Improving your email open rate

Getting your clients and prospects to read your emails isn't the first thing you should be worrying about. How good is your deliverability and open rate? In this article by Karen Gedney she profiles a business that dumped their internal system and implemented an out-sourced email service.

The results were fantastic - and immediate...

The e-mail list for Miller's Professional Imaging, a B2B segment of professional photographers, benefited from automated list cleaning. Deliverability for that list jumped from 86 to 98 percent. Its average open rate is now 50 percent, and its click-through rate is 20 percent. The Mpix contact list, which is more of a business-to-consumer (B2C) segment geared toward advanced amateurs, now also has a deliverability rate of 98 percent and an average open rate of 34percent.

These days it is critical to use a professional email service provider (ESP) that can do the following for you:

• - manage your database, new subscribers, and unsubscribes automatically.
• - deal with bounced messages, without any action from you.
• - report on open rates and click-through rates.
• - maintain good relations with the major ISP's (so your messages get through).
• - can provide templates and advice on creating your email messages/campaigns.

Read more on this topic, plus see a list of leading email service providers in Tip #10 on the Biz Tips page at my website.