A new report from EmailLabs advises e-mail marketers to keep subject lines short and hyperlinks plentiful.

EmailLabs is in the business of selling e-mail marketing solutions, so it makes sense that they would launch a study to find out how to make e-mail marketing as effective as possible. The major finding? Short is sweet.

According to the report, shorter subject lines and an increased number of hyperlinks both led to increased open and click-through rates.

For the purpose of the study, subject line lengths were divided into two groups: zero to 49 characters and 50 characters or more. When analyzed, the zero-to-49 character subject lines had an open-rate 12.5% higher than the 50 or more character subject lines. Click-through rates for the zero-to-49 character group were 75% higher than the 50 or more group.

The differences in open and click-through rates were smaller but still distinct when evaluating the number of hyperlinks contained in the e-mail. E-Mails with 25 or more links had an open rate 12% higher than those containing fewer than 25 links, and a click-through rate 29% higher than for e-mails with fewer than 25 links.

"The more links there are, the greater the chances that one or more will resonate with the recipient and motivate them to click through," says Loren MacDonald of EmailLabs. "And while 25 links may sound like a lot, navigation and administrative-type links in best practices newsletters can easily reach 15 to 20 links by themselves."

Surprisingly, unlike snail mail direct response mailings — where the four-page letter, brochure, lift-device and response card are still the standard — message size for e-mail did not appear to be a significant factor in boosting rates, although messages in the 20 to 79 KB size range had slightly higher open and click-through rates than messages from 3 to 19 KBs.

To summarize:

The results of the study support the long-held belief among e-mail marketers that the length of subject lines should be limited, mainly because a shorter subject line is completely visible in most e-mail clients, and also because recipients can comprehend shorter subject lines more easily and quickly.

It should be remembered, though, that no overall study can take into consideration all the variables of an e-mail message. Most success factors depend on who the recipients are (the quality of the mailing list) and what is being offered or asked (the quality of the content). Simply put, more repeat customers will open a mailing than a cold list and more people will click through to receive a free item than to spend $1,000.

In e-mail, as in most marketing, context is everything.

©2004 eMarketer Inc.

Have you ever wondered why your competition's web site is appearing at the top of search engine results pages and yours does not? Whether you realize it or not, you're now on your way towards understanding SEO and possibly moving your site into that highly coveted territory. All it takes is curiosity, ingenuity and the ability to adapt and improvise. To achieve these top spots, you need to try to understand what each search engine is looking for when it makes one site #1 and another page ranks several pages lower. To understand that, you need to understand the key factors that are important to a search engine’s algorithm, ie: what makes it tick? What does it look for? Why does it think one site deserves to be #1 and why another site deserves to be significantly lower?

There are several approaches to this but a basic way to begin is to study all aspects of those pages that rank at or near the top for your chosen keyword or keyword phrase and then try to determine what makes those pages special, what makes them similar enough to get themselves high ranked and yet sufficiently different from your site? What do they have in common that your pages don't have? Are they all doing one thing exactly the same or very close to the same and you have a very different approach? If so, you can logically assume that the search engine prefers their way to your way. How are those pages that rank from #1 through #10 different from those that rank from #90 through #100? Be sure to not just look at the obvious factors, like what is the page's title and what text jumps out at you but also look at the underlying source code. Your competition's biggest secrets are lying before you like an open book. Any successful e-commerce merchant should take advantage of this readily available opportunity.

In your studies of your competition, did you notice that the keyword phrase you both are trying to rank for is in their title tags, meta tags or h1 tags? Is it in the anchor text of all the inbound backlinks to it? If it's in their code and they rank well and it's not in yours and you don't rank so well, maybe it's time to make a few changes to your site.

Now, what factors come into play? At its most elementary level, there are two types of factors. There are on-page factors and off-page factors. For starters, one should know that Google focuses more heavily on off-page factors than Yahoo or MSN (which is presently powered by Yahoo/Inktomi). Off page factors include such things as which sites link to your site, those sites' relative importance as deemed by the search engine's algorithm, how related to your site those sites that links to yours is, inbound text links and the anchor text or even the alt text that is used to send them to your site. Please see our past article Google PageRank: What Is It, Why Do I Need It And How Do I Get It? on this for additional information on Google Ranking. Conversely, on page factors include such items as title tags, meta tags, h1 and lesser heading tags, what is bolded, italicized, keyword density, keywords used and more. Basically, they are those aspects of your source code that you control as opposed to the off page factors that are often on other sites and/or servers.

Ranking highly is a combination of optimizing for both of these factors and matching your optimization techniques to the search engine's algorithm as closely as you possibly can. We're not recommending that you directly copy what your competitors have done; just try to mimic the ideas that have shown to be successful for them. SEO isn't about reinventing the wheel; it's merely an exercise in finding out who has the best wheels and the building your own wheel that is bigger and better. You might want to try to take it to the next level to make just a little bit better than your nearest competitors. One trick that has proven to be quite successful for anyone willing to try to get a leg up on their competition, to take it to the next level, is to look past your own industry and look past those that rank #1 for your particular keyword phrases and look to see which sites rank well in industries that are much more competitive than yours. Try doing a search for "web hosting" or “search engine optimization" as an example. You'll find that no matter how competitive you think your particular niche might be, there's bound to be another niche that is more competitive than yours. If you don’t feel confident after going through these exercises, there are many professional search engine optimization companies that are will to help you for a fee.

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