Your email marketing campaigns can only be effective so long as they are getting opened in the first place. If your open rates are lower than you would like, here are 5 easy ways to improve them …
1. Keep your list fresh - You’ve probably heard the advice that it’s important to email your subscribers consistently so your list doesn’t go stale. Even so, over time, email subscribers can still go stale. Some people may have changed email accounts, or maybe they just aren’t interested in your brand anymore. To keep your list fresh and filled with engaged subscribers, it’s a good idea to periodically remove inactive subscribers. An inactive subscriber is anyone who has not engaged with any email in the past 6 months or more.
2. Avoid spam filters - Spam filters have become more sophisticated in the past several years, but they’re still not perfect. Your emails – even your best emails – can still get caught in the dreaded spam folder, never to see the light of day. To maximize the reach of your email marketing campaigns, you’ll need to do everything possible to avoid being flagged as spam.
Here are some best practices to keep your emails from falling into spam folders:
- Make sure all recipients have opted-in to receiving your emails
- Send your campaign from a good IP address; that is, an IP address that hasn’t been used by someone else who has sent spam in the past
- Send through verified domains
- Keep any code clean
- Use merge tags to personalize the “To:” field of your campaign
- Show subscribers how to whitelist your emails, and ask them to add you to their address book
- Avoid the excessive use of “salesy” language (these are spam trigger words like “buy”, “clearance”, “discount”, or “cash”)
- Don’t “bait-and-switch” by using deceptive subject lines
- Include your location
- Include an easy way for subscribers to opt-out of your emails
3. Timing – Timing can have a huge effect on whether or not your subscribers open your emails, so think carefully about what time and day you send your emails out. You won’t be able to figure out the perfect time immediately, but perform some A/B tests to identify which time frames seem to perform best, and explore those in future campaigns.
4. Subject Lines - When it comes to email open rates, your subject lines are everything. Your job is to make your subject lines stand out. Break away from the competition and get more creative with your subject lines.
5. Write To One Person - When you draft your subject line and message content, it’s natural to think of the thousands of people who are about to receive it. However, it’s far more effective to write as if speaking to a person, with a personal subject line and a personalized message.
In order to write this way, you’ll have to know your buyer persona. You need to understand their problems, their desires, their values, their likes and their dislikes.