Posted on 12.30.10

Five Tips for Better Email Performance: More from the Emma Experts

by Stacy Jones Sutton

According to the Email Stat Center, a leading repository website of email marketing statistics and research, the industry average email open rate is 22% and the average click-through rate is a mere 5.3%. How do your campaigns stack up?

Part Two in a Series of Four

Our friends at Emma brought these stats to our attention when Mightybytes’ October email newsletter had a 41% open rate and near 48% click-through rate, soaring above industry standards.

Continuing our blog series with members of the Emma staff, we took a look at what worked in our own email newsletters to compile these tips for getting above average campaign performance.

Tip One: Design is Important

The subject line of your email campaign will often be what draws people in, but the supporting role that good design and layout play shouldn’t be underestimated. Emma provides a bevy of templates (offering more design choices than many email providers), custom design services, and the ability to upload your own HTML, which is what we do.


Emma graphic designer Kelly McClain has a great article on email design, 5 Pointers for Visually Effective Email Campaigns. Highlights of Kelly’s tips include:

• “Don’t be shy – use images...there’s nothing less inviting in your inbox than opening an email only to see text, text and … oh, yeah, more text.”
• “Break up your content...visually let your readers know that even with their busy schedules, your email is quick and easy to read.”
• “Keep it a little consistent...email stays consistent within itself, using only a couple fonts (in reasonable sizes) and sticking to a uniform, easy-to-read color scheme.
• “Keep an eye on that length.
...long-winded email campaigns, my friends, won’t always endear you to your audience.”

Tip Two: Use Your Words in Subject Lines

You only have a single line to draw people in. Make it a worthwhile one with ample use of keywords and phrases that define what’s inside.

We try to engage the recipient with just ‘tip of the iceberg’ hints at what’s inside, then we use the header text in our email template to extend the message of the subject line.

Molly at Emma recommends that you use subject lines to “identify yourself and provide an enticing teaser,” as in the following example:

• So-so subject line: Popular Gifts from The Forest Shop.
• Much better: Our Top 8 Gifts of the Year | The Forest Shop.

Molly’s blog on subject lines is for the holidays, but these wise word choice tips can be applied throughout the year too.

Use your subject line words to engage with a specific teaser as to what is one click away.

Tip Three: Teaser Content

Inside the body of your email, keep content short with only one or two sentences of teaser information. We spend a lot of time crafting those lines too. Provide links and experiment with anchor text for them, rather than creating a lengthy email that may lose reader interest.

We strive for information that is educational, valuable and interesting to our readers. Though there were around 7,000 words of fresh content created for the stories that our newsletter linked to, the actual newsletter itself was only a few hundred words. A strong graphic concept and a couple of smart teaser lines can do a lot to convey what lies beyond the link.

Tips for brief email content from Emma’s team member Molly on her customer success story, Meet The University of Chicago, are:

“Include a 3-5 main stories that are summarized and followed by ‘full story’ links, so curious readers can click to read more…In short: Heed your readers’ busy lives and crowded inboxes. A typical reader probably won’t weed through paragraphs and paragraphs of text to find the content that grabs them. Make that content easy to find and quick to digest. Your readers with a short attention span will absorb the summaries, while readers with more time to peruse will click to read the complete story.”

Tip Four: Track Linked Content

Emma offers very robust reporting tools to measure click-through rates to content links in your campaigns.But what happens once users get to your site?

We use custom Google Analytics links inside of our email campaigns to get more robust reporting than Emma alone provides. Google offers a URL Builder tool to create campaign URLs.

Emma provides click-tracking for each link in your email as part of its overall response reporting. Emma easy-to-understand campaign reports and intuitive user interface are features we love.

Tip Five: Test Content in a Few Places

Sometimes campaign tracking reveals surprises as well. We created a post on Twitter Tips that performed dismally in our newsletter. However, this same piece performed very well when shared to social networks and when Business Insider picked it up, it received over 10,000 views in under 24 hours. Of course Business Insider gets around 650,000 views per month, so that helps.

We are always on the lookout for good tips to help improve email and social media campaign performance, so if you have something in particular that worked well for you, please let us know. We would love to hear it!

Did you catch Part One in this series?

Build a Better Holiday Campaign: Tips from the Experts at Emma.