Most marketers measure their email newsletters in terms of the amount of opens & clicks they can generate. These stats tells us how well our email newsletters might be performing but to understand why something might not be here are some suggestions:

Frequency Are you bombarding your customers with too many emails? This is a common problem where you have seen response rates drop over a period of time.

Content Are your offers and articles appealing enough? How does your content compare to the competition?

Relevancy This is the biggest problem with most email newsletters and another reason why you may see results drop over time. If the emails you send through have nothing relevant for a recipient why would they click-thru! Relevancy can be resolved in a number of ways including sending to segments of your database each time rather than the whole list, using past email behavior to determine interest and using tailored content blocks or dynamic content by using a solution such as Maxemail.

Deliverability Quite simply if your emails are not getting into the inbox or being labelled as junk it does not take a genius to work out that fewer people will open the email and even fewer will click-thru. Take proactive steps by ensuring your email provider is whitelisted and not blacklisted and that your email has been scored in a spam checking tool. If you are sending from an in-house system you may find that an outsourced email newsletter software solution will improve your deliverability.

Rendering Many email newsletters land in our web-based email clients inbox looking mangled. Not only does it look unprofessional it is also difficult to read and hence less likely for the reader to be able to find something worth clicking on. Make sure you are not having these issues by reviewing our HTML for emails guide.

Data Collection How 'opted-in' are members of your list? Those that might have subscribed while entering a competition are less likely to be responsive as those that pro-actively requested your information hence you will see this come through in your campaign stats.

Email creative In particular what you should look at here would include:

* Call-to-actions - are they obvious? * Does you message take into account the preview pane and the fact that the top 300 pixels are the most important * What does your email look like with image blocking enabled?

Covering all of the above will help you identify where you can improve your email newsletter. Of course other brainstorming activities such as looking at what your competitors are doing is also a good place to start. And to monitor your success why not check out our email marketing benchmark results.

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