5 Email Marketing Myths Dispelled

Email marketing has proven to be an efficient way to build corporate trust and loyalty plus create brand awareness for quite some time now. Most corporations employ this method to reach their current or potential clients with advertisements, direct sales and soliciting donations.

According to research a total of over 205 billion emails were sent and received last year, a staggering amount of traffic on a platform that barely existed twenty years ago.. However  people’s perception of email marketing is stacked high with false beliefs, following are six myths proven to be untrue –

1. A particular email should not be sent more than once

Drafting an email meant for marketing takes time and attention to detail to craft. The mail goes out in the expectation that it will have an impressive open rate. However, the recipient may fail to open the email for many different reasons –

• Problems relating to connectivity or software failures that prevent the email to open.
• Being very busy and caught up in some work at the time the mail is delivered. And by the time the recipient gets time to view the mail, it might have been covered up by other new mails
• Recipient may be on holiday and the last thing they want to do is read non personal mail.

To overcome these hitches the copy can be rephrased and sent again. The recipients circumstances have often changed and they are more receptive to reading what you have to say, and technical glitches get fixed.

The founder of Noah Kagan, SumoMe, says that to improve the open rate, you need only change the subject heading while retaining the bulk of the content and sending the mail again. Or you can select those who didn’t open the previous mail and resend it a week later. This approach has proved to be effective according to organisations such as Groove.

2. Unsubscribes are bad

Having people who requested to stop receiving your email is believed by many marketers to be a bad thing. This is because they associate a high number of subscribers with marketing efficiency, but high numbers of subscribers may not be something to celebrate. Not everybody who has subscribed to your emails is interested in getting your products or services. Some people may be using the emails to their own advantage.

Unsubscribes helps eliminate all those people from your list who are never likely to become your customer and don’t really want to hear from you. So you can be sure that people receiving your mail are genuinely interested in you. Plus it saves money as most mail software charge based on the number of recipients. It is inevitable that at some point some subscribers will get frustrated and decide to leave. At this point its better that a client just unsubscribes rather than marking you as a spammer, which can attract more spam leading to problems related to mail delivery.

3. The best day to send marketing email is on Tuesday

This myth explains that on Monday, people are just back from the weekend so they are still trying to catch up with work. On Wednesday and Thursday they are focusing on their work. On Friday, they are preparing for the weekend, leaving Tuesday as the quiet day, the best day, to send marketing emails. This is nothing but a myth.

According to a study conducted by HubSpot regarding day of week and email open rates, findings revealed that Tuesday was the worst day to send mails and had the lowest open rate. This might be because other mails were given priority on this day, the study also showed that Weekends had the highest open rate. Every single person has their day and time of going through their emails. It is therefore important to send mails on an everyday basis.

4. Short marketing emails are more effective

Some people believe that keeping market emails short tend to be more productive. According to Joanna Wiebe, the length of your email should depend on your recipient and what you have to say. She said that “it’s not about picking one length or style out of a hat and simply shoving your message into that”. It is all about providing the client with sufficient information. However it is important to study your clients and know how much they are willing to read.

In a study done by Close.io on email length and read rate, several mails were used to carry out the study. Surprisingly, the longest email happened to receive more signups, so try sending long-form emails, packed with interesting content and formatted in a way that makes them easy to read.

5. Subject lines should be kept short

Since the introduction of smartphones there has been discussion about the appropriate length of email subjects suitable to fit a Blackberry screen. They finally concluded that it should be between 25-30 characters. This could be because most marketers believe that short subject lines are easy to capture at a glance unlike long ones which are normally cut off and require clicking and reading through.

However a study carried out by Return Path on more than 9 million marketing emails sent out in February 2015 found that there isn’t any correlation between the number of characters in a subject and the read rate. Those taking part in the study maintained that the amount of characters in the subject line didn’t affect the read rate.

6. Marketing emails should be branded and polished

It is not a requirement that marketing emails should always look nice. On Groove’s onboarding drip, a plain email without a logo or colour performed 35% better than a similar branded and coloured template. According to HubSpot, HTML emails reduce open rate and plain texts are safe from image-blocking. Highly designed images may fail to convey the primary message when people lose interest in downloading the large file images.

Email marketing has been adopted and appreciated because it is influential, cheap and easy to use. Marketers should ignore all the negative advice dispensed about it and instead analyse the recipients of your mail and find out the most appropriate approach for your audience.