AWeber Email AutoResponder

AWeber Email AutoResponder

Email Newsletter Open Rates: April 2009

Posted by Justin Premick

Think you know the best day and time to send your email newsletter?

Ever wonder if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do?

Convinced your open rate is too low (or amazingly high)?

Some recent statistics pulled from all AWeber users may help you answer these questions:

What Kind of Open Rates Are People Getting?

If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.

Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:

Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).

So, here goes…

When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?

You’ll often hear (at least, I often hear) that Tuesday is the optimal day to send, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.

Do the numbers back up that theory? Let’s see.

Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by open rates.

(While we’re breaking assumptions, I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time — email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.)

Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?

In a word: No.

In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.

I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately.

Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.

Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

“It’s So Busy, Nobody Goes There Anymore”

To get at the other reason for not shifting your sending based on these stats, let’s paraphrase Yogi Berra (see above).

If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.

One possible reason for Thursday’s success last month may be that it wasn’t as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email:

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Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers’ inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences’ undivided attention.

My main point in showing these is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your audience.

Some Inspiration… And Some Help

Are you getting better open rates than this?

If so, GREAT! Give yourself a pat on the back…

…but don’t get complacent. Open rates aren’t the be-all, end-all of email metrics. They don’t guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Plus, there’s always room for improvement, right?

Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates:

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Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Try Aweber Email Auto-Responder Today Here !

Sure, you’ve heard about the value of testing in your email marketing campaigns.

You’re familiar with some of the big gains that tests can bring you. Perhaps you’ve even looked over some of the examples of things you can split test and considered doing them.

But there’s a pretty good chance you’re not testing as much as you could, or even as much as you might like to. Most marketers aren’t.

Getting in the habit of testing requires us to think not only about what we want to test in a broad sense, but also what tests to conduct (and how to conduct them) so that the results are useful to us.

Recently, I found a couple articles that I thought would help you get more out of your existing email testing - or simply start conducting more tests to optimize your campaigns.

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Which I may add was a breeze, it was very easy to individualize the e-mail so the recipient would sense that it was sent from a real person. Then I made the mail that is transmitted out when a user confirms their email address, a walk in the park, I also had the opportunity to attach a data file.

As you may notice a lot of individuals offer a gratis .pdf for signing up to their mailing list, well this is how they achieve it, you just attach the file to the verification email and directly your new follower has it transmitted to their e-mail box automatically. This is another possibility that numerous of the businesses provide these days.

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1. Aweber Testimonials
   
2. Domains For Sale
   
   

   Dear Justin, I did not know you twitt

   I found that not all lists open rates are equal, and only testing will teach you a thing or two about these metrics.

   I never had more than 25% open rate, and I wonder how Diana Fontanez got a whopping 46.8%..

   It’s bad that most AWEBER users have no clue how to use these stats, and barely test them.

   Is it because we tend to ignore easy or simple things?

   I’d like to see statistics on great subject lines, the best pulling results..

3. Snowboarder
   
   

   I’m amazed that she’s achieving this 46.8% open rate. It can probably be attributed to a few things…

   1) Her RELATIONSHIP with her subscribers

   2) The scarcity of her email messages. She probably doesn’t email them all the time, and leaves them hanging to her every word because they don’t hardly hear from her.

   3) I definitely believe her CTR rate, because at times I experience similar results. It’s all in the way you DIRECT your reader to the link. If you demonstrate a NEED to click the link for something that’s beneficial or inspiring, they’ll click. If there’s no reason to click, THEY WON’T. Point blank.

   Good article, Justin…and kudos to Diana.

4. Golfing School
   
   

   Aaron;

   I had exactly the same question of Justin — it is hard to judge the open rate without knowing the frequency (or the quality of the content, for that matter).

   I am curious about your statement that your open rate is "much higher than 13.6%." That is really fantastic. Can you please elaborate on why that is (or point me to a resource on increasing open rates)?

   Thanks!

5. Justin Premick
   
   

   Aaron,

   How are we defining "the way to go?" In other words, what metric/s should we use as a measurement of whether more frequent email is better?

   Depending on whether we used average open rate, total opens per week, average click rate, total clicks per week, revenue, unsubscribe rate, change in list growth (to name a few possible stats), we might find that daily emails were more successful than say, weekly ones. And let’s not forget revenue (that’s why you have an email campaign, right?). Open rate is one possible measurement of success, but it isn’t the only one.

   It’s also worth remembering that drastic changes to your email practices (such as ramping up frequency from weekly to daily) can drive away your current subscribers, who are used to what you do now. Shifting expectations takes time.

   That said, if you’re interested in being a guinea pig and doing a case study on making those kinds of changes, I’ll gladly talk to you about it

   Codrut,

   Testing is definitely the way to go, because as you say not all lists are equal (plus opens don’t necessarily yield clicks or sales).

   For those who are not making use of stats, I’d say it’s mostly a question of not being sure what changes to make.

   For example, if your open rate is consistently 15%, what should you change to make it 18%? There’s no universally right or wrong answer. There are many things you could try in the subject line, in the body of your emails and in your overall strategy.

6. Firepow
   
   

   Dear Justin,

   This is pretty helpful stuff!

   I was thinking exactly as everybody else! Now I am wiser or at least more informed

   I track and split-test almost everything… And sometimes get "lucky" with a weekend offer… (made a habit of braking habits.) But your test results and advise really makes sense to me.

   Thanks for your passion and for sharing

7. E-Degree
   
   

   Hi,
   I think that email with some expected value in it will have better open rate. And statistic will tell us what we want to hear. Open rate in percentage. ok but from which volume of emails?? Maybe that 12% is much more emails than some 14%?? I think, open rate statistic is important for accidental emails (spam, which we are not doing, are we?), and for those who bombard their poor subscribers with a ton of emails. I mean we all open our bank statements (and similar emails) with 99% open rate. Am I right? So, value of the emeil…..

8. Flora Morris Brown, Ph.D.
   
   

   Wow! I’m feeling a LOT happier about my open rates having read the averages here.

   I agree that testing is the only way to know which day and which subjects work best for your subscribers. I’ve been surprised to see my open rate go up on or just before a holiday. I always thought that fewer people would be reading their email on those days.

   My main newsletter goes out on Tues. but a few times I’ve sent announcements on a Sunday thinking that they’d be opened on Monday. Not so, the few Sundays I sent email, the rates were as good or better than my average.

   The open rate for my e-courses averages 80%. Clearly, the folks wno sign up for follow-ups are more dedicated to getting the information than folks who sign up for newsletters.

   As with everything else involving humans, there are no sure guidelines. We must each test to see what works for our subscribers. Then test and retest.

9. Clickbank Autopilot
   
   

   Not too concerned about open rates on any given day, more concerned about persistence and consistency in sending out auto responders. I find that 2 or 3 auto responders per week, keeps my name in front of my prospects.

   I often have prospects call me up several months later, and say, Ray you must be real, been getting all those emails, from you for the past seveal months, so sign me up, I’m in!!!

   It is really that simple, with A-Weber auto responders and email campaigns.

10. Build A Greenhouse
    
    

    The best open rates for any email campaigns are the ones that pay their members well. Period.

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    @Mark,

    Open rate for my weekly newsletter (started in 2001) was over 45% *for first year subscribers*. Click thru rate was consistently over 75% of opens.

    Since most of the time my promo emails were text, I don’t have open rate data. However with a multi-send, one week promotion I tended to see visits in the 90% range of number sent. Otherwise, on multiple text emails I sent promoting a product or service the number of visits correlated to about 90% of the number of individuals sent the emails.

    @Justin,

    I was thinking of open rate, though as you imply simply looking at open rate may give a false perspective–correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation and open rate doesn’t mean profitability. Still it would be interesting to see large scale open rate data broken down by frequency.

    I’ll send you a private email about being a guinea pig.

    @Dr. Brown,

    Have you tested Fri v. Sat v. Sun? Just curious.

12. Blogging University 101
    
    

    Interesting info Justin. I send my weekly newsletter out on a Tuesday and we average around 80% open rate (we even had 99% open rate a few weeks ago).

    We used to send it out on a Saturday and that worked quite well too. In fact, weekend emails we found were actually read more in-depth as people obviously had more time.

    Great stats though, thanks for sharing.

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