VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog

So, What's a Good Email Open Rate?

Whether you're generating a report for your boss, measuring return on investment o r tracking recipient activity, when it comes to analyzing email marketing efforts many of us find ourselves asking the question "What's a good open rate?" The quick and easy answer is open rates between 15%-30% are considered average. In truth, open rates tend to fluctuate based on send time and send date and vary with industry, list size, messaging and many other variables. 

As an example, email messages related to marketing and acquisition typically have lower open and click rates than editorial or non-profit messages. Similarly, emails sent from within the travel industry tend to have higher open rates than those from the retail industry.

What does this mean for your business? There really is no magic number to achieve when it comes to open rates. The best method for finding a good open rate for your emails is to monitor your own previous and current rates and take steps to improve upon those numbers. More importantly, click rates can be an even stronger indication of customer engagement. Click rates should also be monitored and improved upon. They indicate that a recipient has not only opened your email but that they are also also interested in the content you've sent them.

Steps you can take to improve open and click rates:

• Personalize Campaigns - Creating a personal, one-on-one dialogue will make your emails more welcomed by recipients. Example: Include the recipient's name in the greeting of your email. Check out our video tutorial on how to personalize emails or visit our VR for AppEx tutorials site for more tips!

• Use Customer Data - Previous behavior or past purchases can be used to send targeted emails and appealing messages. Examples: Send a specific message to customers who recently purchased a certain product to promote a similar product on sale. Or, offer your most frequent or highest-value customers a special premium (free shipping, zero setup fees, etc.) as a thank-you for their valued business.
  
  
• Send Timely Follow-ups - Send messages to recipients while your brand is fresh in their mind and interest is high. Example: Quickly follow-up with individuals who have recently visited your website or registered for a newsletter.

• Test, Test, and Test Again- Test send times, subject lines, link types and email template designs to find those that deliver the best click and open rates for your type of business and audience. Example: Perform a split test to measure open rates of two differing subject lines.

Related Posts:

Yep, Subject Lines Are Still Crucial to a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Get Higher Open & Click Rates with Pre-Header Links

Secrets to Email Campaign Success

Top 10 Things to Test to Put Your Email on the Top 10 List!

Make the Most of your Salesforce Integration

As many of us know, one of the best ways to learn about a tool is to see it in action. Every Wednesday morning at 10 am Pacific time, VerticalResponse hosts a free Live Demo of the VerticalResponse for Salesforce AppExchange integration.

During the demo, you'll get an in-depth look at how to use our service from within your Salesforce.com account. Jill Bastian (pictured right) our knowledgeable Community Education & Training Manager, delivers a variety of Salesforce Integration tips and tactics. Whether, you are new to the integration or have been an avid user, the demo has something for everyone.

Demo Topics include:

• Sign-up and installation on the Salesforce AppExchange

• VerticalResponse for AppExchange Email integration and features overview

• List creation (how to create lists using a query or a Salesforce.com campaign)

• Email creation plus tips and tricks

• Reporting details (how to create and access reports)

• Live Q&A session to address any unanswered questions

The live demo covers a wide range of topics and is a great resource to help you maximize the benefits of your Salesforce Integration. Join us for next week's demo or check out our calendar of events to find a date and time that works best for you!

More Resources:

Download our Step by Step Guide to Email Marketing Success to learn how to get your campaign our the door in no time. And, check out our helpful and aptly named, How to Do Everything pages.

 

Yep, Subject Lines Are Still Crucial to a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

I started looking at some of the subject lines in my inbox the other day. And although we may all think that we've written and read about subject lines ad nauseum, Lord knows I have, they are still VERY important to the success of your email marketing campaigns.

So what do we know about subject lines?
Here are the key rules:

1. Avoid repeating your From Label in your Subject Line, as you can see from examples below, you've got limited space, so use it wisely.

2. Don't think your readers will remember you. Include something about your content in your subject line.

3. Include your most valuable information as close to the front of your subject line as possible since email readers whether it's on a mobile or not will cut it off if it's too long.

So here are a few subject lines both good and bad:

Groupon has done a great job at training all of us to see the one deal for one day. This is simple; they use "half off" instead of 50%. Perhaps they've found in their testing that words work better than using percentages.

This subject line is non inviting, there is no reason why I'd open this email. "January Newsletter" just isn't enough for me to get excited.

This subject line has the problem of the one before it. I don't remember who the sender is and they repeat the from label in the subject line.

WebGuild has a great subject line. They outline three hot topics from their newsletter getting readers to open.

In this Techonati Newsletter, not only is the from label bland, but I have no idea what's inside. I know Technorati, but do I care that it's Newsletter #75?

The Daily Beast includes the name of their specific newsletter in the subject line so you get what edition of the newsletter you're getting. It also fits in one of the hot articles. I'm in.

Ad Hoc, the restaurant, sends out a daily dinner menu. What I like about this is their pre-header text so that i can call them right away. However, I would have put the entree in the subject line and had the From Label read "Ad Hoc Daily Dinner" or something relevant.

So there you have it, another article on the importance of subject lines.
Any comments? We would love to hear them!

Related articles:

5 Tips on How to Write a Better Subject Line
29 Great B2B Subject Lines
Do You Publish Your Subject Line to Twitter & Facebook?

Increase Twitter Followers by Sending an Email Campaign

Let’s face it, our customers want to engage with us in all different ways at all different times. 

Some of them will check their inboxes for an email from us, some of them check Twitter for our Tweets, others check their inboxes for our Facebook updates.

So it’s in all of our best interests to get as many of our customers following us on as many lists that we can.

Try this:
Either send a solo email marketing campaign to your customers or include an article in your next newsletter and ask them to follow you on Twitter.

You may be asking why?
One word: Urgency.

Twitter is a great tool for a short, quick message to your followers. After all, you only have 140 characters to work with. You may have a last minute sale and your customers aren’t close to their inbox, but might be checking their Twitter accounts on their phones.

You may have an urgent update that you want your customers to know about now. We use our Twitter handle @VR4SmallBiz and our Blog to give updates on service issues. We just did a campaign where we picked up an extra few hundred Twitter followers just by including it in our newsletter.

Try it and tell us how it worked for you!

Review - July 22 by NickSQ

If anyone here reads our AppExchange reviews, you'll notice tons of favorable reviews, however, as any heavily used software company knows, you can't please everyone.

I think the idea of being able to post a review is great as it promotes the community aspect of the AppEx marketplace, but not being able to respond to posts (and provide updated or correct information) is more than a little frustrating. 

We aren't looking to brush the negative reviews under the rug, quite the opposite actually.  We want to create an open and public dialogue where feedback can be provided, factual information shared and upcoming solutions announced.  So how do we do that...Take it to the Blog -- of course!

That's right, going forward we'll be addressing any negative reviews on our AppExchange listing here on the VR for AppEx blog.  We'll dissect each issue and provide the official VR stance so you get all the correct information.  We encourage you to comment, share your personal experiences and engage with other users so we can get the back-and-forth correspondence that is sorely lacking on the AppExchange review page.

So to get us rolling, I've picked the review below as a starting point.  Note: The text of these reviews are taken directly from the AppExchange review page (i.e. copy/paste) so all comments, as well as spelling/grammar, are the sole responsibility of the original poster.

Original Review:

"You Get What You Pay For...

Vertical response is great because it gets you around the 1000/day mass email limit imposed by salesforce but it has 1 major drawback that makes it unusable for us. It won't let you specify a from address. It sends out email on your behalf but the from email address is a very spammy looking address. This resulted in a 3000 email campaign only having a 30% open rate. It also doesn't appear to be a true salesforce app as it just reads for the VR website and 'inserts' this inside Salesforce. Not only is the VR site very slow, it doesn't integrate with other Salesforce stuff."

VR's Comments:

"It won't let you specify a from address."

Just to clarify, we allow users to choose a From Label (i.e. Acme, Inc or Joe Smith) and this information gets inserted to the left of the @ sign in the From Address.  We use a static sending domain (@mail.vresp.com) as this helps email delivery rates for a few specific reasons. 

1. First, having a From Address that differs from the actual sending domain can have a negative impact on delivery rates as this is often referred to as "spoofing."  This is a tactic used by spammers to hide their identity and masquerade as a legitimate source in hopes of bypassing spam filters. 
2. Second, the static domain allows us to handle all the email authentication protocols (SPF, SenderID, Domain Keys)on our client's behalf and requires no additional set up on their end. 
3. Third, VR has a proven record in the mass email space and we've developed a very strong reputation as a legitimate sender.  As a result, our sending domain (noted above) has credibility with both major ISPs and corporate domains so customers stand to benefit from these in-roads.

Horn tooting? You bet. ReturnPath estimates VerticalResponse's deliverability rate as being about 99% for users that use VerticalResponse for AppExchange. Besides, 30% is a pretty good open rate and above industry standard for opt-in marketing emails.

"It doesn't appear to be a true SF application."

Hmm, "true" is a little subjective because it can mean different things to different people but from a user interface perspective we understand that making our app look and feel more like the native salesforce.com application is very important to some users.

We're working on some UI and workflow changes that will address these concerns and will have them ready for launch within a few weeks after Dreamforce.  Speaking of that, come see us at our booth for a sneak peek as we'll be demoing the new wares.

Ok, hopefully some of this information has helped and we hope to get some feedback from the readers out there (good, bad, ugly).  Let's get this open forum rolling and feel free to challenge any of the comments noted above.

Lastly, if you got a product idea, send it over. I want to hear from you all so we can make this app better than ever.

-- Chris Carpio, Associate Product Manager