Smart e-Commerce: e Business Information

Email Deliverability:

Deliverability is getting the email into the inbox. Unfortunately not, there is a lot more to it than that. However there's no reason why you can’t have a deliverability rate above 95%. Your email service provider (ESP) should be able to provide this statistic for you as well as do the following:

• Warm up dedicated IP addresses
• Set up feedback loops for Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail                                                         
• Have your IP address white-listed
• Give you (as the client of the ESP) the option to move shared IPs if a bad sender is affecting deliverability for all

Email Open Rate:

An email open is tracked by a 1×1 hidden GIF image your ESP automatically adds when an email is sent. When this image is downloaded an open is tracked. Therefore, if images are automatically disabled then no open is tracked.

However, the open rate is an ambiguous reporting measure and is not always indicative of a good email marketing campaign. For instance, if your HTML email is designed with a good text-to-image ratio people can still read your email without downloading the images. In this situation opens are NOT tracked.

Email Click-Through Rate (CTR):

An email click-through is tracked using a redirect to the ESP server. This redirect passes information about the member id, mailing id and URL id which allows the ESP to record who clicked on the email, which email it was and what link was clicked on. Thus, the CTR is a stronger indicator of email success because it is a more reliable tracking method.

Email Subject Lines:

This is normally the first thing someone receiving your email will see – so make it good. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, “You have done a lot of testing … what subject line works best?” The answer: it depends on whom, maturity, how they got there, day, date, sector, and it also changes every time you send. The solutions… live testing:

• Select two subject lines
• Open a book on which one is going to generate the best open rate (not for money of course, sweats maybe)
• Send those two subject lines to 20% of your database (10% per subject line)
• Wait an hour
• See which subject line generates the best open rate
• Send that subject line to the remaining 80% of your database
• LIVE split testing, done

Email Frequency & Timing:

What day of the week, time of day, and how many times a week to send email is very important? The old school view was to send Tuesday morning … however that really is old school.

It will depend on many factors (as mentioned above – who, maturity, how they got there, day, date, and sector) and also requires testing.

The method that works well for me is to consider people’s behavior rather than focusing on the day of the week. Think about events that may change behavior. A great example of this is sending an email on pay day – this always generates excellent response rates for obvious reasons.