What is the best day to send emails…and get them opened? Does a personalized subject line help open rates?

Private clients often ask how they can improve open rates of their marketing emails. It does you no good to send emails if they aren’t getting opened. So, I found a study recently conducted by a big email delivery house: MailerMailer. The study was just released on July 19, 2011 and was based on 977 MILLION emails sent by over 1,600 of their clients. A pretty good sampling.

This may surprise you.

TIP #1: PERSONALIZATION

According to a study, emails that are not personalized with a consumer’s name in the subject line generate an open rate…equal to that of personalized emails.

According to Raj Khera, CEO of MailerMailer, “If you just personalize the subject line, that’s a tactic some spammers are using to get you to open the message,” he said. “So if that’s all you do, you may not get that extra bump in readership.”

You are likely better off using personalization in the body of the email instead of in the subject line. Folks are smarter than you think…and they think you are a spammer if you insert their name in the subject line. Another tip; the study found that email with subject lines four to 15 characters in length were FAR more opened than those with 50 or more characters in the subject line. In fact, shorter subject lines increased open rates from 9.9% to a whopping 14%. Still not very high…but a 40% improvement.

TIP #2: BEST DAY TO SEND EMAILS

The study shows that the best day to send emails is on Sunday. The worst day to send emails is Thursdays. Consumers are most likely to open and click on an email on Sunday, according to the study, with messages generating a 12% open rate and 4% click rate on the first day of the week. The lowest open and click rates occur on Thursdays, at 11% and 2%, respectively.

TIP #3: EMAIL SUBJECT LINE LENGTH

The study found that emails with subject lines four to 15 characters in length had a 14% open rate, whereas those with more than 50 characters saw a 9.9% open rate.

TIP #4: EMAIL FREQUENCY

Email marketers that delivered less than one message a month experienced a 5% bounce rate, while marketers with at least a daily delivery saw a 0.4% bounce rate. Khera said “Everybody’s list has some degree of churn every month,” he said. “It’s just that when you’re sending [emails] daily, you clean out your list faster, whereas if you send it once a month, it takes a little bit of a longer time to clean it out.”

So, what’s the bottom line? Email open rates are on the decline. Consider these tips to optimize your open rates. Better yet, implement off-line marketing like the good old U.S. Mail to really boost your marketing efforts.

Keep Succeeding!

Mike