There isn’t one! Sorry it’s true. Think about it. There must be a infinite number of combination of content out there in the emails you get. Can you sum all of them up with the same subject line? No. The same runs true here. However there are a few things you could to “help” with your open rates. People who are new to email marketing often ask us, “What is the best subject line for me to use?” or “How should I write my subject lines so that more recipients will open my emails?” So we have got some examples for you to look at to get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. The “highest” open rates were in the range of 60%-87%, while the “lowest” performers fell in the dismal 1%-14% range. Do you see a pattern below?
Best Open Rates (60%-87%)

* [COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter
* Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 – Nov 4)
* [COMPANYNAME] Staff Shirts & Photos
* [COMPANYNAME] May 2009 News Bulletin!
* [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – February 2009
* [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – January 20096 [ *|FIRSTNAME|* *|LASTNAME|* ]
* [COMPANYNAME] and [COMPANYNAME] Invites You!
* Happy Holidays from [COMPANYNAME]
* ATTENTION [COMPANYNAME] Staff!
* ATTENTION [COMPANYNAME] West Staff!!
* Invitation from [COMPANYNAME]
* [COMPANYNAME] Jan/Feb 2009 Newsletter
* Website news – Issue 3
* Upcoming Events at [COMPANYNAME]
* [COMPANYNAME] Councils: Letter of Interest
* [COMPANYNAME] Coffee Exchange – Post-Katrina Update
* We’re Throwing a Party
* October 2009 Newsletter
* [COMPANYNAME]: 02.10.09
* [COMPANYNAME] Racing Newsletter

Worst Open Rates (1%-14%)

* Last Minute Gift – We Have The Answer
* Valentines – Shop Early & Save 10%
* Give a Gift Certificate this Holiday
* Valentine’s Day Salon and Spa Specials!
* Gift Certificates – Easy & Elegant Giving – Let Them Choose
* Need More Advertising Value From Your Marketing Partner?
* [COMPANYNAME] Pioneers in Banana Technology
* [COMPANYNAME] Moves You Home for the Holidays
* Renewal
* Technology Company Works with [COMPANYNAME] on Bananas Efforts
* [COMPANYNAME] Update – A Summary of Security and Emergency Preparedness News
* Now Offering Banana Services!
* It’s still summer in Tahoe!
* [COMPANYNAME] endorses [COMPANYNAME] as successor
* [COMPANYNAME] Holiday Sales Event
* The Future of International Trade
* [COMPANYNAME] for your next dream home.
* True automation of your Banana Research
* [COMPANYNAME] Resort – Spring into May Savings
* You Asked For More…

Observations

On the “best” list, you’ll notice the subject lines are pretty straightforward. They’re not very “salesy” or “pushy” at all. Some people might even say they’re “boring.” On the “worst” list however, notice how the subject lines read like headlines from advertisements you’d see in the Sunday paper. They might look more “creative,” but their open rates are horrible. It’s as if those email marketers assumed that subject lines have to jump off the screen and “GRAB THE READER’S ATTENTION!” or something. Unfortunately, most people get so much junk mail in their inbox, anything that even hints of spam gets thrown away immediately.
Setting Expectations

So does that mean your subject lines should be really stale and un-creative to get high open rates? We don’t think so. We actually saw some campaigns that used more “creative” subject lines (like the ones on the “bad” list) but they had pretty decent open rates. The difference seemed to be in the expectations that were set for the emails. Email newsletters, or eShots are for soft-selling. They build relationships with your customers, and they’re great if your products have a very long sales cycle. Use them to slowly soften your customers for the sale, or to make them feel really good about your brand. If your recipients signed up for these kinds of emails, don’t expect them to be very enthusiastic when, out of the blue, you send an email with a subject line like, “10% Discount! Open Now!” For newsletters, keep your subject lines simple, straightforward, and consistent. On the other hand, if your subscribers specifically opted-in to receive “special offers and promotions” from your company, there’s nothing wrong with saying there’s a “10% off e-coupon inside.” They’ll be expecting a “hard sell” from you. It’s when marketers send promotional emails to their entire “newsletter” list when things go wrong. The idea is to create a totally separate opt-in list for those who want to receive promotional emails. Furthermore, segment your promotions list into smaller, more focused groups before you send your campaign (don’t send an offer for purses and high-heel shoes to the men on your list).
The Secret Formula for Subject-Lines

So what’s our advice for email subject lines? This is going to sound “stupid simple” to a lot of people, but here goes: Your subject line should (drum roll please): Describe the subject of your email. Yep, that’s it. Always set your subscribers’ expectations during the opt-in process about what kinds of emails they’ll be receiving. Don’t confuse email newsletters with promotions. If your email is a newsletter, put the name and issue of the newsletter in your subject line. Because that’s what’s inside. If your email is a special promotion, tell them what’s inside. Either way, just don’t write your subject lines like advertisements. When it comes to email marketing, the best subject lines tell what’s inside, and the worst subject lines sell what’s inside.

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Related posts:

1. All about email open rates
2. Using A/B testing to boost your email response
3. Using the preference center to retain & target your subscribers

We’ve made it much easier to personalise your email campaigns with regular content tags such as ‘First name’ and ‘Email’. But with this update, you can now also add custom fields from your subscriber list’ and lots of variations of today’s date. The former should be especially useful if you’re planning to personalise your email with nice details such as the subscriber’s location, interests or even a message like, “We’re glad you were referred to us via a friend, please let everyone know about our store, too!” (where ‘a friend’ is the value in a ‘Referrers’ custom field):

We made it really easy to add quick links such as ‘Forward to a Friend’ and ‘Unsubscribe’ via the editor – they’re all available via a drop-down menu. In addition, we’ve given you more control over colors and formatting via the toolbar:

You can resize your editor window, too:

It’s been a big week for email templates and the WYSIWYG editor in general. Let us know what you think of the updates – we hope it makes working with email templates a much easier and more time-efficient task.

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1. Using the preference center to retain & target your subscribers
2. Using A/B testing to boost your email response
3. Create the Perfect Email Newsletter – Subject Lines

Our approval process is in place to ensure that everyone enjoys reliable deliverability and service. By having our approval team check that lists abide by our anti-spam policy, we can maintain permission best practice and great deliverability for all campaigns.

If you import a list above your current approved list size, then you will see a warning like this (“Your account has not been approved for a list of this size”):

Once you have imported the list, an email will be sent to us, explaining that you will need to go through our approval process before you can send a campaign.

You will have to have to go through our approval process. This involves answering two short questions regarding your list, which we will then review prior to approving your first campaign to a list of this size:

You will only have to do this once in order to send to your new subscriber list. Read more about how the approval process works.

Please note:

The approval process is actually a campaign approval just as much as it is a list approval. Meaning we actually need to see the actual campaign being sent (in its completed form) as part of our review, that’s why we can’t just check the list when it’s imported.

This is important for us to be able to know that the creative itself meets our policies (isn’t content that violates our terms of use, has a visible unsubscribe, etc) and is relevant to your list permissions.

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Related posts:

1. Using the preference center to retain & target your subscribers
2. Segments are good for you
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~ Nick Robb, Switzerland Travel Centre Ltd.

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What is an open rate?

Open rate is a measure of how many people on an email list open (or view) a particular email campaign. The open rate is normally expressed as a percentage, and at Travel Mailer we calculate it as follows:

So a 20% open rate would mean that of every 10 emails delivered to the inbox, 2 were actually opened.

How do you measure an open?

When each email is sent out, we automatically add a piece of code that requests a tiny, invisible image from our web servers. So when a reader opens the email, the image is downloaded, and we can record that download as an open for that specific email.

It is important to understand that the open rate is not a 100% accurate measure. Recording an ‘open’ can only happen if the readers email client is capable of displaying html with images, and that option is turned on. So if you are sending text-only emails, there is no way to record open rates (the exception is if they actually click a link). Similarly, people reading your html email without images showing will not be recorded as opens.

Another issue is that your readers may have a preview pane in their email client. That preview pane might be displaying your email automatically (and therefore downloading the images) without the reader ever having to click on it or read it.

So you should never take your open rate as a hard and fast number, because you can never know the true figure. It is much better used as general guide, and as a way of measuring the trends on your email campaigns.

What is a typical open rate?

Really, there is no typical open rate. The rate obtained for any list, or group of lists will depend on how it was measured, when it was sent, the size of the list and a zillion other potential variables. There is no shortage of benchmark numbers out there, but even between benchmark figures you will find big variation in the reported open rates.

So instead of giving a specific percentage, we’ve come up with the following chart.

There are certainly some broad trends in open rates.

As list size goes up, the open rate tends to fall; possibly because smaller companies are more likely to have personal relationships with their list subscribers.

Companies and organizations that are focusing on enthusiasts and supporters, like churches, sport teams and non profits see higher open rates

More specific niche topics, like some manufacturing areas also typically have higher open rates than emails on broader topics

Why don’t you just give me a number!

So what if you or your clients just have no idea of what is a reasonable open rate? Based on everything we have seen here at Travel Mailer, and on the other research out there, the bottom line is this:

If you are getting an open rate between 20% and 40%, you are probably somewhere around average.

Very few lists of reasonable size are getting much above 50% open rates from normal campaigns. Your list may have some specific factors that give you higher rates; if so, well done.

However, don’t expect to be getting 80% open rates. People are too busy, inboxes are too full and the measurements are technically limited. If, after all that, you are still interested in seeing specific figures, see the footer for some references you can browse through.

How can I increase my open rate?

There are a ton of elements you can vary to try to entice more of your subscribers to open up your emails. Here are just a few things you could try:

Experiment with your subject lines: Try including details about the content of the email right in the subject line, instead of using your standard subject.

Send on a different day: Are your subscribers too busy on a Wednesday morning to read your email, leaving it languishing down the inbox? Maybe a Friday afternoon email would be welcomed.

Get the important content up the top: Remember that many people will see a preview of your email before deciding to open it or ignore it. Make sure your email is recognizable, and that your key points are in the top third.

The typical open rates in the chart above were derived from Travel Mailer’s own figures.

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1. Create the Perfect Email Newsletter – Subject Lines
2. Using A/B testing to boost your email response
3. Using the preference center to retain & target your subscribers

The preference center in a nutshell

Even if you’ve had an existing subscriber list for a while now, collecting preference information and giving subscribers the option of changing their preferences instead of simply unsubscribing is easy, with a little know-how as to how segments work. In an earlier blog post, we discussed how useful segments can be – if you haven’t tried segmenting your lists yet, do give this post a read.

Setting preferences is akin to allowing your subscribers to subscribe and unsubscribe to sub-lists – a subscriber to a widget store newsletter may be interested in Arduinos, but not Faraday cages, and therefore may only want to receive newsletters solely about Arduinos. Having a preference center allows the subscriber to state this:

Another benefit to setting up a preference center is a reduction in email churn, being the number of emails in your list that become inactive as people discard their email addresses. On average, 15-25% of all valid email addresses are discarded each year as people move to a different ISP or change jobs – with a preference center, subscribers can change their subscribed email address without completely unsubscribing from your list.

Setting up the preference center

In this example, we will set up a preference center with the three interest categories above, being ‘Arduinos’, ‘Faraday Cages’ and ‘Gewgaws’.

In your account, click on ‘Manage Subscribers’, then your subscriber list, then click ‘Custom Fields’. Under ‘Edit field’, create a new field with Data Type, “Multiple Options (can select many)’ and enter your desired preferences. Ensure “This field should be visible to recipients when they edit their settings in the preference center” is checked:

Subscribers will now be able to subscribe to these preferences, and you will be able to segment your subscriber list accordingly:

Customizing the preference center

To change the colors, header graphic, message and language of the preference center, click on ‘Client Settings’, then ‘Preference Center’. You can also preview the preference center:

Adding a link to the preference center in your email

Linking to your preference center is as easy as adding the following tags to your email content. When we send your campaign, we’ll convert this into a personalized link for each of your subscribers.

HTML emails -

this will be a link

Plain text emails -

[preferences]

Note that the preference center is only available to subscribers once the campaign is sent – in order to test the preference center link, you will need to send the campaign to subscriber list that includes you as a subscriber.

Editing your subscribe form

When creating a subscribe form, you can also add custom fields so that subscribers can state their preferences when they sign up for your email. In ‘Manage Subscribers’, click on your subscriber list, then, ‘Create a subscribe form’. Check the custom field you wish to add, generate the code and you’re off:

So.. How do I get my subscribers to edit their preferences?

Using our above example, say you wanted to start sending the special-interest newsletters (‘Arduinos’, ‘Gewgaws’…) to your subscribers. Here are some tactics you could try:

For existing subscribers – Consider sending an introductory email, suggesting that your subscribers update their preferences in order to receive more relevant updates on their favorite products. Also remind them that they can change preferences or their subscribed email address at any time. All future emails should contain a link to the preference center.

For new subscribers - In the confirmation, or welcome message, make sure the subscriber is made aware that they can change their preferences, or unsubscribe at any time. It doubly helps if you have already edited your subscribe form to reflect the preferences on offer.

Finally…

Preference centers are a very powerful addition to any email campaign as they not only encourage subscriber retention, but allow you to profile your subscriber list by interest, gender, or whatever field you please.

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2. Using A/B testing to boost your email response
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What is an A/B Test?

An A/B test involves two differing emails being sent out to a small portion of your subscriber list, with the most successful (‘winner’) email being chosen from the two after a defined period of time. The winner is then sent to the remainder of your subscribers.

You may have heard this practice being described as ’10/10/80 split’ or ‘multivariate’ testing (however the latter involves changing multiple parts of your campaign). Perhaps you have heard reasons why people don’t use it, such as ‘it’s too hard to do’, or, ‘by the time I get the results from the initial test, it will be too late’. The good news is that we’ve set up a very powerful and easy-to-use interface for your to conduct A/B split campaigns. As the results arrive in real-time, you don’t have to wait until the following day to select your winning email; in fact, we’ll send the winner out automatically.

So… Why test?

There are a number of great reasons why you should optimise your campaigns using A/B testing, including:

The chance to experiment and learn from different subject lines – what will produce the better open rate, ‘Receive 20% off all products at ABC Store’, or ‘Discounts on all products at ABC Store’?
The opportunity to decide what email content is most relevant and responsive – Is layout A better than B? What call to action will work best?
Deciding which From name is best – Do you go corporate ‘ABC Store’, or personal ‘Bill Storeowner’?
No matter what you decide to test, A/B testing will always provide you with useful feedback on your campaigns. For example, you will soon find that the process of choosing the ‘perfect’ subject will rapidly become less of a guessing game and more of an empirical study.

Creating an A/B test campaign

Creating an A/B test campaign is similar to creating a regular campaign – after you click the ‘Create a new campaign’ button, you will see two tabs beneath ‘Step 1: Define the Campaign and Sender’. Click the ‘A/B split campaign tab’ and you will be on your way:

In this example, we’ll be selecting two different subject lines. You will be required to enter differing subject lines for Version A and B of this campaign. You can also personalize the subject line with the recipient’s first name, last name or full name:

Once satisfied, complete ‘Step 2.1: Select the format for this campaign’ as you would on a regular campaign. If you have chosen to send two differing emails, you will be presented with the option to include both of them on this step. Next, you will move onto defining recipients. At ‘Step 2.1 – Select the recipients for this campaign’, select your subscriber list as you would for a regular campaign, then click the ‘Define A/B Split’ button:

In ‘Step 4.1 – Size of test and how you’ll decide the winner’, you can define using the slider what percentage of your subscriber list will receive the initial A/B test emails, then what percentage will receive the winning version. These percentages (A/B/Winner) are entirely up to you, however they cannot be smaller than 1/1/98%, or larger than 25/25/50%. Commonly, 10/10/80% splits are used:

Secondly, you can define what criteria will be used to select the winner. You can select from Open rate, Total unique clicks, or Total clicks on a selected link. This will map back to how you will finally gauge the success of the email campaign, for example, if you are looking to drive visitors to your online store, you may want to select ‘Total unique clicks’ as the criteria for selecting a winner.

Finally, you can select the number of hours or days across which you want to run the A/B test. The default is to ‘Select a winner after 6 hours’, however depending how time-sensitive your campaign is, you may want to select more or less. Note: Setting a testing period of less than a few hours may impact the reliability of the test, as there may be insufficient click and open data generated to accurately determine a winner.

Once you’re done, click ‘Next’.

You will then be presented with a snapshot of the email campaign, including the two subject lines defined earlier. Review, then click ‘Test and define delivery’:

In ‘Step 5.1 – Test your campaign’, you will have the opportunity to test your campaign prior to sending it just as you would a regular campaign. Likewise for ‘Step 5.2 – Schedule campaign delivery’. It’s time to get sending!

Sending and monitoring an A/B test campaign

The excitement all happens once you’ve sent out your email campaign – and at this point, you will see the real-time presentation of results to be quite different from that of regular email campaign sends:

Not only will you be able to see how each version of your creative is performing in the test, but upon completion, you will be able to view the total benefit gained from running the test. This is an excellent way to admire your own handiwork, as well as learn how differing approaches to subject line, content and the from line can alter the results of an email campaign.

This is the first in a series of posts on A/B tests, which we hope will assist you in making your email campaigns more effective (and maybe even make testing fun). Feel free to discuss this post via the comments below.

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1. All about email open rates
2. Create the Perfect Email Newsletter – Subject Lines
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What is a segment?

A segment is a subset of one of your existing subscriber lists. Simply speaking, it’s a group that can be defined by you, based on criteria such as:

• If the subscriber clicked a link in a previous campaign
• If the subscriber joined your list prior or a specific date
• A match with any of your custom fields (eg. Subscriber lives in Berkeley)

Lets say you’re running a coffee club meet in Berkeley. Your list may contain a lot of other coffee club subscribers from across the country, but your email is only relevant to subscribers living in Berkeley. That’s where list segmentation can come to the rescue.

But that’s not all…

There are oodles of other reasons why you should use list segmentation, including:

• Sending introductory offers to, or asking for feedback from new subscribers
• Re-awakening subscribers that have not responded to your last few campaigns
• Limiting your subscriber list when sending a campaign to subscribers who responded to a previous campaign
• Testing a new subject line or call-to-action on subscribers who did not respond to a previous campaign
• Sending nice notes to subscribers on their birthday

Segmentation can create more personal, targeted interactions between you and the subscriber, as well as minimize list fatigue. Secondly, it’s a great way to get in touch with specific groups such as inactive subscribers, who may simply need a different kind of prompting.

So, where do we start?

We’re going to pick up again with the example of a coffee club meet in Berkeley. Lucky for us, our subscriber list includes the custom field, ‘Suburb’, so we will be able to filter and segment our list using ‘BERKELEY’ as criteria.

Start by clicking the ‘Manage Subscribers’ tab and in the ‘List’ column, click on your subscriber list. You will now be able to view all the subscribers in your list. To define a segment of this group, click ‘Segments’.

On the ‘Manage segments’ page, click ‘Create a new segment’. You will then be asked to enter a name for your new segment. Make it something meaningful, like ‘Subscribers in Berkeley’. Now we will create the first rule for our new segment. From the ‘Create your first rule based on…” drop-down, select ‘Suburb’ and click ‘Add Rule’.

We now want to specify that we will be selecting subscribers from Berkeley only for this segment. To do this, beneath ‘Suburb’ we will select Suburb Equals ‘BERKELEY’. You also have the opportunity to add further rules, as well as OR conditions to the rules you specify (e.g. Suburb Equals ‘BERKELEY’ OR Equals ‘OAKLAND’). Once satisfied, click ‘Save and refresh count’. The number of active subscribers that match the criteria and thus, will populate this segment are displayed.

You can now use this segment to send your email to, or alternately, you can view the subscribers’ details or export the list as a CSV or text file. To send your email campaign, simply check the segment you want to send to when defining your recipients.

And voila. 87 Berkley coffee drinkers and a list of subscribers happy to receive one less irrelevant email.

So… It all looks like win to me.

Not so fast. While there are countless advantages to clever segmentation of your subscriber lists, the above-average delivery and response rates for certain segments may tempt you to send these groups plenty of email, while ignoring the rest of your subscribers. Remember to share the load – even if a subscriber hasn’t responded to your last two campaigns, that’s no reason to segment them out of your next send. These dormant subscribers may be simply waiting for a more compelling offer. Plus, you may run the risk of fatiguing your most valuable subscribers.

Happy segmenting!

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2. Taking the surprises out of the campaign approval process
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