The document provides tips for improving email open and click-through rates, noting that open rates typically decline over time but can be increased by testing subject lines and sending at off-hours. It also recommends focusing clickable links near the top of the email and reducing the number of links, as people are most likely to click the first one or two links. Additionally, using a digest format and non-black fonts can significantly boost click-through rates.

1. Moneyball for email marketing:
Using data to improve your sends
True University
Elizabeth Yin
June 17, 2014

2. Who am I?
● Elizabeth Yin
● Co-founder LaunchBit
● BSEE Stanford
● Product team at Google

3. Today's talk is on
● How to Improve Your
○ Open rate
○ Click-through-rate

4. Open Rate

5. Letter from a YC founder
Hey guys,
We're a little concerned about some the stats on our
open rates, how often people complain or unsubscribe,
etc. So we'd love to talk to someone with about their
experiences and maybe review our campaign
performance stats with us.
Thanks!
[Founder]

6. A pretty good “open rate” is ~20%
(Histogram of thousands of publishers analyzed)

7. But open rates decline...
Hi Jennifer,
I have a question. Our open rate keeps going down and
I have no clue what’s going on there. From your
experience, could you tell me what seems to be the
problem? It’s getting worse and worse. We’d like to stop
this as soon as possible. Could you give us your advice
on this?
Thank you,
[Name of email marketer]

8. In fact, you need to look at cohorts...

9. What does average open rate really mean?
People open on
average every 2-3
sends
You can increase your open rate...

10. 2 good ideas and 1 bad
idea to improve your
open rate

11. Test subject lines - usually a BAD IDEA
● Unless you are running transactional emails
● Unless you have a 100k+ list

12. ● Off-hour such as 8:37
● Before/after holidays
● When you know subscribers open
Send at a different time

13. Change up your subject lines
● Reduce number of characters
● Special characters
● Ask a question
● Be vague
● Use different diction

14. Click-through-rate

15. 66k campaigns
300M emails

16. Most people click on the first or
second link (< 5 links)
Call to action should be the first or second link

18. But did most have only 1 link?
# of Campaigns
w/ just 1 link
# of Campaigns
w/ just 2 links
# of clicks on
link position 1
131,914 72,003
# of clicks on
link position 2
--- 163,419

19. Doing the math...
203k clicks on link position #1 for emails with just one or two links
1.5M clicks on link position #1 for all emails
=> 13%
163k clicks on link position #2 for emails with just two links
2M clicks on link position #2 for all emails
=> 8%
Only a small percentage of clicks are attributed to
emails with just one or two emails

20. People click "evenly" on 5+ link emails
Having too many links reduces your call to action

21. Reduce your links

22. Digest layouts “teach” people to click:
strong impact on click-through-rate
Digest: 44.2% click-through-rate
vs.
Non-digest: 17.8% click-through-rate

23. Non-black fonts have a significant
impact on click-through-rate
Non-black font: 36.4% click-through-
rate
vs.
Black font: 18.9% click-through-rate

24. One-column newsletters have a low
impact on click-through-rate
One column: 27.7% click-through-rate
vs.
Multi-column: 17.5% click-through-rate

25. Get more stats & case studies..for free!

26. Thank you!
● Questions? Email me: elizabeth [at]
launchbit [dot] com
● Follow me at @launchbit