How to Get Your Email Read

Jack Zeal, Lead Developer

Notice I titled this article "How to get your email read". How to get it DELIVERED is, in contrast, a simple technical problem. Getting email read requires politeness and understanding of your customer, which can't be outsourced or automated.

You hired the best contractors. You set up CAN-SPAM compliant subscription and cancel forms. You configured the SPF records correctly. Congratulations. You got your email into someone's inbox.

And congratulations, you're only one click from being kicked right back into "spam". This is where content and protocol come into play.

Bad Example

Recently, I recieved an email from the company that made a monitor I bought in 2005.

The subject line said "(Company Name)'s New Consumer Displays".

Now, this is a fairly big and successful company, who you'd expect to know how to handle email intelligently. However, they managed to make at least FIVE mistakes in this one message which can backfire on them.

Mistake 1: No or incorrect market segmentation.

I'm sure many companies define an "email strategy" as "email our entire list once a week". The REALLY sophisticated ones say "Email half today, and half next week, so we don't raise any spam warnings at the incoming ISP."

That sort of approach is both hopelessly wasteful and makes your company look bad. If you can break your email campaigns into targeted units, you don't waste money pursuing irrelevant demographics, are less likely to be blacklisted as a spammer, and the customers who are targeted will recieve more useful messages.

One useful way to break up an email list is based on the age of your relationship with the customer. Most businesses have a well-defined "cycle" for repeat contact. It starts the day of purchase. Frequently, 80-90% of the cycle is spent in passive ownership, and the last 10-20 percent is preparing for the purchase of a replacement, upgrade, or additional item of the type. If your message is designed to catch immediate buyers, you're really only interested in the 10-20 percent.

This is common sense. When it becomes savvy, however, is that each business takes a different time to run through a cycle. A car dealer will likely not see today's sales again for at least two years, but a salon will probably see them in a month. If you know your business, you should know your cycle time, and be able to market accordingly.

If you have a long cycle time, and put everyone on the same mailing, you're going to hit mostly customers who are outside the repurchase phase. Indeed, you might end up irritating the client who just came in and bought something yesterday. Not only are you sending him something when he's OBVIOUSLY not a potential buyer, but you might promise him a better deal than what he just bought.

Conversely, if you're a local restaurant, a grocery store, or a bookshop, it's not outlandish to expect your customers back within a fortnight. An advertisement every two or three weeks, especially if associated with a discount valid until the next ad rolls through, will be a welcome contact.

If your business has brick-and-mortar locations, the same segementation logic applies for geography. Most people are not particularly interested in traveling from Phoenix to your Grand Opening in Tulsa, so emailing Phoenix is wasting your time.

In the above bad example, they didn't have to worry about geographic issues, but they still completely ignored the cycle time of their market. I expect a durable, expensive item like a new monitor to last at least five years, so trying to convince me to buy after just two is more than a little premature.

Mistake 2: Why should I care?

I don't even read all the personal correspondence and opt-in mailing list messages I get. Why should I read your message? A compelling subject line can really work wonders here-- such as a promise of something free, a discount, or potentially useful information. My example subject line doesn't sound like there's anything in it for the reader, other than a boring press release.

Press releases are the ultimate in "Why should I care?" messages. Even when they have useful content, the small amount of valuable information is buried beneath filler like summaries of corporate histories, media contact numbers, and irksome congratulatory writing. If it's a product with a mainstream audience, what little content there is can often be found in a more useful form on independent news or review sites.

Press releases work fine if you're actually releasing them for the press, but customers want to see a subject line that sells.

Mistake 3: Why are you telling me this?

This goes beyond the previous mistake. It's possible to fail to make information non-compelling without making it appear irrelevant. Most people find tax forms and technical manuals boring, but still recognize they're useful and worth reading.

The wrong subject line, however, can go all the way to divorcing the message from its perceived value to the reader.

To go back to our example, looking at "(Company Name)'s New Consumer Displays" fails to explain:

What a 'consumer display' is. I suspect it's their own term, perhaps referring to one product line or business unit. But from my perspective, it's not clear what that means, or if it encompasses products I'd be interested in.
What makes them different or superior to previous models, and thus worthy of purchase. All they've said is "new", which provides no frame of reference for determining value. Comparative words are great here. Faster, cheaper, better, larger, more reliable. To take a pessimist's view, "new" alone fails to disprove the possibility that the new models are actually inferior to the old ones.

Evidently, The reader is apparently supposed to peruse the entire message to determine if it's relevant to him. That's a quick route into the spam pile.

Mistake 4: You don't control the horizontal or vertical.

When you send me an email, it could be read in one of four places: One of two completely different web-mail systems, a PDA, or Outlook. Many people are in similar boats, especially professionals who have both personal and business email accounts.

If you design a mail to look good in Outlook, you'd be surprised how strange it looks when the webmail makes the images disappear, or the PDA fails to parse the CSS or HTML you embed in it at all.

The example mail included images, which didn't display in the webmail unless I actively go and press a button to allow them, and the PDA just showed as strings of numeric garbage. Other mail I've seen will actually have screens full of ugly CSS before tiny blocks of readable content on the PDA. Click. Goodbye. If you stick with minimal formatting, and links to active content, it will work more reliably.

No competent website team today would deploy a website without double-checking it looks passable in both IE and Firefox, so why do few people make sure their company's email presence looks right in Gmail and BlackBerries? It's the exact same logic.

Mistake 5: Abuse of user trust.

My dealings with this company via email are limited to putting my address on a rebate form, so they could notify me when they cut me a cheque. Even if there's a opt-out box or a disclaimer to protect you, it's still greedy and obnixous to take any contact other than "Please sign me up for a mailing list" as a request to be put on the mailing list. Half the time, customers do not even remember whether or not they'd have given you authorization in any other way and will treat such messages as unsolicited.

In addition, there are certain potential "feeds" of email addresses you KNOW will not hit good target customers: Requests for support or returns signify dissatisfied customers with a poor chance of repurchase. Warranty registration and rebates imply recent purchases, which need to wait for their cycle time to come through again. Don't be so covetous of a client's email you pack your lists with poor clients. The primary goal is still sales, not just deliveries. A targeted 1,000 message campaign with a 5% conversion rate will get you more sales, for less expense, than a scattershot blast of 100,000 messages which produces a .01 percent conversion rate.

Fixing things:

It shouldn't be hard to fix up a mail campaign like this. It's of potential interest to some of your customers, and there's compelling information buried in the body of the message. All you need is a little change in manners. The next round of messages can be cleaner text, and sent out to customers who are actually approaching the replacement date for their monitors. And, please, perk up the subject line with something interesting. How about "(Company Name) introduces the world's fastest/brightest/highest-contrast LCD displays!" or, better yet, "$10 off the new (Company Name) LCD -- the world's fastest!"