Email Best Practice or Recipe for Disaster?

Email TipsYou strive to improve the performance of your email marketing. You test exhaustively. You pore over every benchmark and research study.

Subject lines, call to action, offer, design, images. You examine everything in your bid for more opens, more clicks, more leads and more sales.

These recent statistics and anecdotes point to a clear way to increase email open and click rates, but read on before you decide to test these approaches.

  • Personalizing email subject lines dramatically increased open rates, according to this post from Eloqua.
  • Saying Thank You improves open rates and click rates. Shelly Kramer (@shellykramer) has a nice summary of the result and one potential reason here.
  • “Hey…” was the best subject line in Barack Obama’s fundraising emails. Copyblogger has a great discussion of this in the appropriately titled blog post Hey…

Umm, no DUH!

When you make a marketing email look like an email from a personal acquaintance or a confirmation message, of course you get a better open rate and a better opportunity to make your pitch!

Here’s the rub: you are mimicking a personal email to drive these results but you are not delivering an actual personal message.

Spammers figured out this trick years ago. Look at your spam folder, you will see numerous emails confirming your order, information or comment and you will likely see a few that still use your email username in the subject line in a feeble attempt at personalization.

Do you really want to copy email spam tactics for your B2B email marketing program? No.

Email Marketing 101

Your audience is gold, or at least the closest thing you have to it. Treasure your audience, value your audience. Do everything in your power to become treasured by your audience.

Your goal is to make them want to open every email you send, before you even send it.

If you turn to trickery instead, how long until they unsubscribe or just tune you out? Not long at all…

Your Turn

Is email personalization a true best practice or a tactic that will backfire on marketers that don’t dramatically increase the value of their email at the same time? Share your opinion in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).

Image by planeta via Flickr

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