The way people handle their business inbox has changed a lot over the last few years. This impacts how you should craft your content, the subject line and the from. It also highlights how your permission gets challenged every time you appear – and how your emails must not over step the boundaries of the relationship (i.e. too frequent), and are relentlessly relevant to their business needs.

People delete, read now or read later. There are different levels of ‘delete’: If you’ve annoyed them by being too frequent, not recognised, or not relevant (even if you once were) they might mark you to automatically end up in the junk box. If you’ve really bugged them by overstepping the boundaries of the relationship or wasting their time – they’ll take the time to unsubscribe. If you’ve crossed the line with them, you’ll be reported as spam (hello black list!).

Other things to take into consideration – they’re obvious, because it’s how most of us handle email:

• You are competing with lots of emails from the recipient’s co-workers, their own clients, notifications (social networking, forum replies, etc) along with all the emails they’ve subscribed to, all the emails they don’t recall signing up to – and the pure out-and-out nasty spam.
• The from and subject line are critical. Rarely do people open emails they’re not sure about simply out of curiosity.
• Using false urgency in subject lines annoys people. Do this once and you will lose the trust of the busy subscriber. Use the subject line to help them assign a priority to your mailing. If it is time sensitive, have the end date listed. If it is a useful e-newsletter, but not time sensitive, highlight this – along with indications of content, so the reader knows to set it aside and read later.
• In B2B we have found that people open an email newsletter they signed up for on average about 1 in every 3 mailings. There are many reasons for this, time being one of them. Another is they’ve been out of the office for a couple of days and simply clear out the inbox and start fresh.
• We’re always sifting, scanning, sorting, deleting or moving into folders. The inbox is scanned by people with a hair trigger mouse just waiting to delete if they don’t immediately recognise the email.
• Recipients do know how to set aside emails that they’re subscribed to – and will read them later. That includes e-newsletters which don’t need to be digested on a handheld on the road and are saved for viewing at a desk. Sometimes they open and read emails days, even weeks later. This contributes to the longer tail B2B marketers are seeing in their stats. No longer is it just the 24-72 hour window of activity. Be sure to trend activity weeks and months after a send.
• Storage space is not much of an issue these days – people rarely get ‘inbox full’ messages. In the old days we were always deleting emails to make room for new ones. Now with GBs of space available, and a good search functionality in most email software, people have acquired a habit of saving emails to search through and find specific items / products/ services at a later date. Often to print out and bring to a meeting. This means email newsletters and communications have a much longer shelf life then the previous read-or-delete era.

Jennifer Curtin, Head of Marketing, Newsweaver