No man is an iland

So I return from vacation to find the latest MailerMailer report citing average open rates for H2 2009 of 11.2%.

This number has declined every half-year since H1 2004, when it was 26.66%.

Then Litmus reveals that of 4 million opens recorded by their tools, an average 51.1%…”spend less than 2 seconds looking at your email.”

Less than two seconds!

Taken at face value, it seems half a decade of improved understanding, expertise, tools, services and experience, together with tens of thousands of articles and books put out by experts, has resulted in…

Not a lot.

Blimey.

So should you be worried? No…and yes. Here my thoughts…

Image blocking

Open rate drops are partly a consequence of how they are measured. They rely on tiny tracking images, so no open is recorded when images are disabled…even if the recipient reads every word in the message.

So as image blocking was activated by major webmail services and email software manufacturers, open rates declined automatically without implying any equivalent change in actual reader behavior.

But there’s no call for complacency.

Major services and software migrated to default image blocking a while back so recent dips in open rates cannot be explained away like this.

Who cares about open rates?

There’s plenty of debate on the value of open rates as a metric, but all agree it’s a pretty poor absolute measure of email marketing success.

Clicks matter, downloads matter, sales matter.

And email marketing still works, usually competing with search marketing for the title of most effective digital marketing tool.

But if you accept falling open rates as symptomatic of declining attention, then they do still matter.

They matter to newsletter publishers, who need their advertisers’ banners to show up and get seen.

And attention is the start of the chain that leads to all sorts of potential positive outcomes. And not just the traditional online metrics of sales and pageviews.

For example, email also…

• gains you mindshare and awareness
• contributes to the image people have of you and your organization
• encourages people to buy offline
• prompts them to visit your site directly without following an email link

…all of which don’t happen if you don’t first get attention.

Latent value: the nudge effect and the unemotionally subscribed

So declining attention matters.

However, to capture email’s value you don’t need attention all the time. Or even for people to “open” your email.

Dela Quist is more upbeat about low email engagement than most commentators.

He argues that many who open rarely (or not at all) may actually…

“…want to receive your emails, but don’t need your content or offer yet”

In other words, you can’t expect people to avidly consume all your emails. After all, it’s not like banner ads are getting 10% CTR.

An interesting task with your own list is to measure the proportion of recipients who opened at least one email over a given period of time.

You’ll likely discover that the number of intermittent openers is much higher than standalone open rates suggest.

Dela also notes the value of merely landing in the inbox as a driver of action:

“Purchase behavior studies…show spikes over time in purchases from recipients who did not open an email.”

The additional “brand impression” and subject line information can be enough in itself to “nudge” recipients into taking action.

So while we should, of course, work toward improving attention, low levels of engagement are not unexpected. In fact, all things being equal, we would expect open rates (attention) to decline with time.

Most list owners find, for example, that the longer someone is on a list, the less likely they are to open an email.

This chart shows open rates for one B2B newsletter issue for recipients segmented by year of sign-up:

And while attention is limited, competition for attention grows with every passing day…from more senders sending more email and from more alternatives to email.

Averages hide success and opportunity

However, the key phrase is “all things being equal”.

Benchmark open rates come from a mix of senders. Response rates dip with time thanks to fatigue, attrition and competition. So those senders who haven’t changed much, and those still feeling their way with email, will pull averages down.

But there’s a third group actively adjusting and improving their efforts…and seeing open rates and other response metrics rise. I know many blog readers belong to that third group.

Simply, we are each challenged to buck the trend.

Epsilon’s benchmark stats show opens for Q1 2010 higher than Q1 2009. So it’s possible. (Even for those unable to access the kind of tools and resources a typical Epsilon customer might have).

In email marketing, as so often elsewhere, to stand still is to go backwards. And a gentle decline can become a headlong rush as the online landscape grows ever more unforgiving.

And even if a decline leaves you unworried, for the reasons outlined above, why wouldn’t you want to be better than the average?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Open rates and Email marketing strategy

This week was meant to be blog-free, as I’m offline, recharging creative batteries.

But as I cleared out my inbox and blog reader in preparation, an uncomfortable and obvious truth about content presentation struck home and seemed worth a quick riff.

We talk a lot about trust and targeting, personality and permission, reputation, repetition, recency and all sorts of things that play a role in driving a response.

We search for the words that draw people’s attention and pull them along the path that leads to a conversion.

We get all of that right, and yet we forget the conversion barriers that come not from what and when we send, but simply from how the words are arranged on the page.

Giving attention (reading) comes at a cost in time and effort. The greater the perceived effort required, the less chance the recipient will bother.

And the perceived cost begins before a word is read or an image viewed.

Consider this screenshot:

You don’t need to read the words. In fact, you wouldn’t read the words if that was an email. The wall of text is a barrier that few will bother scaling.

No matter how good the writing, how valuable the information, how trusted the source, response is sacrificed because the paragraph length demands more reading effort than some are prepared to commit.

Break up the paragraphs and a wall becomes a series of gentle hurdles.

Just as we break big projects into bite-sized chunks that are easier to tackle, so it is with paragraphs. (My rule of thumb is typically 1-4 lines per paragraph and never more than six).

All that makes common sense, but let’s get in some expert proof. An eye tracking study of article-level page design found…

“that stories with shorter paragraphs got more than twice as many overall eye fixations than those with longer paragraphs”

…and…

“the longer-paragraph format discourages reading and that short-paragraph format overwhelmingly encourages reading”

This paragraph length issue becomes more pressing as screen displays narrow, thanks to the spread of smartphones, netbooks and other mobile devices.

And it’s critical if you want people to read a lot of information. Big word counts can be a barrier in themselves, but less so if the individual text blocks are small.

The love of long paragraphs that blights many a good newsletter comes, I believe, from an essay-based education where we’re taught that a paragraph should be self-contained and cover a single concept, idea or focus. If addressing that focus requires a long paragraph, then so be it.

But we’re not in school anymore. We’re on Twitter.

Now let’s take it a step further…

If paragraphs and sentences share a consistent length, even a short one, the result becomes a monotone. If every paragraph is three lines long, you have a flat landscape which may be easy to cross, but promises no excitement or variation.

Throw in the occasional one-line paragraph or a three-word sentence and you may annoy your English professor. But you give the reading landscape contours and diversity. The content looks like a melody of words, not a dirge.

And we all love a good melody.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Copywriting

One of the few people with a legitimate reason to use spyware, Bond likes his email, too, as a sneaky look at his inbox shows.

Previous famous inboxes: Darth Vader, Voldemort, Sauron, Elizabeth Bennet, Julius Caesar, Satan

Find related articles:

• Channel: Marketing humor

The email conversion chain starts with a black hole. You can easily measure clicks and what happens when folk reach the landing page. But what about before that? Nobody’s a huge fan of open rates, so we need help.

In recent months, companies have begun to develop analytics tools which reveal more information about whether people, for example, read, delete, forward or print your emails. One is MailboxIQ from Pivotal Veracity and another is Litmus Email Analytics.

The latter gave me a free account to play with and I’ve used the tool in my last two newsletter issues. This is my full review, covering the information the tool provides, what you might do with that info, limitations and who should pay for an account.

See Litmus Email Analytics: a user review

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing metrics

I’m terrified.

And I’ve been terrified for 12 years, ever since I built my first website and sent my first marketing email.

Why?

Because out there on the Interweb are a heap of people working away to develop new tools and technologies and applications and algorithms and channels and content and devices and designs and software and sites and things we’ve never heard of yet.

Any one of which might be the one that turns an existing business, business model or online approach into an overnight anachronism.

You scared, too?

It’s not as bad as it seems (we’re still here) but the future is a place of both potential and pain. How do you move forward confidently in an era of constant change?

Email marketing, for example, has been hanging under its own Damocles Sword of change ever since someone realized that “email is dead” makes a superb headline. Adapt or die. We adapt, and email continues to flourish.

Yet the “new” email success models presented so well by vendors, blogs and other media leave many of us standing at the shop window like a Victorian orphan, wistfully imagining a world where we, too, could get our hands on all those wonderful toys.

So how do you do cope with change when you have limited time and/or funds?

I have my own blueprint for survival which I’d like to share with you.

Don’t panic and keep a sense of perspective

Few information sources are interested in the success of your business. They’re interested in the success of their own business. And the two are not always aligned.

Compare, for example, Google Trends data for Facebook and Twitter.

The news reference volume suggests each gets comparable press coverage. Yet the search volume favors Facebook by a ratio of 37:1. And sources suggest Facebook has over 20 times as many active users as Twitter.

It’s not that Twitter is unimportant, just that its importance is disproportionate to the media coverage.

And Facebook itself? More than 400 million active users. Or less than 25% of the number of email users.

The importance or relevance of a tactic or trend is rarely proportional to the coverage it gets, which is driven by what’s new and by vested interests. Even if it is important or relevant in a broad sense, it may still not be relevant to your situation.

A sense of perspective is a must to survive the onslaught of new information.

But panic enough to keep you on your toes

Perspective is, however, no excuse for complacency. Change is real.

The fact that email is not dead, for example, is only part-consolation to email marketers. Writing is not dead, either, but the Shakespearian approach to copywriting would struggle to drive conversions.

The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?–
What, will these hands ne’er be clean?–No more o’
that, my lord, no more o’ that: hasten to click
for soap shall ye buy.

The question is not whether email will survive, but how email is changing and how your email marketing needs to change with it. A big, big question. (Here’s one set of answers based on the rise of the social inbox.)

How do you monitor and interpret change?

I rely on a few trustworthy sites and the twin filters of experience and intimate knowledge of my own business and audience. For email marketing, a good time saver is the daily buzz from The eMail Guide or any of these resources. Also keep an eye on studies of consumer behavior and habits.

Start by revisiting the basics

As mentioned earlier, many of us are intimidated by all those blogs and websites showcasing best practices and clever campaigns that seem out of reach of our capabilities.

The good news is that those campaigns are the minority and the vast majority of email marketing is neither cutting edge, nor necessarily even good.

Even the heroes of the twenty-first century marketing generation can get things wrong: consider this critique of Apple’s email efforts by Marc Munier.

So taking your email marketing forward begins with revisiting some of the basics. Three areas that are often under-optimized are:

1. Sign-up

• When people interact with your organization (website, point of sale, trade shows etc.) do you give them a clear opportunity to sign-up for emails?
• Does the language you use in sign-up collateral make it clear what they need to do, why they should do it and what they can expect to happen as a result?

2. Recognition elements

• When your email arrives in the recipient’s inbox, is it easily seen and recognized for what it is?
• Does it communicate the value of giving more than a moment’s attention to the contents?

Key points here are the sender name, subject line, preheader and preview pane.

3. Appearance

• Does your design and layout account for all the different places people view emails online?

Use one of the various low-cost design preview tools out there to test the consistency and viewability of your design in multiple software, webmail, browser and mobile environments, with images turned on and off. Then adapt as necessary.

Review your effort in terms of wider subscriber needs

Another approach is to think in broader terms of what people (subscribers) need in a changing online world and then work towards addressing those needs through your (email) marketing. Some suggestions:

1. Simplicity

If you’re comfortable using the web and associated technologies, you might want to look over the shoulder of someone who is not. See how they click around a website. Now expect them to master a “fully-integrated communication console”.

Review, particularly, the words, instructions and workflows associated with the administrative messages encountered by those on your list (preference centers, confirmation messages, unsubscribe processes, etc.) Are they user-friendly?

2. Value

Well, obviously.

But how does the value you offer differ from that of the competition? If it doesn’t, where’s the true incentive to give your emails attention and ignore everything else? Where’s the incentive to keep getting and reading your emails when so many online alternatives are available?

3. Trustworthiness

Again, obviously.

With so much choice and with PR folk, affiliate marketers and others blurring the lines between content and advertising, we gravitate to those sources we can truly trust. Do your emails build trust?

4. Meaning, humanity, uniqueness

We were social animals before someone discovered fire. The social web just gives us a networked outlet to address the need for meaningful interaction.

How does your email work at an emotional level? Is there anything about your emails that makes them unique and personable? Do you give people something they’d miss if you weren’t there?

Step gingerly towards more use of data and automation

The future is data, which brings forth intimidating, expensive words like “web analytics and database integration” and other concepts outlined in, for example, the excellent Successful e-mail marketing strategies: from hunting to farming.

For those of us at the cheaper end of the marketing spectrum, this is no excuse to ignore the power of data.

It begins with a willingness to develop a greater understanding of your subscribers and their actions, then a willingness to turn that understanding into changes.

• Have you considered all the insights that emerge from a simple review of the standard campaign reports provided by your email marketing service or software?
• Are you conducting simple A/B tests to your list? Most good ESPs now have testing functionality built into their service. Test, particularly, calls to action and subject lines to get quick response boosts.
• Are you looking at ways to collect more information on your existing subscribers?
• What about simple autoresponder programs, such as birthday mails?

Explore social media, but tread carefully

Some trends are fads. Some are driven by vested interests. And some reflect real changes in the marketing landscape. Social media has elements of all three.

But it does seem to be the most important of all the developments allegedly due to impact email marketers (along with the rise of mobile email marketing).

Back in 2009, we all got particularly excited at the prospect of integrating social and email marketing. Very excited indeed.

In the rush to add “share this on Twitter” links to emails, and newsletter sign-up forms to Facebook pages, few stopped to question the whys, whats and hows of such integration. After all, what’s not to like about integration?

The potential is still clear, the practice (still) isn’t, though we’re learning. A year ago, I suggested 20 questions you might ask before pursuing such integration. In 2010, are you any nearer to finding answers as you build out a social presence online?

A key tenet to keep in mind is one suggested by Kevin Hillstrom in a provocative post:

“All channels have strengths, and all channels have weaknesses. Leverage e-mail based on what it is best at, leverage social media based on what it is best at…”

Don’t integrate for the sake of it, but (obviously) because it makes sense for your organization and audience.

…and finally

Change is in the nature of things. But don’t worry: the future of email is in safe hands.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing strategy