Look how long it lasts: The 6 Biggest Email Marketing Myths, Debunked | SEJ Don't worry about cutting your message short just because you want to stuff your email into an arbitrary word count. Yes, you should write economically, but don't be afraid to experiment with long emails! Advertising Continue reading below 4. Keep your subject lines short As soon as smartphones started taking off, article after article appeared about testing your subject lines to make sure they match Blackberry screens. Keep it to 25-30 characters, they said. Cite this as another one of those assumptions that may seem valid, but aren't necessarily that important. Return Path looked at over 9 million marketing emails sent in February 2015 to see how subject line length affected average read rate.
While most marketers fax list stick to 21-50 characters, actual read rates didn't really drop significantly for longer subject lines until they started getting very long. 5. Unsubscribes are bad! Some email marketers love to brag about their low unsubscribe rates. But really, it's no different than bragging about Facebook likes. It's a nice metric, but it means absolutely nothing to your business results. But bragging about not having a lot of unsubscribes is even worse, because unsubscribes are actually great: they remove people from your list who are unlikely to buy from you , saving you money. with your email software provider (almost all charged based on the size of your list). Advertising Continue reading below In fact, savvy email marketers strategically try to get unqualified prospects to unsubscribe from their list in an effort to maximize the ROI of their email marketing efforts.
Marketing emails should be branded and refined Do marketing emails have to look good? Not always. In our own testing at Groove, for some of our email drops — particularly in customer onboarding — plain text emails without logos or colors convert the best. In fact, it's the highest converting email in our entire integration, performing about 35% : The 6 Biggest Email Marketing Myths, Debunked | SEJ For comparison, here is the branded version of the same email: The 6 Biggest Email Marketing Myths, Debunked | SEJ Advertising Continue reading below We're not the only ones who have won plain text emails. HubSpot tested the claim that HTML emails performed better than plain text emails. Again, it all depends on your audience, who might prefer the conversational and personal feel of a regular looking email to a well-designed email.