Email marketing is essential for every Mortgage Professional these days. It helps to build, nurture and enhance relationships with both Borrowers and Referral Partners.
In today’s article we would like to share with you three tips that are not known to the average email marketer. You are about to find out:
- How title length influences open rate.
- What the best time is to send your emails.
- How to optimize your emails for mobile devices.
Title
There is a lot of discussion related to the email title topic. We decided to address science to figure out what is the best length of an email title. Does the size matter after all?
The short answer is yes. According to research by Adestra, which tracked over 900 million emails for its report, a subject line with 60-70 characters showed no increase in either opening rates or clickthroughs.
Conversely, subject lines with 70 characters and up tested to be most beneficial to engage readers in clicking through to the content, and subject lines with 49 characters and below tested well with the opening rate.
What is most surprising is that subject lines with less than 10 characters have over a 50% opening rate! Do you remember President Obama’s fundraiser? It showed incredible engagement with just “Hey” and “Wow” subject lines.
Time
In their quarterly email report for 2012’s fourth quarter, Experian Marketing Services found that the time of day that received the best open rate was 8:00 p.m. to midnight. This block not only performed better for opening rates (a respectable 22 percent), but also for clickthrough and sales.
In that same research, Experian showed the next big thing: both Saturday and Sunday outperform their weekday counterparts. What makes this strategy so special is that very few Mortgage Professionals send out emails in the evenings or on weekends, therefore there’s more of chance of borrowers opening up emails if they’re sent in the evenings or on weekends.
Mobile
How many times do you check your phone for emails per day? Probably around 100, if not more. Your potential customer is no different. According to numbers provided by the email marketing firm Litmus, openings using mobile devices accounted for 54 percent of all email openings.
This leads to one important conclusion: Make sure to optimize your emails for mobile devices. Here are several tips to get you started:
– Images are worth a thousand words, that is why they have to be optimized. Make sure you are using images that are low in size, but high in quality. Services such as http://www.jpegmini.com/ can reduce file size by as much as 80% without reducing the quality of your image.
– Use larger fonts to improve readability of emails on mobile devices. Use a minimum font size of 13 pt for the body of the email, since anything smaller will be reformatted and potentially ruin your intended layout. The header size should be a minimum of 22 pt font, but of course a bigger font, like 30 pt, would show up better.
– Keep the width of your email in the range of 600px. Many email clients have a preview window which has a limited size – 600 px is a safe size to use for Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple, etc. email apps.
Conclusion
Email is still the main marketing weapon at your disposal. Using it correctly and effectively is essential to be the best and to stand out from the crowd.
Here is the last piece of statistics that you should consider: according to Smart Insights research, email campaigns see 50-100 times the click rates that Facebook and Twitter do.
What email strategies are you implementing? Was our advice helpful? Please make sure to leave your opinion in the comment section below.
Thanks and let’s bntouch!
