Chad White from Responsy, a retail email company recently spoke at an American Marketing Association event in Boston about email marketing.
Being from a large email marketing company, he had some good insights. Here are some of the highlights:
1. Best practices for email marketing are always evolving. What was once important, may not be any more.
2. By keeping with “Best Practices” minimizes your risk of being listed as spam.
3. The quality of list beats quantity, in the last 3 years this has changed-it’s about open rates.
4. The “Double Opt In” does not help, when people are signing up, giving you permission to send email, the double opt in does not increase open rates
5. Email width should be no wider than- 640 px -what you really want is a responsive email because more and more people are accessing their emails on mobile and pads.
6. At the very top of emails you often see: “Add our email to address book” that is waisted space, the real estate is too important to waste.
7. Metrics: your subject line needs to measure clicks and conversions – not open metrics
8. Share with your network – all those facebook, twitter …follow me…generally doesn’t perform well in your email…better to put on landing page.
Cwhite@responsys.com
@retailemailblog