You know that opt-in email lists are better than opt-out email lists.
You know that even though you don’t have the figures to back it up.
It stands to reason. Sending a message to even a legitimate third party list is always going to produce worse results than emailing people who have confirmed that they want to receive your messages. Those kinds of subscribers are far more likely to read your offers and act on them.
It’s no wonder then that so few people have bothered to check something so obvious.
And it’s no wonder that when someone did bother to check, what they found backed up the assumptions.
Jeanne Jennings of marketing firm ClickZ recently had the chance to compare the open rates of messages sent by business units of one of her clients (“a large house-hold name”) to opt-in lists against messages sent by other parts of the same company to opt-out lists.
The result was impressive, if a little predictable. The open rates for business units using the opt-in lists were, on average, 82 percent higher than the rates won by the opt-out list. In the third quarter of 2011, the opt-in list had an open rate of 14.9 percent; the opt-out list’s open rate was 8.5 percent.
The clickthrough rates, too, were much higher for the opt-in list. In the third quarter of 2011, 3.1 percent of opt-in subscribers clicked through as opposed to just 1.7 percent of opt-out readers.
It was when Jeanne Jennings check the click-to-open rate though that things got a bit surprising.
One of the most important elements of a successful newsletter is the subject. 1 out 3 Americans open emails solely based on the subject line (Jupiter Research, 2007) and nearly 70% of Americans choose to click the “This is Spam” button based on what they see in the subject line. The challenge is then to grab the attention of your subscribers: a compelling subject line can improve dramatically your emails’ open ratios. Below are some tips:
