Surprising Strategies for Email Marketing

Buffer is an amazing service that enables you to schedule your social media posts for specific times during the day. They also publish very useful blog posts for social and digital marketers. A blog post from October 2013 about email marketing strategies struck my interest and since their findings were surprising, I thought I would aggregate the information here. Read the entire post here. 

1. Do not personalize emails with recipients name unless you have established a relationship with them. Rather include information that acknowledges a subscribers purchase history, demographic and product personalization. Recommending products based on past purchasing history resulted in positive responses in 98% of customers. 

2. Keep the subject lines short. Subject lines with fewer than 10 characters long got an open rate of 58%. However, subject lines 70 characters and up tested to be most beneficial to engage readers in clicking through to the content, and subject lines below 49 characters and below tested well with open rate. 

3. 8 PM to midnight is the best time to send emails. The open rate during this time was 22% and also saw increased click-through rates and sales. This may be due to the fact that this time is the least used and your email may stand a better chance of getting noticed. 

4. The best content is free. According to their resources, templates and tools outweigh ebooks, expert interviews, brain teasers and photo albums. 

5. Mobile accounts for 47% of all emails open. A few tips to optimize your email for mobile includes:

- Use only one column template.

- Use a large font size. 

- Use buttons that are 44 pixels wide and 44 pixels tall. 

- Keep tappable elements in the middle of the screen. 

6. Email is better than social media to convert new customers. In fact, of 300 000 referrals who became customers in this study, 50.8% were reached from email, compared to 26.8% from Twitter and 22% for Facebook. 

7. Send emails on weekends. This may be due to the same fact as a higher opening rate during the evenings. Your email stands a better chance of being alone in the inbox, which increases the chance of being opened and noticed. 

8. Re-engage an inactive group of subscribers. Research shows that the average inactivity for a list in 63% (less likely to follow up your follow up emails). When 90 days have passed, send a new, fun and engaging email to reactivate users.