B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine » E-mail Creative: Small Changes, Big Impact

E-mail Creative: Small Changes, Big Impact

March 22nd, 2007 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Want to boost the open and click rates of your “nurturing” emails? (Who doesn’t?!)

A study of B2B marketing emails by email marketing company SilverPOP – and neatly summarized by Kate Maddox, writing in B2Bonline.com – identified several creative elements which do just that. The survey analyzed 147 e-mail campaigns sent by 115 B2B marketers, and evaluated creative elements ranging from subject-line content to the design format of e-mails.

The very first place marketers can begin to use creative effectively is in the subject line. SilverPOP’s study found that e-mails incorporating the company name or brand in the subject line had substantially higher open rates — 32%, compared with 20% for messages without the company name or brand in the subject line. “This is highly reflective of the fact that the brand or the person it’s from is what matters over the long term,” said Elaine O’Gorman, VP-Strategy at SilverPOP. “When you treat customers well and they anticipate your content, that drives open rates over the long term.”

Also important: design format. SilverPOP studied various e-mail formats, including one-column, two or more columns, letter format, postcard format and varied cell blocks. Postcard-style and varied-cell e-mails were found to garner significantly higher click rates (average 7.9%) than the other formats (average of less than 5%).

Postcard-style e-mails contain a large single image, usually with a call to action, rather than columns of text. Varied cell e-mails have different size blocks of text and images.

The number and type of links in e-mails also impacts click rates, SilverPOP found:

The number of links resulting in the highest click rate was three; adding more links actually causes results to deteriorate.
Text-style links averaged click rates 2.6 percentage points higher than image-style links …fortunate, considering that more and more ISPs – and presumably, internal IS departments as well – are implementing default image suppression.

Even something as seemingly trivial as the placement of certain elements may matter. For example, the study found that placing the call to action “above the fold” — i.e., on the top portion of the screen — resulted in higher click rates.

All told, SilverPOP’s work illuminates at least a solid point of departure for your B2B email campaign. Keep in mind, though, that these are averages …and your market can easily deviate from the average. Which of course comes back to what we continually harp on: there’s simply no substitute for testing, testing, testing!