How can you get more people to open your emails? The answer is to take some time to explore what you are communicating and what the feedback is telling you. Here are some suggestions:

• Take a look at your content and other aspects of your mailings to see if this area needs improvement for enticing those no-shows to open up.
  
• Review your newsletter's stats after each mailing to learn about your readers' patterns. See what articles were clicked on and any other information that you can glean to improve your content. Run surveys to help get insight into what your readers are interested in.
  
• Fine-tune your from and subject line. Surveys have found that up to 60% of e-mails are opened based on the subject line, 40% on the from field. If the subject line isn't interesting or a familiar title, and/or the from field not recognisable - your e-mail will be deleted.
  
• Make sure there's a high 'WIFM' (What's In It For Me?). You have about eight seconds in that 'above the fold' part of the newsletter to get your reader to do the all-important scroll down the page and begin clicking.
  
• TOO much great information can be a bad thing; readers will open, think 'hey, good stuff, but too much to read now, I'll read it later' - and never get back to it.
  
• Of course, there are people who do read when they have the time, and in fact refer back to articles. Review your stats to find this pattern and keep links from past mailings active.
  
• Check your frequency. Quris reported that 68% of the respondents in their recent survey listed 'too frequently' as THE most annoying factor of a newsletter and/or mailings from a company.

One reason people might hesitate to use enewsletters is the perception they have that their clients and potential clients receive so many emails each day that another one wouldn't work.
A recent survey paints a more positive picture. It found that

• 27% received 1-5 emails per day
  
• 20% 6-10 emails per day
  
• 16% 11-20 emails per day
  
• 7% 21-30 emails per day
  
• 10% 31-50 emails per day
  
• 9% 51-100 emails per day
  
• 7% 100+
  
• 4% not sure or refused

This means 70% of the population gets 30 or fewer emails per day. Although most people get fewer e-mail messages than originally thought, we need to do everything in our power to keep it that way. We must continue to e-mail intelligently and not abuse the system.

Shine Roche McGowan is Queensland's leading plaintiff law firm with offices in Brisbane, Cairns, Gold Coast, Redcliffe, Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba and Townsville. This firm has recently started sending out their enewsletter through Using the Net.

Paul Stone, Shine's Business Development Manager, comments "The ability to be able to track your readership through the logging system at Using the Net is very exciting for us from a marketing perspective. It's a real time measurement of whether we're connecting with our readership, and we avoid wasting time using the traditional "trial and error" approach."