5 Surprising facts about email marketing

Social media researcher and author Dan Zarrella recently revealed some interesting data after perusing Mailchimp’s database of 9.5 million emails and conducting focus groups and surveys.

1. The best day to send is… Saturday? Emails sent on Saturdays and Sundays tend to have much higher clickthrough rates than those sent during the business week.

Also interesting: Unsubscription rates peak on Tuesdays and are lowest on Thursdays. From an unsubscription perspective, Saturdays are good.

2. Get at it early Emails sent between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. garner the highest click throughs, no matter the day of the week.

3. Less is more Nearly 81% of people now read their email on their smartphones! Mobile phones are being used for email on a larger scale every day, and MarketingSherpa’s 2010 report says 67% of peoples’ email systems do not display images by default. Graphics and images should be downsized or scrapped for shorter copy.

4. Subject lines can land you in the spam filter If your subject line includes spam-triggering words, your email may never reach its intended target. Some Email Service Providers help you identify such words and phrases with features like Content Detective, SpamAssassin and ContentChecker. Do some research and find out what could be keeping you out of a potential customer’s inbox.

Fun fact: Emails whose subject lines contain these words are most often clicked through: posts, jobs, survey, week’s, e-newsletter, issue, digest, bulleting and editions.

5. Frequency is good If a reader is going to unsubscribe, they will likely do it early. Once they’ve become accustomed to receiving emails, the number or frequency don’t seem to matter. In fact, infrequent emails result in more unsubs.

Have you read about or discovered any other interesting facts about email marketing? Tell us what works or doesn’t work for you.