Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I have one answer to your questions:

https://www.pepperblue.com

Tim Pepper, a current Marketingprofs expert, specializes in this very niche and can most likely point you in the right direction and give you the best advice versus my opinions and/or experiences.

Good Luck!!

My current company (UK Telecoms) also did a bit of basic research on this very subject .. the work continues!

Our typical opening rates are 65%, click through rate 10%.

1. Personalised messages work best for us, but generally we have a good relationship with our customers so I would expect them to go down well. But like ANY DM, it must be personalised.

2. We mainly use ours for campaign offers, and use a special landing page on our website. But the call to action depends obviously on what your customers are looking for, ours need good offers (bundles products and prices).

3. We never use a supporting medium, we don't do that much branding, a little but not too much, so we get our results on purely standalone emails (Good Question btw)

4. We use very little graphics, maybe a small spalsh to promote the offer, but little outside of that. Remember KISS

I hope thats of some use.

1) what types of messages are getting reponse? (detailed? personalized?)

Answer: The more personalized, the more response, however, unless you already have areas of interest qualified in your subscriber profiles, this usually happens over time as you track the interests and MEASURE the responses to calls of action of your subscribers and then ADJUST your content and calls to action accordingly. You might want to consider a survey early on to determine these interest levels quicker than what will naturally happen over time.

2) what types of calls to action are getting better traction? (Webinars, white papers, etc)

Answer: Webinars are big right now but you have to make sure they are very relevant and stand out from all the other noise. An hour of time is a chunk even if you don't have to drive somewhere to participate and you don't want to dissappoint. White papers are always big, I would just advise to limit the personal information you request in the beginning to access it.

Try a split run, one with webinars, one with white papers and see which one gets the best response.

3) what supporting medium has the highest impact?

Answer: Do you mean what types of email marketing have the highest impact i.e. newsletters, announcements etc.?

4) how much do cool graphics matter?

Answer: The beauty of HTML is the ability to display graphics so by all means use them, but not just because they are cool. Make them cool but also meaningful. They should infer meaning and/or represent something in and of themselves, but also be attractive. Don't overdue them either, too many can trigger spam filters both corporate and ISP.