Followed a very interesting webinar yesterday from Hubspot about the science of email marketing, where they used hard data (over 9.5 billion emails from Mailchimp), focus groups and surveys to identify general trends in email marketing.
Here’s a link to the webinar in its entirety (http://www.hubspot.com/thanks-for-registering-the-science-of-email-marketing), and I’ve also included some cliff notes from the presentation:
- ‘Email is Homework’ to users
- Saturday and Sunday have the best clickthroughs
- Monday/Tuesday have the highest unsub rate and Thursday/Friday have the lowest
- Early morning is best time for clickthroughs (6am)
- Night is worst time for clickthroughs and unsub rate (10-12)
- 80.8% of users reported reading email on a mobile device
- # of links doesn’t have an effect on clickthroughs
- # of links does have a small effect on unsub rate (more links more unsubs)
- ‘Use lots of links’
- ‘Serialize and label your emails’ to make them fresh, new, and interesting to users
- ‘Give your subscribers special access/make it feel exclusive’
- ‘Send email from someone they’ve heard of’ – use the brand or an identifiable person
- Best clickthrough is for 1 send/month, all other rates are near even (up to 30+/month)
- Worst unsub rate is for 1 send/month, the best rate comes from 5+/month
- ‘Don’t be afraid to send too much email’
- 58% of users have a separate junk email inbox
- Allow social sharing from within marketing emails