Molecular Vista, Inc. provides nanochemical spatial mapping tools for researchers. It was founded in 2011 and located in San Jose, CA. One of their marketing activities is sending out a monthly newsletter to their email subscribers.
When I learned that the click rate of their newsletters is as high as 9%, my first impression is it might be a mistake or it is calculated differently. However, during a meeting with Molecular Vista’s team, they confirmed that it is the number of unique clicks divided by the number of emails sent. As 9% is much higher than the typical click rate we have seen (which is about 1%), we are very curious about how they achieve it. Here is what we learned from Molecular Vista’s team:
1. Educational content
Let’s take a look at the subject lines of their recent newsletters. They are all technical and educational. For example, April’s newsletter is about the comparison between PiF‑IR and nano‑FTIR. People are always interested in comparison or benchmark content. Please also note that they rarely send out promotional emails.
| Month | Subject line | Open Rate | Click Rate |
| 2022/01 | AFM-IR Explained! | 31.2% | 9.2% |
| 2022/02 | Over 70 new PiFM papers published! | 23.8% | 3.8% |
| 2022/03 | Which AFM-IR system is best? | 26.2% | 7.6% |
| 2022/04 | Is PiF-IR the same as nano-FTIR? | 26.8% | 7.4% |
2. Simple and clean format
Opening their newsletters, we find the email format is rather simple and clean. The typical layout contains a title, a big picture, and a big call-to-action button. This format gets the readers curious about the content, and gives them a clear action to follow (click the big button). We saw many marketing emails containing too many call-to-action items and they often confuse the readers. Simplest is the best.
3. Relevant subscribers
Molecular Vista acquires the contacts in two ways. First, they have a subscription form on their website. Anybody who are interested in their technology can subscribe. Second, they identified researchers in their field based on scientific publications (we helped them in this step). Since their choice of keywords was precise, the researchers identified this way are very interested in their newsletters and stay subscribed.
To summarize, 3 factors contributed Molecular Vista’s successful newsletter: educational content, simple and clean format, and relevant subscribers.