Artigiano, the UK's leading Italian fashion brand, was particularly interested in looking at increasing their open rates. Artigiano work closely with key fashion houses in Italy, to bring stylish, high quality clothes, perfectly designed and shaped for women in the UK.

Duncan Birch reviews the findings of an 'Email Tune-Up', carried out for this high profile brand. The intention; to look closely at aspects affecting Artigiano's open rates, giving recommendations for improvements.

How can Artigiano increase open rates?

There are many factors that can affect open rates. Firstly, deliverability can be a key issue, which can be overcome by using a dedicated server & whitelisting. Here is the run down of factors affecting Artigiano's open rates:

1. Relevancy of the email content

(The email content is the relevancy, the offer, call to action, images etc.)

Making sure the content is relevant to readers is vital. If possible, try and add some segmentation to your lists, this can be based on previous purchases or areas clicked through to on your website. You could follow this behaviour up with an e-mail, based on the product they may have viewed online.

2. Transactional mails

Currently, Artigiano send transactional emails, such as; order, refund and dispatch confirmations, in-house. An option would be to add transactional emails that up-sell; this involves setting up a confirmation email via Pure once an item is purchased. This email could include accessories that may go with the recent outfit purchased. Transactional mails hold great weight, as they are expected from the recipient and almost always looked at. It provides a great opportunity to up sell & cross sell.

3. Personalisation

Personalisation, is adding the recipients name to the e-mail - dear {firstname} either within the copy or in the Subject line itself.

Personalisation is a really good way of telling the recipient that you know who they are, in turn, making it more likely for them to read your e-mail or open your e-mail.  Adding a personal touch makes it feel more human. Personalisation can be added to the subject line as well: 'dear {firstname}{lastname}' by utilising personalisation in the subject line, whether that be the recipients name, or based on a particular product specific to the recipient, companies that do this have seen increases of 10% on opens.

4. Subject Line

One of the biggest factors as to whether someone opens an e-mail is the subject line.

Currently there is no mention of your brand in the subject line, which is always a good idea.  PureResponse actually has a tool that allows automatic subject line selection, which you are not currently utilising. This enables you to send out your campaign with multiple subject lines, and this tool will analyse the open rate of an initial proportion, to see which is most popular - the effect being, all further messages automatically adopt the most successful subject line.

5. Get the image to text ratio right

There are a number of factors as to what makes an e-mail look like spam to various ISP's and filters.  These are not always obvious like controversial wording.  One big factor that companies do not always pick up on is the ratio of the amount of text compared to images. If you have too many large images in your e-mail and the text is limited, this will actually cause a Spam warning and therefore some of your e-mails may be blocked by various e-mail filters. Where wording is embedded in the image try actually replacing this with written plain text this should then remove the warning.

6. Frequency of emails & list age

Other factors decreasing opens include: "How many times you are sending to your recipients?" If the frequency has increased and the message is not relevant, they are more likely to opt out of further communications. On sign up perhaps ask "How frequently would you like to receive e-mails?" This is then giving you permission on when to send emails. A more detailed sign up process could help with relevancy as well.  Also your list may have aged, it may be worth analysing how up to date your data lists are.

7. Enterprise eMarketing Toolset

Currently you use the advanced eMarketing Toolset, within PureResponse, it may be useful to look at upgrading to the Enterprise eMarketing Toolset, which has lots of extra features; including more in depth reporting and campaign analysis tools. With the Enterprise eMarketing Toolset, you are able to create new lists on 'not opens' and 'not clicked' automatically.  Also, to increase open rates, you can use intelligent time sending, which builds up a profile of when your recipients open their e-mails and will send to them only at that optimum time in a 24 hour period.

The Email Tune-Up:

The 'Email Tune-Up' is a detailed analysis of an existing email marketing campaign or strategy, which can look at various factors affecting the success of email marketing, such as:

• Mailing list hygiene
• Sending IP and domain reputation
• message content analysis
• data collection and auditing

If you are interested in Pure360's 'Email Tune-Up' and would like a full analysis on your current email marketing, you can apply online now for this free service.