Sure, there are many new ways to market to your customers. Marketers are always on the lookout for fresh ideas to connect to their market. But there is something about emails that charms consumers into converting. Email marketing may be one of the oldest strategies known to digital marketing, but it is certainly not dead!
This is not to say that email is a fool-proof way of connecting to your market and getting them to convert. Email, like any other marketing strategy, requires planning and mapping out ideas and creating it into a whole campaign in and of its own.
Now, if you have already prepared your email campaigns, it’s best to review everything first before you hit Launch. You wouldn’t want to commit a faux pas. It’s also good to preempt any hurdle that may come in the way. One of which is to actually get your receivers to open the email.
To help you kick-start your way into launching a successful email campaign, we listed down 5 tried-and-tested email marketing tips you can try out!
Let’s jump right in.
Why Is The Email Open Rate Important?
The answer to this is pretty straightforward. The email open rate is a metric that defines how much of your emails from your campaigns are clicked and opened by your email lists.
It’s important to know that the open rate depends on your relationship with your email list. A good email open rate varies from industry to industry. Industries like discount sites which send out discount notifications or coupons everyday may have low open rates which is logical since they do it several times everyday and not everyone will find their daily deals interesting.
It would also make sense to have a good open rate, if say, you only send out an email or 2 a week with valuable content which is targeted to a specific mailing list.
Use A Strong Subject Line
This tip should be obvious. A weak subject line will only deter the reader into clicking the email open.
We receive a heap of emails daily and most of them remain unread maybe because you don’t find it interesting from the subject line alone or it may look spammy because of the subject line. Now, we're not saying that you have to have awesome skills as a writer to create click-worthy email subject lines. While some are natural writers, most acquire this skill through study and practice until it becomes
second nature.
Another tip to create a powerful email subject line is to personalise it by adding your customer’s name with the use of mail merge tags! This assumes you asked for the subscriber's name as well as their email address in the first place!
Determine The Best Schedule To Send Out Emails
Another factor that determines an email’s open rate is the time it is sent. But here’s the thing. There is no clear-cut one-size-fits-all schedule for sending emails.
Not every organisation has the same exact mailing list, the same exact content, the same exact target demographics even if they are of the same industry. Depending on your email sending frequency per week, you’ll have to strategically plan when to send out your emails.
According to CoSchedule, based on the data they collected from various studies, the best days of the week to send emails are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with Tuesday being the top choice. And the best times to send out your emails.
The best times to send out your email in a day are:
- 10am: This is one of the most popular late-morning email sending times when we’re taking a short break from work.
- 8pm-midnight: We also check our email before going to bed.
- 2pm: This is another popular time to send emails when most people are taking their mid-afternoon break.
- 6am: The reason to this is because the first thing we usually do when we wake up is check our emails.
You can take advantage of these popular times by automating your email campaigns and schedule them to be sent at these times.
Audit, Clean Up and Segment Your Email List
This one should be done regularly. Cleaning out your email list will make sure that only your loyal contacts are in your list. Here are some of contacts you should delete from your list:
- Those who do not open your emails
- Contacts where your emails bounce frequently
- Contacts who do not engage with you
The reason why you should do this is to ensure that only your most loyal or those who are interested receive your emails. They are the most likely to open and engage with your email content. Sure, doing this will decrease your contacts, but take note that doing so will leave you with high-value contacts. Remember quality > quantity.
Another thing you can do to your contacts is to segment them into email lists. This way, you can send targeted emails personalised to a particular email list or group.
Send Reminder or Follow-Up Emails To Those Who Did Not Open Your Emails
Sending reminders or follow-ups to people in the email lists lets you know who among them are still interested in receiving your content. It’s also a great way to reconnect with them and build a good relationship. If you’re looking to clean up your email list, this is a good step to do to make sure which of those who do not open your emails should remain on your email list. Make sure that the email subject line in
this type of email clear states your intent to let them know what it’s for.
Make It Work
Now that we’ve shared some of the top email marketing tips to boost your open rates and how you can implement them with the use of the lead funnel swipe file we talked about yesterday, go ahead and give them a try. See how effective these tips are and how much
improvement they give to your email open rates.
But that’s not all there is to it. It does not stop at implementing and sending out those emails.
The key to making these optimisation strategies to work is to always test them and see if they fit into your marketing needs. Optimisation and testing should be a continuous process to ensure that you are at the top of your game.
That's the end of today's lesson and we hope you took value from it
Would you let us know?
Regards
Chris and Susan
