double your open rate in one day — amaze your friends

May 29, 2006 by Mark Rovner

You can double or triple your click-through rate on emails in a day. Here’s how:

Stop emailing your deliverable dead.

By deliverable dead, I mean those email addresses (and odds are you have a lot of them) who are not bouncing, but have not opened, clicked, or shown any signs of measurable response for a year or more.

Chances are you haven’t dealt with this for one of the following excuses, um, reasons:

  • Your group takes pride in its enormous email list and you dread owning up to your ED that most of them no longer know you exist. Suck it up. Tell her or him that what you are doing is cutting edge (by NPO standards it is). Make a big hoo-ha out of your sudden dramatic jump in response rates. That’ll give the boss a better brag point.
  • You don’t consider it a priority. Pish tush! Move it way up on your to-do list. All those non-responsive names are not only dragging down your response metrics, they are hiding REAL performance differences and making whatever testing you’re doing virtually impossible to interpret.
  • You don’t have an email system that will let you segment or analyze based on past behavior. It may be, unless you really have a low-end system, that the data is there, but hard to get to. Get one of your direct mail database gurus to download your email records and do the segmentation offline. Then re-upload, with the deliverable dead in a separate segment.

Once you’ve identified your deliverable dead (and don’t flip if it’s more than half your list), you can to all sorts of wild and wacky things to re-activate them. There’s not a lot of risk after all.

Overhwhelmed by all this? Just download and follow this step-by-step guide Email Labs has put together.