Now that I am more involved in the marketing at work, there are lots of little details that I find simply cannot be neglected..
Last night I stayed up until around 3AM drafting up our new promotional e-mail. I studied everything from our past e-mails including content and compared statistics. We make an important note of not sending any more than 4-6 emails a year such as what we had talked about in class– Nowadays people are very cautious of giving out their emails and sick of spam and “deals.” It was particularly crucial for me to come up with something engaging because MailChimp (an internet marketing channel) will ban the company from sending emails if too many people unsubscribe.
I was amazed to find what a difference the subject of the email makes– Comparing two different emails: one named “December newsletter 2010,” the other named “Free _______ special.” The open rate jumped from 38% to 65%.. that is almost double the numbers! In addition to open rate, MailChimp also keeps track of the click rate (onto whatever you have linked in the email), if any emails have bounced (categorized into: soft and hard), and unopened. Any resemblance of spam, it will get filtered into junk automatically. I had to also make sure it is sent out during work hours on a weekday as a lot of people read their emails at work. If we don’t have right timing, we could lose a lot of potential sales if people don’t have enough time to plan for the promotion period (one day in our case), or they could miss it completely. After writing paragraphs into the email, I realized people filter through their emails so quick they probably won’t even read through the whole email- So I simply added a WHO, WHAT, WHEN at the very top and explained further with fine print down at the bottom. Do you guys think that is helpful or unnecessary? I am still navigating and learning how to catch consumer attention, but MailChimp really does a great job in making it user friendly.
As I am blogging this post right now my open rate has already reached almost 10% with click rate of 2% (which helps with SEO) and I sent it less than half hour ago 🙂 I am excited to see how this turns out! Wish me luck!