These are the sort of questions we get asked very often here at Alchemy Worx, and they’re ones we’ve thought long and hard about. The answer isn’t a simple yes or no, however – for the very good reason that we think these are actually the wrong questions. Clients are often under pressure to meet open and click rate targets, and many marketers obsessively compare their scores with the industry average. But the problem with these rates is that they are very blunt instruments, of limited value for the sophisticated email marketer. Clicks and opens only tell you about the individual campaign or message – they tell you nothing about the people you’re trying to reach, engage, convert and sell to. Knowing, for instance, that your emails have an average open rate of 20%, 30% or even 40% doesn’t actually tell you very much about the impact your email campaign is having on your subscribers. You need to be looking not at how the campaign behaves but at how the people who got the message are behaving.

When it comes to email, the long tail is very long and very powerful indeed. Typically, 25% of the sales generated by a single email campaign happen more than 3 weeks after it was sent out, according to our research. The half-life of your open and click response can be measured in hours – typically 24-48 hours – but when it comes to sales the half-life of an email campaign isn’t measured in hours but in days – typically a week or more.

Why you shouldn’t write off your unresponsive email subscribers Conventional marketing wisdom tells us removing inactive subscribers from your mailing list is good practice – but is it?

Here, we turn that wisdom on its head. Find out why inactive subscribers are still valuable to your business and explore how you can reactivate them.

When you run an email test, do you test for the right reasons and in a way that will deliver real results?

At Alchemy Worx, we’d be the first to agree that testing can be an extremely valuable investment of time – we certainly see it as an essential element of any long-term email marketing strategy. But the most valuable tests require a significant amount of resource across all elements – from planning, design and HTML production, to deployment and analysis of the results.

You might think that displaying an unsubscribe link on your email will encourage people to unsubscribe, but the opposite is generally true.

In this Q&A, Dela Quist shows that the A/B Split email test is not the only way – or always the best way – to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns…

I need to do an email test – tell me a bit about A/B split testing.