Every business is spending more time, labor, and money on data-driven marketing. Despite that, email marketing still has some of the highest returns on investment for businesses! Once they’ve signed up, your goal is always to increase your email open rate. That’s more eyes on your content! Today we will explore ways to entice the members of your email list where we previously spoke about growing your email list itself.
The Basics
Your email open rate is the percentage of subscribers on your list that see your message in their inbox and choose to open it. The average person receives around 120 emails per day, and 40 percent of consumers admit that almost half of them remain unread in their inboxes. How do you ensure yours stands out from the rest and doesn’t become one of those 50+ emails that get left behind?
Finding Your Audience
You could run the best daycare in your state with a high newsletter subscriber count, but if only 8% of that list has a child in the home, even the most evocative messaging won’t get you where you need to be. Before you stay up all night perfecting your email technique, ensure that you’re positioning yourself in front of your ideal audience. This positioning was one of the crucial elements of our campaign with our client, Jenni Kane.
Mixing Sales with Content
Customers don’t want to be sold things, even when they are (or might be) in the mood for shopping. Does anyone like a pushy salesclerk? You don’t want your email campaign to center around a push to purchase every time you contact your audience. It gets stale and people disengage. To keep them invested, mix in content emails to build trust and rapport with your audience. Keep the content emails engaging by making them educational, inspirational, or entertaining.
It’s All About the Subject Line
Understanding human tendencies and behaviors is vital to any successful digital marketing campaign, and email marketing is no different. There are a few key elements that marketers have found can lead to more clicks. The ones that resonate best will depend on your personal brand’s voice as well as your niche. Never miss an opportunity to examine your analytics and see what is and isn’t resonating with your audience. Here are three tips to get you started.
1. FOMO
The “fear of missing out” is a nearly universal human experience. We are hard-wired to want what we can’t always have. There are four types of scarcity, so invoke them in your subject line to draw in viewers.
- Price Scarcity – “Last call at this price!” “Get it now before the price goes up.”
- Quantity Scarcity – “Only X left in stock!” “Enrollment caps at X.”
- Premium Scarcity – “Free X with purchase.” “Signed copy for buyers this week.”
- Offer Scarcity – “This week only!” “Only at the launch party.”
2. A Good Hook
Hooks are a classic sales pitch tactic that translate flawlessly in email campaigns. A hook is exactly what it sounds like – an idea or concept you present that gets people engaged in what you’re saying and draws them in. To hook your client base in, lead with value. This can be a way that you offer a solution to their problem (“Get rid of back pain for good!”), educating them with a surprising statistic, or even confirming a belief (“Your e-commerce store is ideal for customers, but they aren’t seeing it.”) to get them invested.
3. Call To Action
Commonly referred to as CTAs in marketing circles, they can be some of the best ways to get your readers’ attention – even if they don’t completely follow through with the action! Shoot for the moon to land among the stars in your sales funnel, too. A call to action in your email can be a great way to get readers to explore your message and then get out of their inbox and onto your website. That brings you even closer to a close. This can be an invitation to book a consultation, check out your new inventory, or anything else your website may offer your readers. Once they are on your website, that copy can get to work converting for you.
Avoiding Spam
Spam filters get smarter every day, and in their effort to clean up our inboxes, they sometimes send some extra emails through their filter. There are some main flags that these filters look for like all-caps headlines and the word “Free” being mentioned too often. To avoid being flagged as spam, ensure you’re giving your readers high quality emails every time you press “send.” Asking them upon sign up to add you to their contact list can be a huge help here, too!
Quick Tricks
Once you’ve got a basic email structure that suits your needs, here’s some additional know-how to keep in your back pocket moving forward.
- Make it personal. Including a recipient’s name in the subject line can increase the likelihood they will open your email.
- Keep it short and sweet. It’s important to be succinct in your email subject. Your aim is to focus the recipient’s attention and engage them enough to want to keep reading.
- If you’re getting stuck generating a subject line, try using a free tool like RhymeZone to come up with something snappy.
- Every once in a while, send out a survey to subscribers to gauge interest and see what they would want more or less of in their inbox.
Is timing everything?
Now that you’ve got the perfect audience reading the perfect email campaigns, when should you send them? Research actually shows that there is no day of the week that receives significantly more email engagement than the others. Research into the best time of day has also turned up similarly varied results. So rather than basing your email campaigns around when to send, focus more on your specific audience and how your message might be best received. Pick a schedule that works for you and your company instead of fretting over exactly when you’re hitting their inbox – instead, focus on it being a juicy offer they can’t resist, no matter when they see it.
