It depends. Mark Brownlow has written a fabulous article that articulates the perils of looking for absolutes when it comes to email marketing. Here’s a snippet:
Here are just a few of the questions that (initially) deserve an “it depends”:
- When is the best day to send my emails?
- When is the best time of day to send my emails?
- How often should I send my emails?
- How long should my copy be?
- Should I brand the subject line?
- Should I personalize the subject line?
- What open and click rates should I be happy with?
- The problem is we all like clarity.
So here goes:
Sunday, 8.45am, Once a week, About 300 words, Yes, No, 25% and 10%
You can take false comfort in clear answers. But these answers are based on data and experience that has no relevance to the actual situation you find yourself in. So they are unlikely to get the most out of your efforts. They may even be counterproductive.
Or you can accept the correct answer to all those questions: it depends.
He is absolutely correct. We get these same questions too from our own clients and from now on I think I’ll just forward Mark’s article because he puts it far more eloquently than I could. Overall open rates based on data from many many markets mean very little to economic development marketers. For example: Would you really be happy if your network of partners and clients (likely to be the bulk of an economic development email list) opened your email on average as frequently as a product offer sent to thousands and thousands of faceless customers from a major retailer? Obviously, you’d expect your opens to be much much higher.
The only real measure of success is against yourself, and the only way to arrive at where to set the bar is to vary your content, study how your readership responds to it, rinse and repeat. Sure, you can use universal numbers as a loose starting point, but the real art of email marketing comes in the tweaking of your own content. That in turn comes from really studying how people respond to your campaigns – what links they click, what subject lines work, what amount of content seems most palatable… you get the idea.
The bottom line: Don’t be happy measuring up to grossly generalized targets. Instead, use your last campaign as the standard to beat. That’s the true measure of success.
Tags: economic development newsletters, email, email campaigns, Email Marketing