The most effective means of reaching your target audience, developing relationships, and eventually, converting leads into customers is by way of an email marketing campaign. But successful emails are not made of great content or brilliant design; instead, the bottom line of any successful email marketing campaign is dependent on one number: the open rate. Now, when the emails are not opened, all the work on the perfect message becomes useless. Fortunately, there are some strategies you can use to ensure your emails open better and stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes. So, let’s roll up our sleeves and start working on exactly how you should help your open rates boost your message noticed.
1. Craft Compelling Subject lines
This will be the very first thing that will greet him every time he opens his inbox, and this really matters seriously as whether it will or won’t be opened. Having a great subject line, after all, makes sure that his attention will get piqued further into reading.
Here are some useful tips in making a great subject line:
- Abbreviate: 6-10 words for it to be fully readable in mobile devices
- Create an interest: Do not display all of it but just what’s inside the email. “You won’t believe what’s in there” “Are you ready for this?”
- Use the urgency approach: Words such as “Last chance” or “Limited time offer” are sure to bring the urge to do something in a short span of time.
- Put a face to it: Include someone’s name, or mention past action (“We miss you, [Name]!”); that is terrifically familiar yet grabbing subject lines.
- Numbers: “7 Ways to Enhance Your Email Marketing” or “5 Secrets to a Better Night’s Sleep” are excellent and provide value.
Test out new tactics and utilize A/B test subject lines to find what will inspire the best response from your readers
2 Tidy Up Your List
All mailings are the same to all addresses. You will not blanket all of your addresses as you now send the same message to every address on your list. You can now segment your email list by demographics, interest, purchase history, engagement level, and much more, meaning you will now be able to send more targeted emails that will speak directly to the needs and preferences of a particular group and so on.
Example:
- Location-based segments: Send emails with localized offers for other time zones.
- Interest-based segments: Send relevant offers based on the history of previous purchases or browse history.
- Engagement-based segments: Segmentation of the highly engaged subscriber and the least engaged one in order to deliver relevant messages to them.
The more relevant and personalized your email is to your audience, the higher the possibility that they open and engage with it.
3. Optimize for Mobile Devices
Most opens on email happen to be on the mobile, nowadays in this modern digital world. Your subscribers will unsubscribe if your emails are not mobile-friendly, due to bad user experience.
How to Optimize for Mobile
- Responsive design: your email design needs to change based on different screen sizes. In other words, it should be responsive. It should look great on both desktop and mobile screens.
- Fonts readable: Using larger fonts and clear hierarchy, so the material can read itself on small screen
- Loads fast: Compression of images; keep the file size tiny in order to avoid slow loading
- Thumb-friendly CTA buttons: Using huge easy-to click on buttons so as to get the navigation smoother in mobile
It’s very vital that it send over the network through all different types of the device so as it looks excellent as well works exactly as predicted.
4. Send at Right Time
In email marketing, it is a fact that time always matters. Sending the mail at proper time will bring a good level of open rates. The best timing to send the email depends on the location, habits, and preferences of the target audience.
Consider:
- Analytics usage: Use the data to figure out when peak activity is occurring among your audience. Most email platforms give you insights about the best times for sending emails, based on prior interactions.
- Send time test: Conduct A/B tests to determine which times yield the highest engagement in your emails. You may discover that the highest engagement of your morning sends far surpasses those of the afternoons.
- Don’t over-mail to your subscribers: Over-messaging, and especially at awkward times, causes them to burn out and have a higher tendency to opt-out. Balance making them top-of-mind versus respecting their inbox.
5. Personalize Your Email
It does not include writing someone’s name in the subject line or greeting. Instead, personalized emails have received higher open rates and engagement levels by a huge margin. According to a report given by Campaign Monitor in 2019, emails that have personal titles in the subject lines have opened 26% more than others.
Here are some pretty easy ways through which email personalization can be done as well:
- Purchase history: It’s a suggestion of products by previous purchase history.
- Birthday or anniversary emails: A simple “Happy Birthday” message or an anniversary offer shows you care and can increase engagement.
- Dynamic content: Use dynamic content blocks that change based on recipient behavior, location, or preferences.
Personalization makes your subscribers feel valued and more likely to open emails from you.
6. Leverage Preheader Text
This text is that piece of text viewable straight after the subject line in the inbox. It provides another chance of making the recipient open the email, and so it should be used best while giving context to the subject line.
How to Optimize the Preheader Text
- It can reinforce the subject line: This can aid adding extra context to the subject line or it may expand the message with it.
- Squeeze their interest: Add a preheader text that gives a hint of what’s inside your email without telling them everything
- Short and snappy: Use a text preheader to 40-100 characters long so it’ll show up correctly on any device
Don’t overlook this sub-headline, it may well be the thing that makes it open vs not.
7. Test and Optimize Your Emails
Optimize them continuously. These are the components that make mails successful. And to know it, test for each element about an email campaign: send time, content, CTA placements, or the subject lines. Test these into details:
- Subject Lines: Try it out with varied sentence lengths about tone and even word choices.
- CTAs: Test with all types (Example: “Shop Now” verses “Get 20% off”) and test their performances also.
- Images: Compare the image with the text-only email to know which is performing better
- Email layout: Try out single-column versus multi-column layouts
Through constant testing and analyzing the results, you refine your email marketing strategy and continually improve open rates.
8. Build Quality Email List
That would mean having clean and relevant email list to enhance open rates. Probably, when not engaging or being idle, you are going to get very low engagement of your emails since most remain unopened. For sure, to know whether you are emailing interested people regarding the content that you bring along, you must do the following steps:
- Clean up your email list: Remove the inactive subscribers who haven’t opened or engaged with your emails in a while.
- Double opt-in: This ensures that only interested subscribers end up on your list because they have shown interest in your emails, reducing the number of fake or invalid email addresses in your list.
- Segmentation support: Provide options to subscribers about choosing preferences of the content, frequency, and topic of interest.
A good-quality email list is bound to open up at a much better rate, and engagement with your campaigns will be far better.
9. Optimize your email’s “From” Name
For example, one of the factors to send your email is the “from” name. If the receiver does not know or believes the sender, then the receiver will be less likely to open the email.
Optimization Best Practices for Your “From” Name
- Use a name your audience will recognize: Use your company name, or a specific department like Marketing, or even Sarah from Customer Support if they are familiar with the person.
- Do not use “no reply” email addresses: There is no interaction with an unrecognizable “no reply” email address. Use a friendly, personable address.
- Test out different sender names: Run A/B testing on different sender names and see which one has the higher open rates.
The most recognizable and trusted “From” name gets the receiver opening and responding to your mail.
Conclusion
Email marketing remains the highest-rated best method of communication that maximizes engagement and outreach with your audience. All these practices of optimizing subject lines, personalizing content, and making emails look pretty on mobile can only be accounted for as dramatic increases in open rates and tremendous returns on investments made on email campaigns. Remember that email marketing is such a huge process of testing, trying, and learning about your audience. The list you’ve read above takes you only so far, and it will probably be quite necessary to continue fine-tuning your approach in order to
