One of the most common challenges faced when it comes to a business' emailing strategy is improving the open rates. The higher the percentage of open rates, the better. You want to be seen and heard, right? But the reality is, many businesses simply aren’t achieving the numbers they want - their email marketing campaigns aren't working. So how can they be improved? Yes, an eye-catching subject line goes a long way in some cases, but what if we told you there are other techniques that promise to increase that open rates number week by week?
In this blog, we will uncover 12 simple yet powerful email marketing tips that help you improve your email open rates like never before.
DO NOT buy email addresses
We know what you're thinking: In the early stages, you want to do whatever it takes to kickstart the campaign and get people seeing your business as soon as possible. Nevertheless, you should ALWAYS resist the urge to purchase an email list.
There are lots of ways to buy an email list, but none of them will actually benefit your campaign. Why? Well, think about it - the owners of these email addresses didn't actually agree to receive content from you. So there's no telling how interested they are, or even whether or not they are the target audience you want to reach. A bought email list is also in violation of GDPR.
For great, and more importantly LEGAL, ways to build your email list from scratch - click HERE!
Email new contacts within the first 24 hours
It's important to take advantage of the window of opportunity when you and your business are at the top of the person's mind. You can really get a good idea of what future engagement will look like by what people do when you email them within 24 hours of them opting in for emails, subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for an offer, and so on.
If you don't have any automated email workflows set up for your business, you're likely missing out on some major opportunities to nurture and engage your contacts. So make sure you have a welcome/introduction email set up and sent out every time someone opts in/ subscribes to your emailing list.
Send your emails from a REAL person
When you send emails from a person, rather than a company, your open rate increases - plain and simple. This is because, based on experiments we've conducted, recipients are more likely to trust a personalised sender name and email address than a generic one. Just think about it for a second, people are so inundated with spam emails these days. And for that reason they often hesitate to open emails from unfamiliar senders or business names/brands - meaning they're more likely to gravitate and trust a personalised sender name and email address than a generic, boring one.
At Avanty, we found that that emails sent from "Peter Bell" perform better in terms of open and clickthrough rate than emails sent from just "Avanty." Our tests showed personalisation works, as well as a combination of a person's name and a company name together in the sender name. You've just got to test what works best for your particular business, brand, audience and industry.
Write clear and eye catching subject lines
Your email is instantly in competition with others in the inbox - you want to stand out in order for the recipient to click on your email, right? Well the best way to do this is to write compelling and clickable subject lines. You want to stand out from the crowd (as the saying goes).
To entice the recipient to click on your email, you must make sure your subject lines:
- Are clear and understandable (especially at a glance).
- Are no more than 50 characters so they don't get cut off (particularly by mobile phones).
- Only use language that your target audience is familiar with.
- Include action-oriented words to create a sense of urgency and excitement.
- Avoid spam terms like “Cash,” “FREE,” and “Save" to ensure your email isn't thrown in the spam folder.
- Include an exclusive value proposition (like 10% off a new product) so people know what they're getting.
- Include their first names (on occasion) - personalisation goes a long way!
Include call-to-action buttons in every email
Your email recipients are likely to scan your email without reading all the copy, and that's why you want to have clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons that are easy to spot. Without CTA buttons, you won't be calling on your audience to take any action that actually benefits them as well as you.
You'll need to place your CTA's in a place where it's easily visible and where it makes sense for someone to click on it. For example, you might put a CTA to download a free ebook in an email that describes the great strategies for using your brand new product.
Place at least one clickable item above the fold
One way to make your emails more clickable? Place one (or more) of your clickable elements, this can be a CTA button, a link within the text, or a clickable image, near the top of your email (above the fold).
This is especially useful for mobile users. Mobile tends to require a lot more scrolling, and sometimes squinting, pinching, and zooming (which can be a pain). Giving a recipient something actionable that is seen upon opening can lead to more clicks than before.
Avoid background images
This is especially important if your recipients tend to use Outlook for their emails. Microsoft Outlook doesn't recognise background images and given that Outlook is open of the most used email providers, it's best to avoid using background images altogether. Instead, use a background colour and use images in other ways within the email itself.
Many emailing tools will come with templates that have built-in social sharing buttons that make it as easy as possible for you. All you have to do is fill in the destination URL and you're good to go.
Note: If you want to increase the number of clicks you get, you want to add sharing buttons, not follow buttons (look into that).
Optimise your emails for mobile users
As more and more people use their mobile devices on a daily basis to read emails and browse the internet, it's more important than ever that your design your emails with mobile users in mind. Otherwise, their user experience with your emails/ contact with your business could be significantly affected.
Here are a few ways to optimise your emails for mobile devices:
- Reduce image file sizes to make up for mobile devices' generally slower download speeds.
- Ensure the CTA buttons and links are larger than 45-57 pixels for the best user experience.
- Invest in responsive email templates.
Preview and test your emails before sending
When you're ready to hit that send button on your email, make a habit of not just double checking but triple checking your emails look as good as you want them to. Go ahead and preview what your email looks like on different devices that are popular with your audience.
You should also send out a test version of your email to yourself before you send out the real deal, to ensure all links go to the right places, every element of the email fits right on the screens and all is in working order.
Monitor every email's performance
Tracking and evaluating every email's performance is the ultimate way to get to know an audience, build upon what works, eliminate what doesn’t, and make a mailing strategy the best it can be. Plans to measure and analyse should be woven into a campaign from the very beginning. And at every stage, you need to think about measurability.
Here are the list of metrics you should be looking into when it comes to email performance.
Don't be afraid to clean up your contacts list
We know it's tempting to keep every subscriber you win on an email campaign until they personally choose to opt out. But just because they haven't opted out yet doesn't mean they're still interested, and subscribers who have become inactive can kill your emails' open and clickthrough rates (the exact opposite of what you want).
To make sure you're only sending emails to the people who want to read them, clean up your email list so that it excludes recipients who haven't opened an email from you in a while. By doing this, you're making sure your emails' open and clickthrough rates truly reflect only your most interested audience - allowing you to collect the most effective data on what is and isn't working in each email you send to your database.
