I Analyzed 25 Newsletters. This Is What I Learned…

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As a designer/marketer, you should always know if your email campaign works or not. The best way to find out that gather data from actual customer engagement. Before doing all the analyzing the data, that’s important to be clear on your target audience, company goal, and marketing goal.

By tracking mailer open rate, click to open ratio (CTOR), click-through rate (CTR), user interaction, and email clients, you can get a better idea of what you’re doing right and what might be going wrong. If it worked wrong you can improve(content and design) the mailer before sending the next email. It’s interesting because you work with real data to build up a complete story of how your campaign performs at every stage.

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I designed many mailers/newsletters which the main goal is to increase the click-through rate (Expect CTR of 2.5%-4%.). This is the most important metric for lead generation and increases mailer performance. Although we can’t ignore other marketing metrics. Therefore I always analyze open rate, click to open ratio (CTOR), and user Interaction as well. That helps me to get the overall idea of the campaign.

Here is what I gained from my analysis…

#1 Personalization can increase the open rate and CTR

Many researchers found out that personalized subject lines and personalized content can increase the open rate and CTR in a significant way.

Personalize subject lines with recipient’s names

These subject lines from “really good email” caught my attention because they include my name.

Personalize subject line

Recently I wanted to test the personalized subject line and I analyzed 4 newsletters. First, our team sent out 2 email campaigns, the first email was sent with the product name (the usual one) and another one with the recipient’s name.

Here’s what happened next…

The first email, that was with the product name (the usual one) earned a 19.60% open rate. And the one with the recipient’s name earned a 20.09% open rate.

After one month, the team sent out a new email campaign with “Introducing…(the product feature)” subject line and the email open rate was 13.63%. Finally, we sent the 4th email campaign with “5 reasons…(related to product feature)” subject line and the email open rate was 16.13%.

Which one works best?

Exactly, It’s one with the recipient’s name (personalized subject line)

Open rate by email subject line

Personalizing the subject line isn’t enough to get the best out of your newsletter. You should personalize the newsletter content as well.

#2 Less number of characters in the subject line increases the open rate

Email open rate by the number of words in the subject line

A report says that the email subject lines with 6 to 10 words increase your open rate by 21%.

Although this is not the only reason that affects the email open rate. Always 1st impression matters the most. Therefore user 1st can recognize the sender name, subject line, and pre-header. These give users a sense of what’s inside the mailer.

Based on research, more email is read on mobile devices than on desktop email clients. (47% of people use a mobile device to check the emails).

If you set a lengthy subject line it might get cut off on the mobile device. If more people are read your newsletter on the mobile device, a long subject line might return a negative impact on your open rate.

A good example of less number of characters in the subject lines

Next, the user can see the pre-header. Most of the marketer doesn’t think about this. But the pre-header impact more the email open rate than a personalized subject line. Therefore we better focus on the pre-header too. Furthermore, most marketers scared of using emojis in the subject line or pre-header.

Example of emojis in the subject line and pre-header

How do you feel about emojis on the above examples?

Exactly, emojis grab more attention…

We got so many mailers within a day. If we use emojis, it can help us to grab user attention more than other mailers. Further, some studies found that emojis on the subject line or pre-header has a good impact on the email open rate.

If you think emoji doesn’t fit your brand, then don’t use it. However, this is a good tactic to do A/B testing.

#3 Email clients support Dark mode

In 2019 Apple introduce dark mode to desktop email clients and the iOS 13 version. Now many email clients support dark mode.

What email clients support dark mode?

• Gmail (Android, iOS)

• Outlook (Android, iOS)

• Outlook 2019 (Mac, Windows)

• Outlook.com

• Apple mail

I analyzed email clients of our newsletter and let’s see how it affects the open rate.

Email open rate by email clients

What do you think?

Yes, we can’t ignore the dark mode. Because most of our email clients support dark mode. Therefore when we design the newsletter/mailer we always need to do rendering and see how users can see our mailers in dark mode and how they can view mailers on different devices.

Why many users prefer dark mode?

• It’s easy on the eyes

• Decreases screen brightness

• Most of the developers work on the darker interfaces

• It helps to improve content readability

How is dark mode theming work?

It should identify the area with the light background and converted into the dark background and Dark text become light.

Unfortunately, in the Gmail app (iOS13) and outlook 2019 (Windows) clients identifies the area with the light background and turned into the dark background as well as dark background turned into light.

I experimented with many ways to improve the look and feel of the mailer and finally, I’m taking the following things to do;

• Always test your mailers in both light and dark appearances.

• Use transparent backgrounds for images. Some layouts not good with transparent backgrounds. Continuously test and change what fits for both modes.

• You can put an outline or shadow if your logo is black (Black logo is not noticeable when it changes into dark mode). I don’t choose to apply shadows on the logos. Therefore, I reduce the dark percentage of the logo. Because Email clients turned #000000 (Black) into #ffffff (White) and white into Black.

• In case you don’t need to replace the background color, use a background image with the same background color. (I don’t recommend this for the full template.)

Email clients are changing. Hence, continuously test your mailers before hit the send button. Because what worked yesterday might not work today.

#4 The best day to send out mailers

The research found out that Monday and Tuesday are good in terms of open rate and click-through rate. Moreover, Saturday and Sunday were the top two for CTOR.

Let’s see how this is accurate for our users. I wanted to test this with two different audiences. Because user behavior varies from user group to user group.

Here’s what happened…

Result of 1st audience by days

Open Rate - Wednesday and Monday

CTR - Friday and Wednesday

CTOR - Thursday and Friday

Result of 2nd audience by days

Open Rate - Tuesday and Thursday

CTR - Thursday and Tuesday

CTOR - Monday and Thursday

Here you can see, Wednesday and Monday were the top two choices of an open rate for one audience and Tuesday and Thursday were good in terms of open rate and click-through rate for other audiences.

What happened…?

Yes, one user group has different behavior than the other one and it’s different from the marketing benchmark as well.

Every audience is different and they change their behavior due to many reasons. Therefore, I suggest you do the A/B testing for your audience and keep track of it. Then plan your email campaign to achieve your goals.

5. “wh-word” titles and the 1st links have the highest clicks

I analyzed 3 mailer campaigns that were under one product. Therefore the user group and their interests are the same. All 3 mailers have 5 main segments and each segment has one call-to-action(CTA).

Click-through rate report

Click-through report of three mailer campaigns

Click-through rate analysis

Here, I’ve noticed that our product newsletters “wh-word” (why, who, which, what, where, when, and how) titles had more clicks analyzed with other titles. Although it depends on the interest area and the audience. As I mentioned earlier, the different target group has different behaviors. We should identify these by analyzing user behavior every day.

On the other hand, if your mailer has more segments (more than 6), numbers might be changing. Recently, I noticed that our general newsletter 1st link has the highest number of clicks by analyzing two years of data. The general newsletter has more than 6 sections. But we can understand that user behavior change by the number of segments(length) of your newsletter. However, it does not apply to all other user groups. You better test these tactics in your newsletter.

#6 Use animated GIFs or images for higher CTR

I’ve experimented with this for many mailers. First, I sent one mailer with GIF (animated) image and another mailer with illustration, and the last one without image (Text-heavy HTML).

Here what I noticed next…

Results of GIF, Image and without image by click-through rate

Most of the time I’ve noticed that GIFs have the highest clicks. Plus, many researchers found that video in mailers generates the highest engagement. But we can’t embed the videos to the email because some email client doesn’t support for embedded videos. Therefore, we can use GIFs that seem like a video player and link to the page. This will help to improve the mailer performance.

On the other hand, images amount impact on the mailer CTR. The MailChimp study found that text-only mailer campaigns do better than the email campaign with more than 10 images. I’ve experienced that also. However better analysis of various tactics to see which runs best for your particular audience.

All the best for your next newsletter and let me know your experiences.