Email Marketing Myth Busters

Email Marketing Myth Busters

DJ Waldow, the Founder & CEO of Waldow Social and Jim Ducharme, GetResponse Community Director decided to bust a few of the common email marketing myths that some still think to be true.

Email Marketing Myth Busters Introduction

This article is based on a GetResponse Webinar with presenter DJ Waldow.

First a little about GetResponse for those new to autoresponder applications. They are an email marketing company, email service provider or autoresponder provider with some excellent features for marketing entrepreneurs. Some of the features include:

• Unlimited sends. In other words there are no restrictions on the number of emails you can send.
• The amazing email creator. This is incredible. It’s a drag and drop email editor. So, instead of having to code your email marketing campaigns by hand you can just drag and drop everything, including text boxes, pictures, links, etc. Another plus is the incredibly intuitive user interface.
• The landing page generator. This is an extra service which is tied to the email creator which automatically allows you to generate landing pages (squeeze pages) which GetResponse can host for you if you don’t have your own web site. With this facility you can actually generate landing pages automatically from you news letters for added consistency.
• Power real-time email and social analytics. These tell you who’s sharing what and where.
• Time travel? This is such a simple yet really neat idea. With time travel you can set you email to be transmitted at the same time no matter what time zone the user occupies. In other words, I can have an email sent at 0900 London time, 0900 New York time, 0900 Hong Kong time, etc. For those who know how important send times are, you’ll really appreciate this facility.
• Inbox preview tool. This tool enables you to see exactly how you email is going to look in different browsers and different platform, including mobiles.
• Easy segmenting with 99.5% deliverability plus 5-Star customer care.
• The latest GetResponse Autoresponders2 technology is now available.

Email Marketing Myths

Email-myth
Never Use the Word FREE in the Subject Line!

There are certain words which when included in email subject lines can have a detrimental effect. They can result in your email never reaching the recipient and instead get blocked by spam filters.

This used to be true several years ago, but is no longer the case. Years ago a lot of email service providers would block the word FREE, as well as other words, in the subject line, especially if all caps were used.

Email-fact – Busted

It’s now okay to use FREE and other so-called ‘no-no’ words in an email subject line.

Email-myth
All Email Subject Lines Should be Between 35 and 50 Characters!

This is another antiquated myth. The possible reason for not using more than about 35 characters is because messages can be truncated. For example in gmail this message line:

Sesame Street Asks Obama Campaign To Take Ad Down, Anderson Cooper vs. Star Jones, Die Hard Obama Supporter Freaks Out

was truncated to:

Sesame Street Asks Obama Campaign To Take Ad Down, Anderson Cooper vs. Star Jones, Die

Alchemy Worx Study

An interesting study carried out by Alchemy Worx made a study of subject line character length to open rates. The found that subject lines with character length of less than 70 characters had the greater open rate. But what’s really interesting is that subject lines with a character length of greater than 70 characters had a better click-to-open rate.

• Note: Click-to-open rate. How many people opened the email and clicked on a link within the email.

Email-fact – Busted

There is no reason to curtail the length of email subject lines with modern email systems.

Email-myth – Hiding the unsubscribe link with keep people from opting out!

GetResponse will automatically append an unsubscribe link to the end of your emails, but, an interesting study was carried out by Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports. He tested adding an unsubscribe link to the top of his newsletters, as well as the usual footer unsubscribe link. So now you have two unsubscribe links. The result? Mark’s unsubscribe rate went from 0.26% to 0.54%.

Mark’s Conclusions. Every unsubscribe is potentially one less;

• spam report.
• person likely to get annoyed at me and my website when getting another email.
• unwanted email cluttering up the airwaves and inboxes of this world.

Email-fact – Busted

The harder it is for people to opt-out, the more likely it is they will use the “spam” button or complain to their web hosting provider. You definitely do not want them to doing either of these things.

Think of it this way, if lots of people are opting out. You’re doing something wrong. Be sensitive to your subscribers and deliver good quality email content.

Email-myth
The Bigger the Email List the Better!

You’ve probably heard the saying, “The monies in the list”. The belief being that the more email recipients there are, then the greater the response (hopefully positive) you will receive.

This is basically saying that you haven’t targeted your audience very well. It’s not the size of the list that matters, but the life in the list. The more targeted a list, the better it will perform.

Email-fact – Busted

Keep building your list, but manage and optimise what you have along the way, and as always, test, test, test.

Smaller targeted lists can provide:

• Better open rates.
• Better click-thru rates.
• Better conversion rates.

Irony: Those with larger lists should segment for better targeting and performance.

• Never buy or swap lists!

Email-myth
Stuff as many offers into each email as you can!

The more offers stuffed into the email the more likely the email will elicit a click-through response.

Email-fact – Busted

Fewer offers equals better clarity.

The most important thing to think about. as far as your email list is concerned, is “what are you asking them to do“.

You email must have a storyline which has to be delivered fast. Your customer is asking:

• Who are you?
• What do you want me to do? and
• Why should I do it?

Email Marketing Myth Busters Video

Email Marketing Myth Busters Conclusion

Well, I hope you found something useful and enjoyed this article, Email Marketing Myth Busters.