Happy Spring!

Welcome to another issue of Communications Matter! In every issue, we will review topics that will help you grow your business faster with cutting-edge communication skills.

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In this issue:

What's a Good Email Open Rate?

Optimized Online Press Releases

 

What's a Good Email Open Rate?

As high a number as possible! Look to increase your numbers with the suggestions below.

As with any profession, email marketing has its own, specialized terminology. Email campaigns involve sending a message to a large list of email addresses at one time. Usually that message is tailored and targeted to individuals based on their tastes, demographics (age, gender, income, etc), buying history, and so forth. The more tailored the list, the better chance you have to get more of those recipients to OPEN the email.

“Open rate” refers to the percentage of recipients who opened the email out of the total sent. The number of those who opened the email, rather than deleted it or just ignored it forever, can be measured. By “open rate” publishers sometimes mean “Clicked on it in their email client, and presumably read at least part of the message.” However, it’s important to know the number is arrived at by calculating the ratio of emails opened to those sent, not to those delivered. Open Rate = Open/Sent, not Open Rate = Open/Delivered.

So, if a publisher sends an email but it doesn't get delivered, the denominator in the ratio is larger than it should be. That makes the Open Rate smaller than it should be. The good news is you can adjust the number - if you know the percentage of emails that actually get delivered.

Common sense suggests — and thousands of marketing studies confirm — that the higher the percentage who open the email, the greater the number of potential customers who will read it and become actual customers. More opens means more customers, on average. Whatever your numbers are, you should be always trying to increase them with each mailing.

The ratio of Open Rate to Conversion Rate can vary a lot. Email marketing is always a combination of writing great content, having a great list and a reliable delivery mechanism, along with a number of factors outside your control.

Delivery rates for email have gone through the virtual floor. According to MarketingSherpa, one out of every six people who asked to be on your mailing list won't receive your email newsletter or marketing message because a spam filter blocks it by mistake.

As you probably know, the challenge you are facing is primarily spam filters, electronic and human. And no wonder. Consider these sobering numbers:

• 10 out of 12 messages reviewed are considered spam (Postini.com)
• average users receive 42 unwanted sales pitches a day (Jupiter Research)
• 70% of all email messages will be spam by 2007 (Radicati Group)

But in the long run, those who write compelling messages, keep their lists clean, and deliver on a regular schedule generally do very well.

In one Forrester study, participants gave two main reasons they opened commercial emails. They recognized the sender as a company they signed up with (40%) and they recognized the sender's name (52%). So it is important to identify yourself in the subject line if possible. According to a study carried out by OptInNews, business-to-business (B2B) email marketing has a higher overall open rate (71%) than business-to-consumer (B2C) email newsletters (41%). Note that these figures are based on scenarios where there is a legitimate and strong relationship with a subscriber base.

Please call us at 303-527-2978 or email kathy@mason-works.com if you would like help creating email marketing messages that provide bottom-line results. We beleive in the use of email marketing as a powerful method to communicate with your target market.

Optimized Online Press Releases

Do you know about Optimized Online Press Releases? They are press releases written for distribution over the internet that have your keywords enbedded in them. They help you get alot more visibility than traditional press releases.They can generate online traffic as well as produce offline publicity. Do you know what your keywords are? The easiest way to see them is to pull up your website, check on Tools (in IE) and look at Source. Your webpage should show up in code and your keywords will be near the top of the page. You can have 100's of them if you want. Currently the trend is to have alot of three word keywords in your code. To create an Optimized Online Press Release, you need to add as many of those keywords into your text as possible. In addition, to gather the most free publicity possible, you will want to add a bio box at the end of your press release to connect the information back to your web address. Once you have completed this step, now you are ready to blast them out. Here are a few online PR news wires for you to use:

http://www.PRWeb.com, http://www.emediawire.com, and http://press.xtvworld.com

If you'd like more information on press releases, please let us know. We're happy to help you gain the publicity that you deserve!

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We hope that you have enjoyed our March 2006 newsletter and will gain many useful ideas from our experience to accelerate your business! Please contact us if you do not want to receive future mailings. For more information, email kathy@mason-works.com or go to our website, www.mason-works.com The Mason Works Acceleration team looks forward to helping you grow your business faster than you can do on your own.

Best wishes! Kathy Kathy Mason, President Mason Works, LLC. 303-527-2978 kathy@mason-works.com, www.mason-works.com