Conventional wisdom says that personalizing your email marketing subject lines, such as putting someone's first name in the subject line using tags or other automations, increases the open rate for that email marketing. That may not be the case any longer.
Digital marketing solutions provider Vendasta recently did research on which gets not just better deliverability, but better traction in terms of response: plain text email or HTML email? Their conclusion may surprise you!
We have a customer who sends email out on behalf of a very large, very well known institution in the financial investment world. Some of these mailings lists are paid mailing lists. By which I mean that the users paid to receive these emails. And yet, they still report it as spam. Why would they do this? Here's why.
Increasing email deliverability is both an art and a science, and to really get results, you need to have some expertise in both. And of course, that's one of the reasons that many companies pay someone to do it for them - be it an in-house email deliverability expert, an outside company such as ours, or a combination of both.
We've talked previously about why all the email addresses you send from (i.e. your email's "return address") should really exist. It's because if they don't, you're email is going to get junk foldered, both due to spam complaints, and because ISPs actually test whether your from address exists. But there are some email addresses - used as "From:" addresses - that even if you create them on your system - even if they really do exist - you should just never use.
Have you ever wondered what the majority of your users are using to read their email? The answer may surprise you - even stun you!
Disclaimers. Whether in email, print marketing, or contracts, who reads them? I'll tell you who reads them: spam filters. How often do you think a user reads a message that starts with "You have received this message because you have opted in" or "You received this message due to your subscription" and thinks "Oh! That's right, I did ask for this, so I won't mark it as spam?" Now, how often do you think that a spam filter (or, indeed, a user) sees that and thinks "This must be spam"?
We've talked more than once here about how not just your content, but the form and formatting of your content, can make a big difference to your email deliverability. It's something on which we can not put too fine a point, as some people just don't get it - others don't believe it - and yet others feel that it shouldn't matter, gosh darnit, especially if their list building practices are kosher and their users really want their email. But it does matter.
Most mailing software these days will allow you to personalize your mailings, and, not surprisingly, most commercial emailers take advantage of this, personalizing their mailings in all sorts of ways. Using the recipient's actual name when addressing them seems like it should be a really good idea. But it isn't always the best idea. In fact, here are 3 reasons that personalizing your subject lines, in particular, can get you in trouble with spam filters and users, and kill your email deliverabilty.
