Successful email marketing - case studies

Article from August, 20th, 2003.

What does a small company that sells flower seeds have to teach you? Actually, a lot. American Meadows used server logs to track its email marketing efforts, before switching to a new tracking system. Here is what they found out.

1. What day of the week is best? This is a tricky question. If you own a restaurant - Friday probably would be best. Not so for other businesses. The best way to know when to send a mailing, of course, is to track your campaigns. Since the start of this year, American Meadows has found the top six performing e-mail messages have all gone out on either a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Logically, the company now sends nearly all its offers early in the week.
   
   
2. What time do most people open their e-mails? It depends whether they do it at home, or office. In case with American Meadows, they found almost all their responses are in the middle of the day, around the lunch hour. Most likely, people at work are taking a break and ordering wildflower seeds. That is no surprise. But that's one reason why you should track mailings.
   
   
3. What motivates people to make a purchase? A third of the top-performing offers include free shipping, which American Meadows proffers several times a year. Allen says that seems to be the only real incentive that can change offer response, other than (of course) the offer itself.
   
   
4. What form of e-mail is the best? The American Meadows offers are all fairly simple HTML mailings, with a colorful photograph at the top followed by text. The designer typically puts three links throughout the mailing, and more than 70 percent of recipients will click the first link. As it turned out, the length of the mailing doesn't make much difference.
   
   
5. Other findings. Interestingly enough, there where quite a few people, who did not delete the messages and kept them in their inboxes for week and even month before making a purchase.

Relevant links:

    • Scheduled targeted mass mailing

Next week: Overhauling your e-mail campaign
Prev week: Email Marketing Software Tips

 

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