This Email is to %first_name%%.
Email has a long, long, looooong way to go to become a real advertising medium. Could you imagine all the weird email mistakes showing up on a billboard or TV ad?
This email I received is like so many: poor targeting, poor strategy and poor proofreading. Optimization is key across the board for all industry segments. The U.S. average open rate is around 31% and the click rate is 4%. These numbers are strong and fairly stable across different business categories. So the medium is capable of delivering strong success rates. You just can’t ignore the elephant in the room when you talk email: who are we sending to and do we have a valid email address?
Once you have a vetted list, your emails need to be optimized beyond content, because we are finding nearly half of all emails are opened in smartphones and tablets, yet few are optimized for the smaller screen size. According to Litmus, desktop accounts for 22% of email opens, Web mail 30% and mobile 48%.
Make sure your email renders on mobile, but also make sure your emails render for a human. Happy Halloween.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.