At Hypenotic we are constantly testing new technologies, trending ideas and “best practices.” Our focus the last couple of weeks has been mobile newsletters. With the growth of mobile email and the discussion that surfaced based on why your newsletter sucks, we decided to rework our own newsletter to see what would happen.
By focusing on the subject line, the email content preview, the design and actions we were able to get a 3.2% increase in our open rate and a 1.1% increase in our click-throughs. According to Mailchimp, who is our newsletter service provider, we were ahead of the industry standard (“creative services/agency”) open rate by 1.3% and click-throughs by 2%. These stats really depend on what kind of email list you have. If it’s a list of all your friends then you’d probably have rates close to 100%, but if it’s a large list of subscribers you may or may not know, the average click through rate is 2% – 15%.
Here are some of the changes we made.
1) Subject line
Subject lines are critical in newsletters. It can influence whether someone opens the message, hits delete or ends up in your spam folder. It’s a fine balance of being business like and peaking interest. We changed our subject line from “Latest News for 02/12/2012″ to “Latest News: Weekly Roundup.” Granted, not a huge change but one that moved from a computer generated date to proper language.
2) Email preview content
The email content preview of the email is the one or two lines that you see before you open the message. It depends on your email client and setup. In my case I get about 30 -40 words of content preview. We moved from what I can only describe as a mishmash of content (see before image ) to one that consisted of a summary of what was in the email. We still have some tailoring to do with this but you get the idea.
Before:
After:
3) Design and Actions
We made some major changes here that really drove click throughs. Your newsletter is really like a website landing page and you should incorporate the same practices. Clear, concise with one or two actions. We made the “read more” button shiny and big. We took out the date, the author name and all the share and “send to a friend” buttons. After all, are they really that useful? I don’t think I’ve ever used a “send to a friend” button from my iPhone and I usually “Tweet” or “Like” from an article webpage not from a newsletter. We also made the text larger with more breathing room and white space. The result was less “stuff”, clean and with a single action.
Before:
After:
So, what’s next on our list. Well, next week we are going responsive. What does that mean? Basically, we are going to tailor the newsletter to the device. If you’re viewing the newsletter on a desktop you will see one design and content flow and if you’re seeing it on your mobile you’ll see something that suits the mobile experience.
Let us know what you are doing with your newsletter and stay tuned.
P.S. Sorry, blatant call to action here, if you want to sign up for our newsletter it’s pretty easy to do.
