open an email than any other single element.
Ok so does the following elements help with the open rate:
1. From email address? yes, fake, nonsensical email address will get your email deleted.
2. Subject line? Yes beyond a doubt. Its the single most important element in an email as its often the only element a person will see.
3. Creative (Images)? Not at all, as you need to actually open the email to see the Images.
4. Layout? Only if the layout presents the information clearly and concisely in text. A layout that's reliant on imagery to deliver the message, will not help at all.
5. Body Copy? Plays a big factor, its the second most important element, after subject line, that will get someone to open the message. Rule of thumb, an email can do without images, but not without text.
Click Rate.
Click rate is probably the only and most reliable measurable you can have in an email campaign.
When someone clicks, it means they're actively engaged and willing to take the next step to find out more.
Everything in an email should be focused on achieving the perfect balance. I have listed them in order of importance.
1. Clear concise messaging.
2. Clear layout with strong intuitive call to actions.
3. Strong, interesting, memorable imagery
The biggest mistake marketeers make is wanting to use new call to action delivery methods or imagery, thereby breaking away from the industry standard approach, In the hope of standing out. Unless your one of the big boys setting the web user interaction standards (facebook, google, twitter etc), stick with what they are doing.
Ok so does the following elements help with the Click rate:
1. From email address? Not really. It might impact on trust and thereby increasing the likelihood that the recipient might click.
2. Subject line? Again, it wont have such a big impact on a click.
3. Creative (Images)? It will help to capture the recipient's attention and draw them into the body copy.
4. Layout? Absolutely, clear message layout with intuitive and visible call to actions will get you those clicks.
5. Body Copy? Yes! why would the recipient even bother clicking if your body copy did not engage them enough to want to take further action.
In conclusion.
As you can see, each success criteria is dependant on various elements. The trick is to get the balance just right. Big strong jaw dropping graphics is useless without engaging copy, and the most amazingly engaging copy is useless if the recipient does not know how to take the next step.
Spend as much time as possible getting the copy and subject lines right and let your designer worry about the pretty pictures. Your copy is the most important aspect of it all.
