Campaign Monitor explains how it selected its 20 top-performing e-mail messages:

With lists larger than 100,000 email subscribers and email campaigns that get more than 5% click-through rates (CTRs) or open rates exceeding 50%, our Top Performers are great examples of effective email strategy in action.

This assumes the purpose of an email campaign is to get an open or a click. In many cases, including for nearly all of those Campaign Monitor highlights, the goal is some further conversion like a sale. Opens and clicks are just the means to an end.

Just as you don’t measure the success of a store by how many people come in the door, you shouldn’t measure an e-mail campaign by how many people open or click.

Every time a fundraising campaign makes the news, nonprofit boards start asking “why can’t we do that?”

It happened after the Red Cross’ success raising money through text-to-donate after the Haiti earthquake.

And it’s sure to happen now that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has drawn more than $100 million for the ALS Association in just a month.

You should resist the pressure to mimic the Ice Bucket Challenge. And you should resist the “weasels” who will try to sell you a viral campaign. Here’s why:

1. There’s no plan you can copy. The Ice Bucket Challenge appears genuinely organic, not something generated by smart fundraisers at the ALS Association. In fact, several days after the challenge took off, their website’s only mention of the challenge was a blog post talking about the “new phenomenon.”
2. You can’t recreate the conditions for success. The challenge benefitted from several factors that your organization probably won’t be able to copy, including the early involvement of celebrities like Matt Lauer on national television.
3. Success may be fleeting. Retaining these socially-generated donors will be a challenge, and could be costly. A lot of the value in a new donor is in their subsequent giving, and socially-inspired donors (like donors to disaster relief) are probably unlikely to give again. This means you could expend a lot of time and money mailing large numbers of new donors with little lasting affinity for your cause

Focus instead on the fundamentals of fundraising. Identify individuals who believe in your cause and who have a proclivity to donate. Then cultivate relationships with them over time so they give now and in the future.

Marketers should tell stories. That’s the best way to engage our customers. But too often, we create content that’s not a story—there’s no protagonist, no drama.

Paul VanDeCar elaborates:

But the “stories” on their websites weren’t so much stories as statements of feeling or timelines or sequences of events. Those all have their place, but they’re not stories, and they typically don’t grab people in the way stories do.

Here’s some fascinating behavioral research:

Through the experiments, the researchers homed in on a hypothesis: People appear wired to incur a significant physical cost to eliminate a mental burden.

In particular, Dr. Rosenbaum said, people are seeking ways to limit the burden to their “working memory,” a critical but highly limited mental resource that people use to perform immediate tasks. By picking up the bucket earlier, the subjects were eliminating the need to remember to do it later. In essence, they were freeing their brains to focus on other potential tasks.

Savvy marketers will use this knowledge to help their customers relieve mental burdens.

Courtney Seiter describes the human psychology behind eight effective headline formulas. Understanding why the formulas work is far more important than blindly copying the formulas.