Email Marketing E-book

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Email Marketing Tips: Revealed

Tips and Best Practices presented by the LaunchBit Team

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I. About LaunchBit

LaunchBit is an ad network for email, working with advertising partners from around the world to reach niche audiences via email. Since their inception, LaunchBit has grown their network to thousands of newsletter publishers and campaigns reaching millions of people.

Some of LaunchBit’s email publisher partners include Hacker Newsletter, Now I Know, and HTML5 Weekly.

The data for this eBook has been compiled based on the LaunchBit team’s experience and their consulting work with publisher partners.

To learn more about LaunchBit, visitwww.launchbit.com.

About the Authors:

This book is a collaborative effort by Team LaunchBit.

Elizabeth Yin, the main author as well as CEO and co-founder of LaunchBit, is an internet marketer and previously ran marketing for developer products and events at Google. She also lived on a tall ship for 5 weeks at some point.

Jennifer Chin, the COO and other co-founder of LaunchBit, is a front-end designer, holding a PhD from MIT in Material Science and Engineering. In her free time, she likes to experiment in her kitchen, where the team has graciously been her guinea pig on multiple occasions.

Audrey Cu hails from a background of procurement and supply management. When she’s not keeping up with the latest in celebrity gossip, you can find her exploring new neighborhoods and restaurants.

Zachary Tong comes from a biology background, started coding on the side and enjoys stats and graphs. Most of his free time these days is taken up by his golden retriever, Sophie.

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II. Why Email Marketing?

With the rise in Saas and ecommerce businesses, more and more conversions are happening online. As such, it’s becoming increasingly important for online marketers to optimize their online sales funnel: driving traffic, nurturing that traffic, and finally, converting that traffic to sales. While many marketers are fixated on driving traffic to convert people to buy right away, that conversion rate is typically so small. Even if you optimize it, you still are typically just looking at small percentages of conversions.

This ebook is all about how you can nurture and engage the much larger percentage of traffic who doesn’t convert immediately. If you can turn this group of people into customers, it can be much more substantial than the number of people who convert immediately.

Email is one of the best ways to nurture an audience. Instead of trying to funnel traffic to buy immediately, the best marketers will funnel their traffic to sign up for an ebook, a webinar, or even a contest. Then, they’ll cultivate those relationships over time by sending useful emails with exclusive tips/content or perks for being on the list. Their audience will get to know their voice and personality and eventually will begin to understand the person behind the corporate machine. The best marketers know that they can gain many more sales by gaining trust and building rapport with their audience first before trying to make a sale.

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III. Challenges of Email Marketing

A. Growth and Retention Are a Constant Challenge Faced by all Marketers So What Are Good Subscribe/ Unsubscribe Rates?

To the extent of our data, subscription rates in our network are largely biforcated. You are either growing your readership relatively slowly: 1-2% growth or you are doing really well and

growing beyond 10% growth. Since we do not know how each of our publishers specifically grows their lists, I surmise that the high growth publishers in our network are using paid acquisition methods to achieve 10%+ growth rate.

For unsubscribe rates, there is a skew towards a 1-3% unsubscribe rate. In other words, if the plurality of publishers are on that end of the spectrum for both subscribe and unsubscribe rates, it means that most lists are not growing overall or are growing really slowly…

From the aggregate average data, it was difficult to see how a newsletter really grows. But after talking with a sample of successful newsletter publishers (lists 50k+), we found that generally speaking, their lists:

1. Grow linearly, not exponentially

2. The slope of that linear growth increases for a while when prominent people or companies plug their lists

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What’s the best way to grow a list? Create a Landing Page:

The growth of our best newsletter publishers looks nothing like the exponential nature of the growth of top websites. Most of our publishers grow in spurts — sometimes they'll get sudden floods of new subscribers, and then those taper off. That said, if you have a top newsletter, you can rival the revenue of websites who have hundreds of millions of visitors per month with lists in the low millions of subscribers. So, although it’s harder to grow as a newsletter, each new engaged subscriber can often be worth more than a single web visitor.

Prominent newsletter publishers will typically create a landing page or popup solely dedicated to getting newsletter signups. Having a sign up box with a clear call to action and a couple of bullet points on why signing up can help. Here are some good examples of successful landing pages for newsletters:

Now I Know

Now I Know (www.nowi know.com) is a newsletter about learning a cool, new fact every day. They message this clearly upfront, have one call to action, and 3 bullet points on past topics they have covered.

At the bottom, they also have social proof — testimonials from prominent people who are subscribed as well as their subscriber count, which is currently at over 80,000.

Under30CEO

Under30CEO (www.under30ceo.com) is a newsletter focused on young entrepreneurs, under 30 years of age. In addition to their newsletter, they also have a blog and publish articles every day.

Thus, creating a single page for newsletter signups on the home page just is not feasible since they want people to read their daily news as well.

Still, Under30CEO wants to have a dedicated audience to make it easier to get reach for their articles. So, they utilize a newsletter popup box to increase sign ups. The popup includes 3 bullet points for why you should sign up, and one clear call to action. If you load the page for the first time in a session, it shows up. But, if you refresh having been there in the same session, it does not, making it effective, but not spammy.

Ecomom

Typically, newsletter publishers will also add some sort of incentive to sign up for their list(s). B2b companies, consultants, etc. will often offer ebooks and white papers. Others, who are more consumer facing, such as Ecomom (www.ecomom.com), will typically offer discounts or coupons.

Others yet, will hold contests to sweeten the deal for signing up. These tactics work quite effectively, but you will want to be careful of those who are just going after freebies and will not actually be engaged with your product or newsletter.

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2 common ways to grow newsletter subscribers 1) Swaps/cross promotions

The concept behind swaps is simple. You promote a company — for example purposes, let’s call it Colossus Industries, Inc. You Tweet about their new product and write a blurb about their great new offering in a blog post or newsletter. After that, Colossus Industries does the same for your company and product(s). This is essentially free advertising for both companies.

The best marketers do this en masse and have an organized, efficient process for doing cross-promotions with complementary companies who have similar audiences. In particular, a lot of marketers favor newsletter swaps, because cross-promotions in emails actually get seen. Tweets will often fall off. Blog posts are effective only if they already have an audience. Often

marketers swap blog posts and use their newsletter to promote the posts.

There are a number of different formats you can swap. Guest posts are the most ideal, because it puts you and your thought leadership completely in the spotlight. However, not all companies have a blog or spend time on a blog or even allow guest posters. Additionally, short informal shoutouts, such as this one, are also effective:

If you are a technologist, interested in startups, or Internet companies generally, you really should subscribe to Kale Davis' excellent Hacker Newsletter. It's a weekly summary of the best parts of Hacker News (which, if you're not familiar with, is a community-driven tech news site; there's nothing nefarious about it). Subscribe here -- 12,000 others have, including me. -Dan

At the top of the December 5, 2012 edition of Now I Know, the publisher promotes Hacker Newsletter with a quick blurb at the top. This ended up generating over 1000 new subscribers for Hacker Newsletter just from this one mention!

Swaps work quite effectively once you reach a certain level of scale. Since publishers typically only want to do swaps with others of a similar newsletter size, this limits the number of new customers you can acquire when you have less “swap-leverage.” Smaller companies typically have to be more aggressive in doing lots of swaps with lots of small companies to get some volume. Having an efficient process of doing outreach, writing creative for the swap, and coordination becomes crucial. We rolled out NewsletterDirectory.co, a free directory of email newsletters, to help newsletters find similar lists.

2) Paid acquisition

A lot of newsletters pay for new subscribers. Typically, publishers will do business development deals with lots of large bloggers or other newsletters asking them to write about their service.

Most advertisers want to pay on a cost-per-lead basis to mitigate risk. Depending on the worth of an email address, it can be anywhere between $1-2 per email for pure media companies to $7+ for daily deal/subscription services. It can be even higher for high-margin industries such as Saas companies, insurance products, and financial products. The flip side is that bloggers and newsletter publishers typically would prefer to be paid on a flat fee (CPM basis) to mitigate the risk of not being paid much (or at all). This is where negotiations come in and having an organized process to do this en masse, since most deals won’t go through.

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These are a few common things to consider in approaching bloggers/newsletters:

1) Relevancy - If a publisher likes your service and thinks it’s a good match for his/her audience, he/she is more likely to write about it either for free or on a cost-per-lead basis.

2) Size - Larger bloggers and newsletters tend to get bombarded with requests all the time, so approaching slightly smaller bloggers or newsletters can often be more effective.

3) Price negotiations - A lot of people we know will often be willing to take a risk and pay a blogger/newsletter on a flat fee basis but will often negotiate hard to get a significantly cheaper price, sometimes more than 50% off. Doing larger bulk buys also tends to yield better prices. 4) Creative - Lastly, placement and type of creative matters a lot. For example, if a blog is able to sell banner ads consistently, your chances of getting a shoutout on a cost-per-lead basis in a banner format is unlikely, since the blogger has limited ad inventory. A blog post, on the other hand, for a busy blogger might be a good fit, since he/she will constantly need to publish anyway. Choosing what kind of creative to negotiate really depends on the surrounding circumstances of the blog in consideration.

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Approach the Right Market:

The marketers we work with love growth. (Who doesn’t?) But, growth can come at the expense of getting the wrong audience. Let me explain. Last year, I was talking with one of our

advertisers. They were running a bunch of contests to giveaway some awesome stuff! You could potentially win a free iPad and other cool stuff by entering your email address into their landing pages. “More volume! More volume!” they yelled. They were getting crazy conversions off their landing page, and their cost per lead was far lower than their expected threshold.

And then the crash…

They were getting leads like crazy, and then they realized their leads were not paying off in the same way that their non-contest leads were. Their effective revenue per lead was much lower. Intuitively, this wasn’t particularly surprising. But, it was disheartening, because they thought they had found an awesome way to scale their customers. It all came tumbling down when they realized a few months later that those contest-leads never bought anything. Those leads just could not be cultivated into great customers.

Aligning your campaign with growth

Contests, freebies, and giveaways can be a great way to generate leads. But, make sure that your leads are the right audience. Make sure that your giveaways/freebies are related to your business, and even better, can hook someone into eventually buying your product. For example, I was recently approached by a jewelry e-commerce company who is thinking about doing lead generation through LaunchBit. They would do a giveaway for a free piece of jewelry, which would be relevant. But, what would be stronger would be to tie their product to their giveaway — perhaps, a credit that can be used in their marketplace? You still run the risk of attracting mere freeloaders with contests and giveaways, but aligning your giveaway to be more closely related to your product/service increases your chance of attracting a relevant audience.

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Reader Fatigue Happens

A couple weeks ago, we received this email: Hi Jennifer,

I have a question. Our open rate keeps going down and I have no clue what’s going on there. From your experience, could you tell me what seems to be the problem? It’s getting worse and worse. We’d like to stop this as soon as possible. Could you give us your advice on this? Thank you,

[Newsletter publisher name]

We generated this graph to get them some answers.

This graph breaks their subscribers into cohorts by the month they subscribed. A more ideal way to do this would have been to create cohorts by subscriber acquisition channel. But alas, that information was not available to us, so we broke subscribers into time-based cohorts.

As you can see, the overall open rate is indeed decreasing. It goes from about 30% to nearly 15% on average. “Reader fatigue” in newsletters is a common phenomenon. When someone first signs up for an email newsletter, they are excited and tend to open every issue they receive. Over time, however, they do not open as often. They don’t necessarily unsubscribe or hit the spam button; they just don’t open every issue. Different newsletters have different average decay rates. The two most important factors to look at in email newsletters are 1) decay rates by customer acquisition channel and 2) the effect of content on decay rates.

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Older customer acquisition channels are more engaged

Almost all the cohorts in this case mimic a similar pattern regardless of their starting and ending open rates. This isn’t necessarily the case with other newsletter publishers. In fact, you can see that this publisher’s most recent subscribers don’t fit the same pattern.

Moreover, the older subscribers on this list seem to be much more engaged. This could be due to a particularly effective customer acquisition channel used in the beginning. But, it could also just be that their most loyal friends, family, and fans signed up in the beginning.

We recommended taking a closer look at August-October customer acquisition channels to see if there was something unique about their marketing then that is different now. In contrast, their most recent cohorts are not that excited about their email marketing.

Cheaper customer acquisition channels vs. open rate?

The publisher responded to our recommendation, and as it turned out, they recently changed their subscriber acquisition user experience. This resulted in an increase in signup conversions by 4 times! So, even though their open rate on newer signups has dropped as much as half, their 4 fold increase in new subscribers makes up for the lower quality subscribers.

On the outset, this seems like a win for them. Our one caution would be to carefully monitor spam complaints. They are currently on shared IP addresses, so if their spam complaints increase, they may be forced to share “dirtier IP addresses” with true spammers. (We’ll get into this topic a little later on.)

If we had broken down the cohorts by customer acquisition channel, we may have encouraged them to remove the non-performing channels.

Create a reason for subscribers to open

So what to do about the people who are not opening? This is where changing content comes into play. We encouraged this publisher to reduce the frequency of sends to this audience and to change the subject lines of the emails they do send to this group.

They can promote special perks to this non-opening audience — first crack at events, opportunities, discounts, freebies, etc. From our experience, reviving a non-opening list is difficult, but you can win a few small percentages of your list here and there through these tactics.

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B. Maintaining Subscriber Engagement What is a good open rate?

A Y Combinator founder asked me this past summer, what kind of stats he should expect for his email newsletter. I thought I would share our learnings publicly since we see a lot of data in our ad network for email newsletters. Note: this is only data for email newsletters, not transactional emails. Moreover, the email newsletters in our network tend to be focused on content as

opposed to commercially-focused.

Here is a plot of open rates for the newsletters in our ad network. We filter and reject a lot of publishers to keep the quality high in our network, so this plot is essentially a bell curve of the open rates of high quality email newsletters.

Based on just eyeballing the skew of this graph, I’d say that 20% open rate (over which the vast majority of our publishers lie) is roughly what you should be shooting for. Anything above that is amazing.

We were curious, though, whether a larger list size affects open rate? Is it harder to retain a good open rate with a larger subscriber base?

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We found there is no correlation between list size and open rate. Open rates do not actually get better (or worse) as you increase in size. Disclaimer: we did not have enough data to include our largest publishers (100k+ subscribers), so we can’t say with any certainty that this continues to hold at the very large list levels.

Now, a few entrepreneurs have asked me if they should benchmark themselves to email stats broken down by industry. (See: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks-by-industry/) Unfortunately, I don’t have enough data around that study to say whether you should seriously look at those numbers. For example, if we look at the Agriculture and Food Services category, these newsletters have an average open rate of ~24%. For

simplicity, let’s pretend there were only 2 newsletters in this category. This could mean that one has a 25% open rate and another has a 23% open rate. It could also mean that one of them has a 47% open rate and the other has a 1% open rate. In other words, we don’t know how different the open rates are.

That said, if we use the standard deviation of publishers in our network to figure out how big of a difference the open rates are, we find a normalized stdev = 0.23, which is quite high (relative to 1). What this means in plain English is that the vast majority of our network is spread out by a lot and are not closely centered around average. With that in mind, I would not worry about the industry averages — just try to keep your open rate above 20%.

Now, if you are just starting to send email newsletters, you may find that at first you’ll have an amazing open rate, but as you send more email newsletters, your open rate will probably drop.

Keep an eye on this — this is the number that tells you whether or not people actually care about your emails. It is normal to see your open rate drop and taper at a steady state. But make sure your open rate doesn't continue to drop in a downward spiral. Even people who are opening may eventually start seeing your emails go to spam, due to the lack of engagement of others’ on your list.

Assuming that you are sending to people who have legitimately subscribed to your list, low open rates start happening for two reasons:

1) People don’t want to read your emails anymore - This is obvious, but how to combat this? Unfortunately, limiting your emails or unsubscribing people from your emails is the best way to save your open rate from going to the pits.

2) Your emails are getting stuck in spam filters - There are certain key words that will often send your emails to spam. Check out: 100 Spam Trigger Words & Phrases To Avoid

(http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/spam-trigger-words/). For example, we see a number of people use the word “Free” in their newsletters, and this can often send emails to spam. If you are offering a product or service for free, try using phrases like “complimentary” or “at no charge”. Also, check out Mailchimp’s explanation on spam and spam filters

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How Can I Increase My Open Rate?

It’s another week, and you’re hurrying to get your email newsletter out the door, because you’ve heard it’s a good idea to do email marketing. But, you’re not really sure whether your email marketing is good or bad. But, obviously, not everyone is opening your emails, so what is a good open rate and how do you improve it?

As I said above, a good open rate is 20%+ in my book. This is just my opinion based on our data in our email ad network. Imagine two scenarios.

1) You’re seeing < 10% open rate:

If you’re seeing such a low open rate, you may have a bigger problem on your hands. At this level, I surmise that a number of your emails are actually going to spam rather than inboxes. If this is the case, you will want to fix this immediately, as this is just a downward spiral to losing your whole email marketing program. Once your emails stop going to spam, you should see a slight boost in open rates, which leads me to scenario #2.

2) You’re seeing 10-20% open rate:

When you’re in this category, the three most impactful activities you can do are:

a) Clean up your list - No one wants to do this, but it really helps to clean your list every once in a while. Your email service provider should be able to tell you who on your list has not opened in the last few months. If the same 15% of people on your list keep opening your emails, it means that 85% of your subscribers are not opening at all! It’s time to whittle down your list and to stop sending to people who are not opening your messages. Perhaps, save this list of people and send them a message only when you have a very important message instead of daily or weekly so that they will listen when you send them fewer emails. I call this Karma Sending. b) Test subject lines - Once you clean up your email list, it’s time to reinvigorate your email marketing. Using the same subject line diction over and over again gets boring very quickly. If you have enough people opening your emails, try split testing creative new messages that may be random or whacky. A few ways to make your subject lines stand out:

- Reduce the number of characters in your subject line - Try special characters

- Ask a question - Be vague

- Use different diction from your typical subject lines

Note: None of these ideas are guaranteed to improve your open rates — these are just some ways that changing a subject line has helped other email marketers improve their email marketing.

They’re worth a few tries.

c) Send your email newsletter at a different time - Karma Sending and testing subject lines are probably the most effective actions you can take to improve your open rates. But you might get a slight boost by sending your email newsletter at a different time.

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A couple years ago, there was a lot of advice circulating on the internet about the best day and time to send your email newsletter. However, because a lot of email marketers now send on those days/times, there really isn’t an optimal day/time that you can generalize for your newsletter. However, there are a few strategies that may make sense to test.

- Try sending not on the hour. Lots of marketers will queue up their newsletters to go out at say 8:00, fewer at 8:37.

- Try sending on days and at times other marketers may think are bad days/times to send, such as the weekend. With mobile becoming more prevalent, subscribers can check emails all the time. - Try sending on the off-holiday. Everyone tends to send emails around the December holidays.

And while this is the best season for retailers, if your business is not seasonal, it may be wise to send your promotions at other times for holidays or occasions that are not often celebrated, such as Pi day or Clean Up Your Room day.

- Try sending emails to your subscribers when you know they open. If they last opened on a Monday at 2:48pm, then send at that time again next week. If not, experiment with other times.

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How Many Links Should I Include in My Campaign?

Since we run an ad network for email, we care a lot about where clicks are happening in email newsletters. We recently ran a study with publishers in our own network, analyzing which links people click on.

Details of the study:

We analyzed clicks across 66k+ email campaigns and nearly 300M sent emails. If there were 10 links in a given email campaign, we looked at whether the first link was clicked, the second link was click, and so on and categorized our findings and graphed them. As it would turn out, email campaigns that had < 5 links had click-behavior that was very different from campaigns with 5+ links.

Let’s first discuss the results of newsletters with less than 5 links. Place your call to action in the first or second link

You could’ve probably guessed that the first link of an email gets a lot of clicks, and you’d be right. It turns out, having your call to action as the second link in your email newsletter is just as good if not better. (Note: These links are not the “Click here to view this in a browser” or “Unsubscribe” links. These links are the first links that you, as the email publisher, insert.) One caveat is that a lot of publishers tend to link a header image at the top of their newsletters to their respective websites, and those would be considered the first links. This may explain why the second link gets a slightly better click-through-rate in the graph below.

Of all clicks across all email campaigns, the first link was clicked about 35% of the time. So, for example, if there were 100 total clicks across all email campaigns, 35 of those would be on a first link in an email campaign.

What is interesting is that the drop off after the second link is quite steep. In fact, link #3 on average gets approximately 1/3 as many clicks as link #2! You might be thinking, “Well, is it because most email campaigns only have two links in them?”

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As it turns out, there was not a whole lot of 1-link or 2-link campaigns relative to the total population of campaigns we analyzed. This was the click breakdown:

1-link campaigns

Clicks on link #1: 131,914

Clicks on link #2: 0 (because there was only 1 link to click on) 2-link campaigns

Clicks on link #1: 72,003 Clicks on link #2: 163,419 Total on 1 and 2 link campaigns:

Clicks on link #1 = 131,914 + 72,003 = 203,917 Clicks on link #2 = 0 + 163,419 = 163,419 Total on ALL campaigns:

Clicks on link #1 = 1,569,827 Clicks on link #2 = 2,053,468

So, the effect of clicks in these 2 types of email campaigns was approximately 13% on link #1 and approximately 8% on link #2. So, even if you removed all clicks from #1 or #2 link

campaigns, the breakdown of clicks would still massively favor clicks on links in position 1 or 2 over subsequent link positions.

Correlation is not causation, but you might see improved results by moving your call to action into the first or second link in your email newsletter (where you have fewer than 5 links).

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Plurality of email campaigns have no links

From the Campaign Histogram graph, we also see that the plurality of campaigns actually have 0 links. It really surprised us that so many email campaigns have no call to action, and we were wondering why publishers are sending these emails. (It is possible that some of these publishers have an offline-call to action or an email-the-publisher call to action.)

Now, let’s look at campaigns with more than 5 links.

It doesn’t matter where you place your links

While we previously found that most clicks were on the first or second link in newsletters with <5 links, we found behavior to be very different in email campaigns with 5+ links. The

distribution of clicks looked like this:

The plurality of clicks seemed to slightly center around the fourth link, so there may be slight advantages to placing your best links or calls to action in link positions two through five. We hypothesize that the campaigns with 5+ links tend to be news digests (at least in our sample of newsletters), so readers may be “trained” to skim all links and click whatever is most interesting, which somewhat evens out the click distribution.

Of course, this begs the question: how many links are in the newsletters we analyzed? Only 5? As it turns out, we were surprised to see so many of our publishers sending newsletters with TONS of links!

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As you can see, for newsletters with 5+ links, the plurality hovers around 10 links. Surprisingly, the long tail of newsletters goes out to as many as 100+ links!

So, if you send an email digest, it looks like it does not really matter where you place your links. You can stop worrying about trying to position your best links at the top of your newsletter. What this study did not look at, however, was if there is a way to optimize click-through-rate by split-testing different permutations of link position in a digest. That’s an experiment for another day.

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Images and Clickthrough Rate

In the 90s, people would send text email newsletters. Now, so many email service providers make it easy for you to add images, and we’re seeing a ton of email publishers including images in their newsletters. One publisher told us that they are adding a boatload of images to their email newsletter to increase their click-through-rate. Does that work? Do publishers who include images lead to a higher click-through-rate than publishers who don’t?

The Background

We separated newsletter publishers into two categories: “has images” and “does not have

images,” and then we analyzed them to see if we could find a correlation between having images and increases/decreases in various forms of engagement. If a newsletter had a header image but no images in the body, we considered that newsletter to be in the “does not have images” category. We analyzed 465 campaigns across 155 publishers.

Having images has no effect on click-through-rate

Y = has images, N = does not have images

In short, having images in a newsletter has no effect on click-through-rate. Having images does have an effect on forwards

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Y = has images, N = does not have images

That said, we found that people are more likely to forward email newsletters that have

images…but only slightly. On average, newsletters with images had 0.30 forwards per campaign compared to newsletters without images that had 0.13 forwards per campaign.

Having no images has a higher effect on unsubscribes

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There was a clear correlation between not having images and number of unsubscribes, but the effect was small. On average, newsletters with no images had 16.0035 unsubscribes per campaign, but newsletters with images had 6.9 unsubscribes per campaign.

Overall, we found that having images had statistically significant impact on forwards and unsubscribes, but it is a myth that images affect actual engagement with a newsletter’s content.

Moreover, the effect on forwards and unsubscribes was so small that it is not worth changing your newsletter to include images if you currently have none.

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Length of Email

We went crazy and analyzed just about any and every factor that could possibly affect

engagement in email newsletters. Many email publishers believe that by increasing the length of their newsletter, they can improve click-through-rates. We were curious to learn whether this is true or not.

The Background

We quantified newsletter length by counting the number of times it takes to press the page-down button on a keyboard to get to the bottom of the newsletter. Then we analyzed the number of page downs to see how they correlated with click-through-rate. So how were we able to get the number of page views and other numbers, you may ask? Yes, someone actually went through each newsletter and pressed the page-down button and tallied this information and other factors for each newsletter. We analyzed 465 campaigns across 155 publishers and got tired of hand-classifying and stopped.

Click-through-rates do increase with longer newsletters

So, it turns out it is true that click-through-rates do increase with longer newsletters — this was statistically significant with our dataset. However, before you run out to write an essay in your next newsletter, it turns out that the effect of length on click-through-rate was incredibly small. In other words, there are other factors that have a much bigger effect on increasing your click-through-rate than writing more content.

Forwards increase with longer newsletters

It also turns out that the percentage of people who forward your email newsletter is correlated with longer newsletters. Again, there was a clear effect, but like click-through-rate, it was a small effect, so writing War and Peace won’t improve the number of forwards much. Forwards increase by writing a full story in your newsletter

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We took a deeper dive around the content in newsletters. We noticed that some publishers will print a whole story in a newsletter, while others will print just a link or teaser text and prompt people to read more on a website. We thought that it would be interesting to breakdown publishers by “full story” publishers and “teaser” publishers. It turns out, forwards increase by writing a full story in your newsletter. There was a clear effect, but again a small effect. On average, publishers who wrote a full story yielded 0.4 forwards per campaign, while publishers who only wrote a teaser yielded 0.09 forwards per campaign. This also held at a normalized rate per subscriber per campaign.

Teaser publishers have higher spam complaints than full story publishers

Also, teaser publishers tended to have higher spam complaints than full story publishers. This was again statistically significant but had a small effect — in other words, before you worry about changing your teaser text to full stories, there are many other factors that have a much greater impact on your spam complaints. Again, this was normalized per campaign per person so that the list size did not play a role.

Changing your length has only small effects on the click-through-rate of your email newsletter

All in all, while it is true that length had a clear effect on various forms of engagement, it turned out to be a small uninteresting effect. So, to the publishers we work with who are deliberately adding more content, links, and images in an effort to get a higher click-through-rate, I would recommend only adding this content if you think that it will improve the quality of your newsletter. It is not worth your time to lengthen your newsletter in hopes of milking a greater click-through-rate, because the effects are minute.

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C. Effectively Delivering Emails Spam Complaints

You put all this work into your email newsletter. You’re following common bulk sending guidelines

(http://blog.mailermailer.com/tips-resources/12-tips-best-practices-email-newsletters) and CAN-SPAM compliance. But, your emails are still going to spam! Why? How can you stop this from happening?

The overview on spam

Here’s the lowdown on spam. If you know some of your emails are going to spam already, you need to read this post. Once emails start going to spam, you’ve already entered a downward spiral — more and more of your emails will continue going to spam unless you start changing how you run your email marketing program.

7 tips to increase your deliverability 1) Make it easy to unsubscribe

Readers will often hit the spam button, because they can’t figure out how to get off your list. Make it easy for people who want to get off your list to unsubscribe. Add a clear unsubscribe button at the top of your email newsletter. Use CSS to render your button (as opposed to images files) so that all readers, regardless of whether they display images in email, will be able to see the button. You need your readers to stop hitting the spam button right now!

2) Remind subscribers where the subscribed.

We see a lot of startups who collect email leads/sign ups for their launch, but they don’t start sending email newsletters until months later. In that interim, subscribers will often forget what they signed up for and may immediately think that you bought their emails from lists. Remind your subscribers how they found you in the first place. This leads me to my 3rd point.

3) Require your subscribers to double opt-in.

It’s so tempting as a web or mobile app to collect a list of sign-ups and throw those email

addresses on a newsletter mailing list. This is fine if you are sending transactional emails to help them use your app. But, if you are using this list for other purposes, such as marketing or

promotional purposes, require these subscribers to double opt-in.

But if you make people double opt-in to get your newsletter, what’s the worst that can happen? Statistics show that it’s actually better to take a loss on the number of people who subscribe to your newsletter messages to get fewer higher quality subscribers. If you have a spam problem already, switch to double opt-in immediately to reduce the number of spam complaints. You can’t afford to get anymore.

4) Change your email template

Your email template could be setting off spam triggers (http://blog.mailchimp.com/most-common-spam-filter-triggers/). For example, if your email template consists of all images, adding text could help you. Not all subscribers show images by default, so it is possible that

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your subscribers are hitting the spam button, because they aren’t seeing anything in your email! Adding text would allow these readers to see something. But, more importantly, spam filters often look for the ratio of images to text. Changing this ratio to include more text helps you look less like spam in the eyes of spam filters.

5) Ask your readers to rescue your emails from their spam folder

If your readers are telling you that your email newsletter is going to their spam boxes, ask them to press the “Not spam” button so that their spam filters will learn to not send your email to spam in the future. You need a number of subscribers to do this to recover your deliverability, so be proactive about asking your readers to do this.

6) Use good HTML; send a plain-text version

True spammers typically use poorly formed HTML: bad headers, unclosed tags, etc., which are all things that spammers do, because they don’t take the time to write good emails. Good headers are a must. Many of them also don’t take the time to create and send a plain-text version. Even if you do not think it’s important, be sure to include a plain-text version of your newsletter. We have seen several good newsletters hit spam boxes because they skipped this. 7) Avoid “spammy” subject lines

You know exactly what I’m talking about — guarantees, FREE things, CAPITAL LETTERS YELLING SOME MESSAGE, deals, medical supplies, weight loss products, etc. These are all things that spammers have in their subject lines. Do the opposite.

8) Get a dedicated IP

If you’ve done all the above, you may want to consider getting a dedicated IP address for your mailing list. If you are sharing an IP address with a spammer, your deliverability is probably being affected by that.

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Dedicated IP

Most affordable email service providers automatically assign a shared IP address to email lists. The problem with shared IP addresses is that your deliverability is affected by the other senders sharing your IP. Under most “normal circumstances,” shared IPs are fine, and they are cheaper than getting your own.

But, if there’s a spammer sharing your IP address then your deliverability will be affected as well. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know who else is on your IP address. Moreover, many email service providers will split your emails to send across different IP addresses of different levels of deliverability. You can check the sender score of one of the IP addresses your emails are being sent with. (More details on this is available in the next section) A really good IP address is a 98+.

Typically, email service providers have multiple IP addresses and route the “best emails” through their “cleanest” IP address and their most spammy customers through their “dirtiest” IP address. For example, let’s say you are sending an email newsletter that has a 70% open rate and 0 spam complaints. The majority of your emails will likely be routed through a really clean IP address with a high sender score. Now, let’s say you start sending emails to your list around the clock, and your subscribers start hitting the spam button and your open rate starts to drop. Your email service provider will likely move the majority of your emails through a much dirtier set of IP addresses, shared with spammers. At this point, if your emails continue going to spam, your emails will likely continue being routed through this IP address, but if your readers stop hitting the spam button and become more engaged, you may move back up to a better IP address. The problem is that once you are on dirtier IP addresses, the other spammers’ emails will affect your deliverability as well. So, it’s a vicious downward cycle once you end up on a bad set of IP addresses. And, your email service provider doesn’t tell you what IP addresses they’re sending your emails from, so it’s hard for you to even know if you are on a bad set of IPs.

For most small-ish senders, it’s probably not worth getting a dedicated IP address. But, if your emails are super, super important to your business and/or you send a lot of email, such as list sizes of 100k+, you may want to consider getting a dedicated IP address. This will give you full control over the reputation of the IP address that sends your emails.

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Sender Score

Email deliverability is influenced by a number of criteria. It’s partially about how you create your emails and it’s partially about how good your sender score is. This section focuses specifically on how to find a sender score in any email newsletter.

How to find a sender score for an email

1) Go to your inbox and find a copy of an email newsletter you want to check 2) View the full header of that email:

- In Gmail(http://support.google.com/groups/answer/75960/?hl=en) - In Yahoo Mail (http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?locale=en_US&y=PROD_ACCT&page=content&id=SLN3276) - In Hotmail (http://email.about.com/od/windowslivehotmailtips/qt/How_to_See_Full_Email_Headers_in_Windows_Live_Hotm ail.htm)

3) Find the IP address of the sender

4) Go to senderscore.org and type in the IP address and submit it.

My email newsletter from Living Social was sent via an IP address that has a fairly good sender score (95). Anything ~98+ is very good. Anything ~95+ is good. Once you get < 95, we’ve seen email newsletters start to go to spam at a much higher rate. If you are below 90, you are probably seeing a lot of emails go to spam.

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IV. Case Studies

We’ve talked a lot about how to theoretically improve email newsletter engagement, but can we really help? So we challenged email publishers to duels. We reached out to newsletter publishers with over 10k subscribers to participate. We then took their content and sent it to half of their list using our tactics and they controlled the other half. Here are the results.

Case Study 1

In our first duel, we spoke with a publisher who wanted to compete in 2 ways: - Improve their clickthrough rate on opens (clicks/unique open)

- Improve their clickthrough rate on a specific link in their emails. The Background

This first competitor sends a weekly digest of articles from its site. The digest typically includes a quick note from the editor at the top, followed by 12-25 links to articles or events.

Our rocket boosters

In this challenge, we pit the publisher’s newsletter with a newsletter we created. Our newsletter was largely identical to the publisher’s, since we wanted to retain the same content. But, we made the following small changes:

- Shortened the letter from the editor

- Reduced the number of links in the editor’s note (from an average of 9.3 links to an average of 2.3 links)

- Added descriptive text (teaser text) following each of the links to articles so that you could read a bit about the articles before clicking

- Made the layout 1 column (instead of 2)

For privacy reasons, unfortunately, we cannot show you the two layouts. Start your engines!

We divided the subscriber list into 2 groups. Each group received either the original layout or our layout for 3 consecutive weeks. We kept subject lines of both emails the same each time, and we sent all campaigns within 10 minutes of each other. We divided each group into

approximately 15k subscribers, and we sent out all campaigns through a third-party email service provider.

Game 1: Improving overall clickthrough rate

The publishers’ newsletter is represented by A, and ours is represented by B. After three weeks, the data shows a larger percentage of people who opened and clicked on something in our layout.

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Generally speaking, content near the top of emails receives more clicks than content at the bottom. We also found that in our layout, the clickthrough rate of the lower sections was higher than the clickthrough rate of the comparable section in the original layout. In other words, the combination of adding “teaser text” to article links (which was in the lower section) and reducing the length of the editor’s letter drove more readers to engage with content throughout the

newsletter, including the very bottom section.

Lastly, subscribers to our variation, on average, clicked 8% more links than subscribers of the publishers’ version. For all three weeks, our layout encouraged readers to engage with more content.

LaunchBit 3, Publisher 0.

Game 2: Improving clickthrough rate on a specific link

In this second game, we wanted to see which newsletter would do better in directing clicks toward a specific link. Very often, email publishers may want readers to sign up for a event or buy a particular product, and it’s important to test how a layout does in driving clicks towards specific actions.

In game 2 of this challenge, the goal was to drive traffic to 2 high priority links. The first was a link to the article named in the subject line of the email. The second linked to a sign-up page for an upcoming event.

Subject line link – mini competition

In the original newsletter, the publisher typically mentions an article in the subject link and then places a link to that article as the very first link in their newsletter. As a result, we did the same in our layout. As you can see, the publisher wins 2 out of 3 matches.

However, what is interesting is that for whatever reason, the publisher made the article link the 5th link in their newsletter during the 2nd week, while we placed that same link in the first position. And, the publisher still won that week. It would seem that people actively searched for that link after reading about it in the subject line.

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Event link – mini competition

Despite the publisher’s apparent comeback, when it came down to driving traffic to a particular event link, our newsletter blasted the original into space. By cutting the number of links in the editor’s note from roughly 9 to 2, we made the event link standout. We increased the

clickthrough rate on their event-signup link by more than 2x. FINAL: LaunchBit 7, Publisher 2.

Takeaways

The numbers show that your highest priority link should be the first link in your newsletter content. The editor’s note is an effective way to highlight important links to your readers, but reduce the number of links in this note to focus on a particular call-to-action.

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Case Study 2

For this competition, the publisher wanted to compete in two ways: - Increase open rate

- Increase click-through-rate The Background

The publisher sends out a digest-style newsletter that reports the most popular articles on their site from the last week. They also use the newsletter to tell their subscribers about new features and to highlight users and discussions.

Our Rocket Boosters

One of the first things that struck us was the sheer number of images in the publishers’

newsletter. A typical issue had 70 images!!! The average word count was roughly 125 words per issue. Though spam filters are largely a black box, best practices ask for a healthy text-to-image ratio of 7:3 (http://www.icontact.com/blog/the-hulk-no-bulk-text-to-image-to-text-ratio-tips/).

Frankly, this is not an exact science, but we thought that it was plausible to improve engagement by reducing the number of images in the layout. We decided to make these changes:

- Slim down the newsletter by removing extraneous images - Increase the text-to-image ratio by using CSS wherever possible - Add alt text to all images

- Move clickable items above the fold

- Make the email easier to read by making it more list-like Start your engines!

We split tested between the publisher’s layout and our version throughout January and randomly assigned half the list to their layout and the other half to ours.

Game 1: Improving overall open rate

The publishers’ newsletter is represented by A, and ours is represented by B.

After 4 weeks, the data shows that we were able to get higher opens overall.

Game 2: Improving overall click-through-rate

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Overall, this was a challenging match for us, but we found that by slimming the newsletter, we were able to drive them more opens, possibly by reducing the susceptibility of the email from going into spam (though this is speculation). Although an analysis of their open rates by email clients was inconclusive, for 3 of the 4 split test campaigns, our layout also yielded fewer spam complaints.

FINAL: LaunchBit 5, Publisher 3. Takeaways

At the close of this challenge, we recommended that publisher adopt our layout as a starting point for continued tweaking to increase click-through-rates.

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Case Study 3

In our third challenge, we competed with Snapette, a popular fashion discovery app, to see if we could beat their engagement in their newsletter. For this competition, the publisher wanted to increase the overall number of clicks back to their site.

The Background

Snapette sends a weekly digest-style newsletter that shows off fashionable apparel items. They had a very long and image heavy newsletter. As such, we suspected that a portion of their newsletters might be going into spam. So our strategy for this challenge was to see if we could increase their open rate first, and win this contest by getting extra clicks off the extra opens. This publisher’s newsletter averaged 41 content images across 3 sections of the newsletter. In addition, there were several images for social sharing icons as well as the company logo and pictures to download the app. None of these images utilized the alt text attribute.

Start Your Engines

The first layout we tested reduced the number of content images to just 8 by removing the bottom section of the newsletter and the small, thumbnail images in the middle section. Instead of 2 large images in the first section that were one on top of the other, we made these images smaller and put them side by side, bringing them both above the fold. The overall width of the newsletter was also narrowed to bring it to a more traditional newsletter width. We also

encouraged the publisher to write a short note to the readers and made sure the images had text links in addition to alt text.

We blasted the open rate — 26.13% vs 22.75%. Unfortunately, we lost on clickthrough rate — 2.16% vs 2.68%.

Having a significantly greater open rate across all four split tests strongly supported that new layout with reduced number of images was helping the newsletter avoid spam boxes. However, the overall decrease in clickthrough rate meant that while more people saw the email, the new layout was not as engaging.

In an effort to bring engagement back to original levels, we tested the following changes over the next few weeks:

- Removing the note to the readers

- Bringing back two vertically stacked large images

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When the first two ideas didn’t move the needle on the clickthrough rate, a more in-depth click analysis revealed that a significant portion of readers clicked on the bottom content section exclusively. However, instead of restoring the entire section, which would have added 15 more images to the email, we opted to go with just 6 images as a compromise. Fortunately, this did just the trick and we were able to increase clickthrough rates (while still maintaining superior open rates)! However, it took us a while to get to this conclusion, so we lost this challenge overall.

FINAL: LaunchBit 1, Publisher 3. Takeaways:

Going forward, we’ve recommended the publisher re-examine the priority of the different newsletter sections, perhaps moving the bottom section toward the top. They may also want to experiment with the number of images in each section to see if they can further optimize open rates.

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V. Glossary

There are a lot of terms referenced in this book that although are common terms to email marketing, but may not be familiar to everyone. Here is how we define these terms.

Ad Network: A company that connects advertisers to other companies/individuals that want to host advertisements. LaunchBit works specifically with email newsletter publishers who host advertisements in their email campaigns.

Campaign: An issue of an email newsletter sent with a particular goal in mind, whether to promote a product/service or inform constituents about an issue.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR): A measurement of unique readers who have clicked on one or more links on your email, as a percentage of the total readers who were sent the email.

Digest: A compilation or summary of articles

Email Service Provider (ESP): A company providing email marketing and/or bulk email services.

Karma Sending: A methodology of sending email campaigns only to subscribers who have previously opened campaigns.

Open Rate: The percentage of your subscribers who open your email. Publisher: A person or company who issues an email newsletter.

SaaS: Software as a Service is a software delivery model in which software and associated data are centrally hosted on the cloud.

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For continued reading on email marketing tips and best practices, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at www.launchbit.com/blog.

Email Marketing E-book

Email Marketing Tips: Revealed

Table of Contents

I. About LaunchBit

II. Why Email Marketing?

III. Challenges of Email Marketing

IV. Case Studies

V. Glossary