Getting Your Offer in Front of Their Eyeballs: 5 Simple Ways to Increase Your Email Open Rates

Marketers have avoided email campaigns for years. Social media channels have distracted them from proven marketing methods. Those same marketing minds now see what they’ve missed.

As the Young Entrepreneur Council told Business Insider, “Despite all the flashy new online marketing tools, apps, and social media sites, the oldest online marketing tactic, email marketing, is still one of the best ways to generate sales in your business.”

Today’s marketing people should weigh the ways to get prospects to open and act on their emails.

 

5 Tips To Increase Your Open Rate

 

1. Humanize the email

You must put the name of a real person in the “From” line. People are more likely to open a message from a name they know or could confirm.

Email services can customize their bulk mailing with a “From” person. But, if you run your own emails, you should use your own name or nickname. Using a “From” name consistently will train recipients’ computers to route emails to “Inbox.”

 

2. Optimize the “Subject” line

The “Subject” line is a headline-grabbing (or not) grabbing the first impression, the recipient to read on and click through to purchase.

Strong subject lines use less than 50 letters and clear simple words:

  • Promise lists: “5 ways to relieve your purchasing pain”
  • Ask questions: “Do you have time to save 50%?”
  • Scare them: “You can’t get this deal after Friday!”
  • Make it personal: “Phil, we’re holding this discount for you!”
  • Be the boss: “You need to move on this soon, Helen!”

 

3. Avoid the tricks

Emails should not use social media lingo like “lol,” “OMG,” and whatever the teens are using. Business is for grownups, so your choice of words should show respect. If you’ve learned anything from Twitter, it’s how to compress a message and still make sense.

Emails are no place for “likes,” “dislikes,” or ALL CAPS for emphasis. You can still frame a friendly and chatty email without being clever and coy. What you should do is study how to optimize the marketing tools available.

 

4. Think “keywords”

Blogs offer clues to what emails should do. A good blog has a creative, brief, and engaging title. Your email text should open with a sentence with the power of a headline or subhead.

You should use strategic keywords, key phrases, or long tail keys. They should appear in the subject line and throughout the message. The SEO preference for short paragraphs makes sense, too. If you think about how you read emails, you’ll appreciate the value of brevity and clarity.

 

5. Keep it going

If at first, you don’t exceed, email again. The recipients who do not open the email are more likely to the next time. Well-constructed emails will build curiosity. If you change the subject line, you can send the same email and double the total open-rate.

Non-respondents help filter your email campaign list. The address list depends on many factors. For instance, B2B emails succeed better around 10:00 AM or lunchtime. You don’t want to hit them as they start or end their workday. Sooner or later, you must delete or requalify the non-responders.

 

Converting those eyeballs

Marketing campaign recipients scan hundreds of emails every day. And, marketing masters are learning to slow those eyeballs to make their messages count.

They are learning, too, their email campaigns can be more effective than their social media obsession. Huffington Post notes, “Email conversion rates are 40x those of Facebook and Twitter.” Hopefully, these five simple ways will help you succeed.