Newsletters can be powerful tools in getting your messages out. With the Can-Spam Act of 2003 some changes have occurred that affect unsolicited commercial email. Unsolicited commercial email is defined as email from businesses that have not previously been subscribed to. That is different than newsletters.
Newsletters are information a customer requested. Permission has been granted to the site owner to contact the subscriber about new products, services, and any other relevant information. This is where the power begins.
Email marketers cite numerous problems with delivery of their email notifications. These issues are a direct result of people and businesses misusing the powerful tool of email notifications. Email addresses were sold by unethical businesses and email addresses have been harvested by unethical marketers. The Can-Spam act, as week as it may be, prohibits the exercise of harvesting email addresses off web sites. Yet, the act is still performed.
Due to the fact that unethical business people have ruined a worthy tool, there are still things that are important in measuring the success rates of newsletters. First, as I mentioned a few weeks ago the best days to send out newsletters are Wednesday and Thursday. This has nothing to do with less spam being sent out on those days. It primarily relies upon the fact that people's work weeks are coming to an end and the beginning of the week with all its headaches are nearly over. Receiving newsletters from favorite companies can be refreshing if the content is compelling and interesting.
Each newsletter a business creates must be interesting to the subscriber. By providing information about your products and services with a mixture of interesting and educational material will always come over with the best reception. Including a call to action can assist in measuring the successfulness of your newsletters.
Email marketers have focused upon the metrics of opened newsletters while they were limited to the ability to measure click-thru rates. Those companies that could afford high-end newsletter programs capable of reading the log files from the web server were able to measure this all important metric.
As a business owner your goal is to know how to interpret the statistics available on the web server. Since many business owners do not understand how to interpret these important elements, their success rates are extremely small. Open rates are a result of two elements only. First, the sender's company name or email address and second, the subject line. My advice is to use your company name in the sender's address. Second, use subject lines that identify the purpose of the newsletter. Below is an example of both:
Sender's Address:
If you look at my sender's information you'll notice it says Apple Pie Shopping Cart. You are assured that any email from with that sender's information would be from me.
Subject Line:
My newsletter subject line is always "Apple Pie Recipes of Success". This identifies the subject of my message and assures the subscriber that they are about to read my newsletter.
The most important metric is not the number of subscribers the newsletter was sent to or the number of subscribers that opened the newsletter. In fact, it is the click-thru rate that becomes the one most important element and above all the most successful marketing statistic available. That number tells me how successful my message and call to action were.
As mentioned above, many business owners pay third-parties to provide these statistics. Or, they have to decipher the server logs. Attempting to do either can be either overly burdensome due to cost or simply due to time constraints. In order to assist clients the Apple Pie Shopping Cart includes this high level of measurement.
Newsletters are information a customer requested. Permission has been granted to the site owner to contact the subscriber about new products, services, and any other relevant information. This is where the power begins.
Email marketers cite numerous problems with delivery of their email notifications. These issues are a direct result of people and businesses misusing the powerful tool of email notifications. Email addresses were sold by unethical businesses and email addresses have been harvested by unethical marketers. The Can-Spam act, as week as it may be, prohibits the exercise of harvesting email addresses off web sites. Yet, the act is still performed.
Due to the fact that unethical business people have ruined a worthy tool, there are still things that are important in measuring the success rates of newsletters. First, as I mentioned a few weeks ago the best days to send out newsletters are Wednesday and Thursday. This has nothing to do with less spam being sent out on those days. It primarily relies upon the fact that people's work weeks are coming to an end and the beginning of the week with all its headaches are nearly over. Receiving newsletters from favorite companies can be refreshing if the content is compelling and interesting.
Each newsletter a business creates must be interesting to the subscriber. By providing information about your products and services with a mixture of interesting and educational material will always come over with the best reception. Including a call to action can assist in measuring the successfulness of your newsletters.
Email marketers have focused upon the metrics of opened newsletters while they were limited to the ability to measure click-thru rates. Those companies that could afford high-end newsletter programs capable of reading the log files from the web server were able to measure this all important metric.
As a business owner your goal is to know how to interpret the statistics available on the web server. Since many business owners do not understand how to interpret these important elements, their success rates are extremely small. Open rates are a result of two elements only. First, the sender's company name or email address and second, the subject line. My advice is to use your company name in the sender's address. Second, use subject lines that identify the purpose of the newsletter. Below is an example of both:
Sender's Address:
If you look at my sender's information you'll notice it says Apple Pie Shopping Cart. You are assured that any email from with that sender's information would be from me.
Subject Line:
My newsletter subject line is always "Apple Pie Recipes of Success". This identifies the subject of my message and assures the subscriber that they are about to read my newsletter.
The most important metric is not the number of subscribers the newsletter was sent to or the number of subscribers that opened the newsletter. In fact, it is the click-thru rate that becomes the one most important element and above all the most successful marketing statistic available. That number tells me how successful my message and call to action were.
As mentioned above, many business owners pay third-parties to provide these statistics. Or, they have to decipher the server logs. Attempting to do either can be either overly burdensome due to cost or simply due to time constraints. In order to assist clients the Apple Pie Shopping Cart includes this high level of measurement.
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