Email Checklist
Email is the critical application. Everybody on the Internet has and uses email. I wrote about a few email stats in: Email Stats - Part 1 and Email Stats - Part 2.
- 25% of Internet users check their email immediately after waking up.
- 33% of Internet users check their email throughout the day.
- 70% of Internet users check their personal email at work.
- 25% of Internet users check their personal email at work at least 3 times/day .
- 22% of Internet users unsubscribe from email they do not want to receive anymore.
- 60% of people who read an email only read the first half of the message
As a photography business, I receive thousands of email per week, and I send out about a hundred emails per week. I receive about 1 200 to 1 300 emails per day that go directly to the trash, my system is so good, that I don't even see them anymore. There should be rules for sending emails:
- Would you pay for stamp, instead of sending the email?
- Would you have called, instead of sending the email?
- Have you dealt with this person before?
- Have they replied? If not, all your previous emails went to the trash.
- If it is a cold-call email, i.e. unsolicited, it's spam and will go to the trash.
- Does the subject line describe the email content?
- Can you fit your email in 20 lines or less?
- Are you forwarding somebody else's email and what will happen when they find out?
- Are you forwarding something about religion, politics, crude jokes, virus, hoaxes...?
- Are you attaching files that the recipient will not be able to receive or in a format that they will not understand. Have you considered using PDFs?
- Only 22% of Internet users unsubscribe from email they do not want to receive anymore, according to "Return Path". This means that 78% of all Internet users press the delete key when they receive your email.
- 60% of people who read an email only read the first half of the message. Long and complicated emails, don't even make it.