If your emails aren’t being opened as often as you’d like them to be, then maybe you need to alter your sending habits. Many factors go into making the perfect email marketing campaign, so take a look at the tips and tricks below that’ll help you fine tune your mailing procedures for improving email open rates.
Improving Email Open Rates – 1. The Subject Line
Creating the perfect subject line for improving email open rates is an art of finesse. Too long and it’ll be skimmed over, but if it’s too short it might end up looking like spam. And if it’s even a bit misleading not only will it be marked as spam, but the name associated with the email (your name) will lose all credibility. It’s about being concise, personable, and to the point. The subject line should stay short, never going over 50 characters if at all possible. In those 50 characters you should include a direct address, meaning at minimum the recipient’s name, as well as your company name. Combine this with a short message that builds up a sense of urgency and you’ve got yourself a perfect subject line.
2. Research
If your messages are ending up in spam filters more often than not, then you might want to reconsider the words you use in your email. There are certain flag words that alert spam filters to the possibility of spam emails, such as excessive use of dollar signs or words like “free” and “beneficiary”, but even more so than that, the reader has a keen sense of determining what is spam and what isn’t. Keep the language simple and try not to make your email look like an advertisement for a Barnum and Bailey’s show, so research and see what the most common spam flagger words are. Making sure your email does not hit the spam folder is a great step to improving email open rates.
3. Use Your Email Address as a Memo
The quickest way to get the recipient’s attention is by using a keyword in your email address. The email address is usually the first thing a recipient sees, so by using an address like receipts@yourname.com or feedbacksurvey@yourname.com lets the recipient know what the email is about in a single glance.
4. Timing and Send Rates
Now that you’ve got an address pool, try sending at different times of day to see at what hour people seem more likely to open mails. Choose differing recipient pools of similar sizes and alternate send times between them. Then just compile the data and analyze. The same should be done for figuring out how often you want to be sending your emails. Once a day? Twice a day? Weekly? Every 18 hours? Test out as many times as possible to find what works best for you and watch what is improving email open rates.
There are many guidelines that you can follow for improving email open rates, like many of the tips listed above, but ultimately you need to tailor your sending habits to match the desires of your own recipient pool. What works for company A won’t necessarily work for company B, so test often and test hard until you get that chemistry right.
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