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 47% of the population gets 10 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.

Using the Intenet doesn't guarantee instant results. Research has shown the optimal number of times you need to email someone who is on your mailing list to get a response is six. I know six sounds like a lot, and you're probably asking yourself, "How did they arrive at that number?" Surveys of e-mail customers have uncovered many reasons why consumers may not respond to the first e-mail they receive, including:

• The e-mail didn't make it to its destination
  
• The message got lost in an e-mail-packed mailbox
  
• The recipient deleted it by accident
  
• Someone else using the computer deleted it
  
• The person was too busy to respond
  
• He was on vacation
  
• She had to discuss it with someone else
  
• He wanted to compare with other offers
  
• It just didn't "strike" the recipient in the right way
  
• She filed it for future review
  
• He simply forgot about it
  
• It was blocked by an ISP or user-installed software program

So the conclusion is - email marketing is like any other marketing. To see results you need a clear strategy and persistence.

• Create an incentive for members to join. Make the newsletter sign-up box clearly visible on your home page. Don't bury it through a link to another page
  
• Set up strategic alliances with complementary companies to cross-promote each other's mailing lists
  
• Get current subscribers to refer friends or colleagues. Ask them to forward your newsletter to colleagues with similar interests
  
• Optimize your newsletters and its key topics with search engines and crawlers so people conducting searches on topics related to your products or services will find your newsletter
  
• Pay attention to your readers, work hard to continually add to and clean your subscription list, and produce a focused newsletter based on their information interests.

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."