Get Your Emails Read By Others

August 24, 2012

Interview with Ron Cates of Constant Contact

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Mike Carruthers:
People don’t read email the same way they read a letter on a piece of paper. When you send someone an email…

Ron Cates:
They spend two to two and a half minutes and they scan it. They look at the upper left of the screen the most that gets the most view "heat." Then they look at headlines and a couple of sentences below…
 

Ron Cates Spokesperson for Constant Contact says 30% of a person’s decision to actually open your email or not is based on your subject line. Your subject line should be compelling but concise.

Ideally it’s going to be 40 characters or less and that includes spaces but I’m going to recommend it never ever go more than 49. At more than 49 characters two bad things happen. Open rates drop by about 13 or 14%, but the click-through rate (click to my link to buy my stuff, or visit my website, or find out more information) those drop 75%. And I just got the very best bad example of commercial email. It’s from Neman Marcus; it says “Fall fashions you cannot afford to miss”. And I looked at in my inbox and it said, “Fall fashions you cannot afford.”

And the best time to send email is 10:30 in the morning or 1:30 in the afternoon. And the best day of the week is Sunday.

We know that open rates on Sunday are pretty good because people like to scan their email before they go to work on Monday. But people don’t take action on Sunday’s just a scan. So the best action rates typically tend to happen on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.