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BizReport : Email Marketing : October 24, 2006
Authenticate Email To Increase Open Rates
You’ve worked on deliverability, but still aren’t seeing many conversions? Have you considered authenticating your emails?
Deliverability is a huge challenge for email marketers, but those statistics can be changed with a little work on the part of email marketers. According to Iconix, an email research firm, adding a company icon to emails for authentication is the best way to increase open rates. In the study, emails from online auctioneers increased their open rates by more than 400% when they added an icon to authenticate the email. Auction sites are often targets of phishing outfits.
The biggest open rate increases were for e-cards (192%), social networks (115%), dating sites (107%) and banks/mortgage institutions (90%). At the bottom of the pack were online retail outfits, which saw open rates increase by only 40% when adding an icon, and media services with a 26% open rate increase.
Melinda Krueger, principal of Krueger/Direct Interactive, recently asked (via MediaPost) email professionals about Send To A Friend (STAF) functionality for marketers. With more trust in peer-to-peer transactions, having friends send trusted links to friends seems like a great idea. However, the general consensus was that STAF emails aren’t a great way to build databases because the programs can’t produce much volume.
However, if you want to include this type of program on your website, it won’t hurt anything. Simply include a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing to tell Computers and Humans Apart), a kind of graphic code, so that spiders and other automated programs can’t enter random email addresses.
Tags: email deliverability, email filtering, email marketing
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Comments
Even though it doesn't sound like a lot, to increase open rates, even if it's only by 26% or more, is still a huge improvement. If some of them take the desired action that the email represents, it's even a bigger improvement. Doing several of these types of things that increase open rates are necessary in the email marketing world.
Posted by: Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com) on October 25, 2006 07:13