Improve Your Email Open Rates With These 3 Tips
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive sales. In fact, more than 77 percent of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications via email.
So, why is it that your email open rate is dwindling? Getting emails into inboxes is half the battle, and using an email verifier can help. The other half is encouraging people to actually open and engage with the email. Luckily there are plenty of non-strenuous ways to keep your customers clicking once the email lands in their mailbox.
Know Your Audience
While you may know the needs of your customers, do you really know them? Why did they join your email list in the first place? What are their interests? Questions like these help you gain further insights into your subscribers in order to better reach them with email content.
Understanding your email audience is crucial when it comes to designing email campaigns. When you learn more about your list, you’ll be able to target your contacts with more relevant, noteworthy information.
Try sending out a poll or a survey asking readers to answer two or three simple questions. You could also use your click reports to see which links are getting the most hits. Then, you can hone in on the type of content that resonates most and pivot your email marketing campaign to reach potential customers more effectively.
Segmentation Heightens Relevancy
Once you know your audience, break them up into segments or lists. These lists can be cut or combined a variety of ways: By page views, demographics, downloads, etc. After you’ve crossed all your t’s and dotted your i’s, you’ll be able to send each list the information that is relevant to them, specifically.
Why is this important? According to a recent Hubspot study, targeting emails to certain buyer personas increases email click-through rates by 16 percent. This is because list segmentation gives you the chance to separate your viewers into groups so you can send them the content they want, when they want it.
On the flipside, you might want to “scrub” or delete inactive users. 1,000 subscribers sounds a lot better than 700, but let’s be honest, the only way you’re going to turn a profit is if you have real customers who are engaged with your brand. Not only that, but scrubbing off a few subscribers every now and again will save you money in the long run.
Preview Text is Important
The preview text, not to be confused with preheader text, appears right beneath the subject line. It’s basically copy that’s pulled from the body text of the email and displayed with the sender name and the subject line.
The best way to avoid an embarrassing preview text line is to create a little white space after your desired preview text, so clients won’t be able to see all the other distracting and unnecessary stuff. All you need to do is add a chain of zero-width non-joiners and non-breaking spaces, i.e. “ ” And presto! No more weird characters.
Timing is Everything
When it comes to digital marketing, timing is everything. One of the easiest ways to find the best time to send out your campaign is to segment your contact list into two-to-three equally sized groups and send them the same copy of your email during various times of the day. Try this out a few times and keep track of which versions get the best response rate.
If you’re still having trouble, use this chart to figure out which times are the best to send your email.
Who is the Email Coming From?
What was the last “from” name that you used? What about the “from” email address?
The “from” field of an email tells your readers a lot about your company. If you’ve been neglecting this small detail, you may be losing customers. Remember, your “from” address and name should represent your business as a whole. You shouldn’t be using a personal email address. Instead, you should send from an email address that has your business name in it.
Emojis are Becoming Popular (And There’s Nothing We Can Do About It)
If you open your inbox right now, what do you see? I’m not talking about the annoying reminder emails from your boss, or the due date emails from your bank. I’m talking about the emojis.
More and more businesses are using emojis in their subject lines, and as ridiculous as it sounds, it’s working. According to Experian, 56 percent of brands using emojis in their email subject lines had a higher unique rate.
Just think about it – emojis use less space and have the potential to say a lot more than a line of text.
Conclusion
Email marketing will work in just about any business situation to improve customer engagement and benefit your bottom line. Make sure you’re optimizing your emails to not only make it into inboxes, but also encourage your target to open and convert. Once you figure out who your audience is, when you should be sending, and how best to format your emails, you’ll see open rates increase along with ROI. Outsource Digital Marketing
