It’s no secret the single-most effective way to find new customers is through email marketing. But Is the subject line the most important part of writing a persuasive message? According to the 2014 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, the most successful email marketing campaigns are the ones with the highest open rates – and the least effective efforts aren’t opened at all.
Getting a foot in the door with email
Silverpop broke its analysis into different industries. Healthcare boasted the highest open rates, with 26.2 percent. It also featured some other impressive marks in different categories:
Opens per opener: 2.05
Click-through rate: 4.8 percent
Clicks per clicker: 1.62
Unsubscribe rate: 0.105 percent
By contrast, the industry with the worst overall open rate (15 percent), travel and leisure, also fared extremely poorly by other statistical measures, coming in last or near the bottom in the same categories:
Opens per opener: 1.40
Click-through rate: 2.2 percent
Clicks per clicker: 1.33
Unsubscribe rate: 0.168 percent
Ultimately, it seems that though emails can be optimized for clicks, the basic test all of them must pass is if they’re opened – period.
How to get customers to open their hearts – and their emails
If a portion of any given company’s prospects aren’t going to open emails, how can marketers maximize the eyeballs they DO get on their marketing messages?
- Target the right audience. As Brafton reported, familiarity and relevance are essential to avoid seeing emails completely ignored. If customers don’t know the company sending them content and don’t recall signing up for it, it barely stands a chance.
- Make inbox messages eye-catching. Visual media isn’t difficult to include in email marketing materials, so pictures, videos and even just properly formatted text can help brands see click-through rates six times the average.
- Include a company name in the headline. At Brafton, we’ve found a correlation between personalized headlines and higher open rates. This effect is particularly pronounced among B2B clients.
- Experiment with send times. There’s plenty of conventional wisdom about when to send emails, but as Silverpop’s data shows, every industry is different. Try sending different batches of email marketing messages at different times and see which ones have the best open rates and clicks.
