Let’s look at 3 tips to improve your email marketing open rates:

1. Brand Reputation, More Importantly Email Brand Reputation

Do you think your email recipients are actually excited when they see your email in their inbox? Why or why not? Companies have a hard time understanding that they develop an email reputation that can make or break open rates.

Break it: If you email too often, only try to sell them (buy! buy! buy!), write near novels, or never establish yourself as a valuable reference, you are going to suffer with each additional email.

Make it: You deliver timely, valuable content that your users associate with your brand so that they look forward to hearing from you. You educate, inform and help, benefitting the recipient more than your company.

Personally, I have about 5 companies that I get a monthly email from that I’m actually excited to open.  I have about 20 that I pass over just about every time.

If you do one thing after reading this post, evaluate your email brand reputation and work to start improving it right now. You can slowly turn long time subscribers into frequent openers and deliver a substantial first impression to your new subscribers.

2. A/B Test Your Subject Lines

I’m always amazed at how subject lines are ignored as a key contributor to your email marketing success. Creating multiple email subject lines and testing them against each other in a A/B test is just plain smart.

The email marketing platform we use allows our campaigns to test two subject lines with the first 50% of the email list. Afterward it automatically sends the second half of the list the email with the winning subject line. This A/B test helps produce an increase in opens just about every time out.

The example above illustrates that for this A/B test, Version A was the winner and helped produce an estimated 96 more opens than if Version B’s subject line was used. This resulted in a 19% increase for delivery of the winning subject line to the second half balance of the email list.

To take it a step further, this A/B test was the only one done by this client in a 6 month period and it returned a higher open rate then the other 5 email campaigns. (Note: The client manages their own campaign sends, but Spyder Trap initiated the A/B test to illustrate to them the value of A/B testing subject lines.)

The September campaign with the A/B test saw an open rate of 25.35%, almost a full 4% higher than the 6 month average, and out performed all of the other campaigns. Even November’s campaign, with 400 more subscribers in the list saw 105 fewer opens.

If you don’t currently use an email platform that enables A/B Testing, we can help.

3. Mobile Email Awareness Is A Must

So, you already know that people engage with email on their smartphones more than any other platform (desktop client, webmail, etc.). Today’s email marketer in any industry needs to make their emails mobile friendly in all aspects.

Step one is to be aware just how many of your email subscribers are opening your email marketing via mobile. The example below shows you that IOS devices iPhone and iPad dominate how this company’s email marketing is opened and read, especially the iPhone. (Over 1/3 of their readers!)

Step two is to understand how your subject line differs on mobile devices. You will have less characters in the subject line depending on what device it is viewed on. For example, an iPhone 4s can display as little as just 33 characters. Also pay attention to what message/text appears in the content teaser below the subject line. If you start your email with a graphic header, that teaser might just be visible HTML code and not even the content of the e-newsletter.

Step three for your mobile awareness is to start building your emails using responsive design. This allows your email to change its shape and size when it’s opened on a smartphone compared to a desktop email client. Just as responsive web design is solving many companies challenge of a great mobile experience, email shouldn’t be left out.

Email is Still the ROI Leader

Even though we have a lot more to think about over the last decade for online marketing, and so many more exciting options to consider, email is still the ROI leader. Take into account these 3 tips to improve your email marketing and open rates and it can be an even stronger performer for your organization.

If you need an expert email partner or a better email marketing platform to help improve your email marketing efforts, we’re here to discuss what can be done.

Many organizations utilizing email marketing have yet to even think about how this shift to mobile engagement affects their experience and goals.

If you’re just starting to explore how to best leverage email in mobile, we’ve put together 5 tips for mobile email marketing success to start with.

1. Know Your Mobile Email Audience

The best place to start is to know how your audience is engaging with your emails. Having the ability to see what email clients and devices lists are using to open and read your emails is of big value.  You’ll also want to pay attention to the growth rate here in the last couple of years to forecast what’s coming.  Our email marketing service tracks email client and device use per campaign.

The example from one of our clients below shows that iPhone, iPad and all iOS engagement is over 21%. Throw in Android and it’s over 24.4% total for mobile on this campaign.

The Return Path report also found that 85% of all mobile email opens are via Apple/iOS devices.

2. Email Design Width & Space

Email marketing designs have had a standard width in the 600-pixel range for quite some time. At the mobile level, the iPhone has a width of 320-pixels and, since right now that device is considered the standard for smartphone screens, you may want to design your emails at a width of 640-pixels for an exact scaling of 50%. Also keep in mind that an iPhone screen in landscape format is 480-pixels wide.

3. Mobile Touch

A click of the mouse is a very precise movement, while a finger or thumb touch on a mobile screen is not.  Apple recommends a 29×41 pixel size for any clickable items and also consider using spacing of at least 10 pixels around these objects.  The goal here is to minimize accidental clicks or touches and improve the mobile experience.

4. Font Size Matters

Whether on a desktop or a mobile device, web and email is still often a “scannable” read. We recommend a font size guideline of 30pt font for headlines and at least 14pt font for body copy.  Don’t forget that when you put together content, avoid giant blocks of text, which will lower your ability to get the reader’s attention for sure.

5. A Mobile Experience

If your use of these mobile email marketing tips gets your email opened and read, don’t let the experience end there.  Having a mobile site or responsive web design will create further engagement and success when your users move from your email marketing content to your website, blog posts, or other media you’ve linked to.

Let’s say you’ve nailed all of the components to a solid campaign and you want to know just how great your email campaign is.

Our email marketing platform offers a robust tracking and reporting feature set to get the most out of your efforts.

Tracking For Insight, Measurement and Success

Many businesses only focus on one number, the size of their subscriber list.  With the proper email marketing service, you can get your hands on numerous data and behavior numbers that will allow you to evaluate, adjust and improve.

The base features below provide numbers, trends and fantastic insight to get the most from your campaigns.  You can track and view reports on:

• Open rate, click rate, address bounces
• Email clients used to read your email (Outlook, Gmail, Mac, iPhone, ect.)
• Social sharing on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• Use of “forward to a friend” link/button
• Ability to compare multiple email campaigns for trends
• Per subscriber reporting of opens and clicks
• Visual geographical mapping of email opens and clicks
• Base reports available via your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry

Email Tracking With Google Analytics

Our platform, SpyderMail, allows for integration with Google Analytics.   With the help of GA you can track how your email marketing impacts your website by driving traffic, leads or sales.

Google Analytics integration allows for:

• Tracking of email driven traffic for page views and time on site
• Tracking of website user goals from your email marketing
• Tracking of e-commerce sales form your email marketing
• Tracking of A/B split tests

If you’re looking to move to an enhanced email marketing provider, we can help implement all of these tracking methods as well as our overall email expertise to make your campaigns a bigger contributor to your online success.

I disagree. I believe email marketing can be loaded with dangers that can harm the reputation of otherwise solid brands. So before you take on email marketing as a do-it-yourself activity, here’s just a few questions you need to answer:

What do you hope to accomplish via email marketing?

If your goal is to find new customers, email marketing is probably the last thing you should consider. Email marketing is about creating customer loyalty and goodwill among your current customer base. There are far better options for lead generation.

Are you certain that your email list is in compliance with opt-in best practices and the CAN-SPAM act?

There are no shortcuts to building an opt-in email list. Plenty of seemingly reputable vendors will sell you an email list. My advice is to stay far away! In fact, most email marketing services like ConstantContact and Vertical Response will not let you to use purchased lists. If you are planning on sending messages to a purchased list from your own server, you will probably wind up being blacklisted. That is an ugly mess you can’t afford.

How will you represent your brand as unique and superior?

Successful business owners invest a lot in their unique brands. So how will you address the design and layout of your email messages so that it conveys your brand correctly? Every major email marketing service provides dozens of nifty templates. But doesn’t the brand that you’ve worked so hard to build deserve something better than a template designed by someone who’s never even heard of your brand? I bet it does.

How will you reach different segments of your list with uniquely appealing messages?

Unless you plan on speaking to your email audience in the broadest terms, chances are a single message will not appeal to your entire list. Have a plan for segmenting your list so that you can reach different types of customers with messages that directly appeal to them.

How will you track the success of your program, and how will you use tracking to improve it?

It’s very easy to track an email campaign. But without an accurate frame of reference, the numbers contained in these reports are meaningless. The difference between a good open-rate and a great open-rate could mean the difference between a profitable campaign and a time-waster.

My point here is this: Email marketing services have made it easy to physically execute an email marketing campaign. Unfortunately for the do-it-yourself business owner, great email marketing is not so easy. It requires specialized skills and experience.

I’ve been on the receiving end of messages form some otherwise great businesses, but because they bought into the DIY email hype, their campaigns actually harmed their brand and reputation.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours? Have you ever received an email message that made you wonder if it had been prepared by a first grader? Or are you a business owner who can shred my contention? Either way, let me know.