Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist with HubSpot, recently gave a webinar entitled The Science of Email Marketing. He analyzed over 9.5 billion emails provided by MailChimp and came up with some unexpected results. Here is a brief summary of key findings based on the data, focus groups and an online survey.

• People are people. 88% do not have separate work and personal email accounts. So B2B and B2C emails all land in the same inbox. Treat business contacts as consumers. However, 58% have a junk email account (hotmail, etc.). Make your content relevant and valuable to increase the liklihood that recipients will sign up with their real (non junk) email address.
• People are creatures of habit. Most people treat their email as “homework” or tasks to do and read it primarily in the morning. Although they will continue to read emails throughout the day and evening, having your email in their inbox first thing in the morning increases the liklihood it will get reviewed as part of that morning email routine.
• People don’t hibernate on weekends. Surprisingly, the highest clickthrough rates (CTRs) and lowest unsubscribe rates were on Saturdays and Sundays. Most unsubscribes are on Tuesdays which is not surprising given that so many marketing emails are sent on that day. Experiment with your own list to see how weekend emails pan out for you. At KickStart, we started sending our monthly newsletter, KickStart Accelerator, on weekends several months ago. Our highest CTR was indeed on a Saturday.
• People are mobile. Over 80% of people read emails on mobile devices. Test your emails not only on traditional email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Entourage, etc.) but also on smartphones. For tips on optimizing for mobile, see this blog post by Adrienne Rhodes.
• People like links. The more links in an email the higher the CTR, even if it’s the same link presented multiple times and ways. More links means more ways to persuade the recipient to take action. Be sure to link to landing pages to help you gather metrics on conversions and especially if you are trying to generate new leads.
• People filter and archive their emails. To increase the liklihood that your email will land in the inbox or appropriate folder, use a consistent sender and subject line. If it’s a newsletter, digest, summary, etc. say so in the subject line. Pack the email with valuable information (data, statistics, how-tos) so it will be archived for future reference. You can send multiple emails per month to the same list without impacting unsubscribes or CTR as long as the content is valuable to the recipient.
• People like to feel special. Offer exclusive deals to your subscribers and remind them how important they are. They’ll look forward to receiving the emails and builds loyalty.
• People seldom forward emails. Nor do they Tweet about them. It’s okay to include Forward to a Friend and social share options, but more importantly include “Follow Us”  links to build your social media audience. Post your newsletter or other content on your website so it’s Tweetable.

View the presentation.