Email marketing is always an effective strategy to reach out to people. It is also one of the least expensive ways to ensure that you get your word spread out among prospective clients. Every Digital Marketing Agency you approach will surely bring out this one aspect out to you.
Even though email marketing works great, people keep getting promotional emails all through the day. Very few people bother to actually open emails and read their content. It is very likely that your email could get lost in this clutter and remain ignored. As such, it is a marketer’s job to ensure that your email is actually opened and read. You need to increase your chances of being noticed among the crowd. This does take some effort, but is worth it for sure.
Here are a few tips to help you get your emails opened and read:
- Make A Targeted List Of Recipients
Make a list of targeted receivers. This is very important if your expertise covers various areas. You need to create content that is specific for a group of people with similar interests. This way, your email would match their interests and increase your chances of getting noted. Your content will be able to speak directly to the audience’s interests and will make the mark. Also, it is necessary to have a list that is clean, and consists of only people who have opted to receive your emails.
- Set Up Specific Expectations
Each time a subscriber signs in to receive your e-newsletters or such emails, or subscribes to you, do send them an auto-response email to let them know what to expect from you. Give them a detailed idea about the kind of emails and also the frequency of emails you will be sending out. This lets your subscribers know what to expect from you in due course.
- Show That You Are Real
This point should reflect in your content first of all. The content in your email should be real and accurate. No fake promises or messages should be promoted. This is also applicable to your email address. Use a real name instead of generics like info@abc.com and such ids for the address that you use as a “reply to”.
- Keep A Catchy Subject Line
Your subject line needs to be a well researched one. Spend enough time to sit and think about what you would put as a subject for your email. This must be something that actually provokes your recipient to open your email and check its contents. It needs to be really enticing.
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- A Good Pre-header
A number of e-newsletters and emails have pre-headers that instruct the reader to open the email in a web browser in case the viewer is not able to see it properly in the mail. This is actually not a good way to proceed. You need to use this option to give the user a really compelling reason to go on and read the email completely.
- Call to Action
A Call to Action or CTA is necessary in every email. This lets the user get to know what you actually expect them to do. A common mistake is to let this portion go towards the end of the email. Instead, place this somewhere near the top of the email. This will help the readers notice it soon \enough rather than giving them pains to scroll through the entire email to get it.
- Give them Control
You need to allow the subscribers to opt out easily if they want to. There is no point in marketing to people who have no intention to do business with you. It is better to let them opt out and not disturb them with your emails again.
- Personal Message
Make your email personal by greeting your readers using their name. You could also use their first names in the subject line. According to market studies, it has been found that the by using personalized emails you could increase the chances of getting your email opened by around 14%.
- Share
It is a good idea to add some sharing features to your emails. You could make use of social sharing options to allow your readers to share the email to their family and friends. This could highly increase your chances of being opened and help you get a much wider audience. According to researches, it has been found that emails that have social sharing buttons have a 115% higher click through rate as compared to other emails that do not implement the feature.
- Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization is an essential part of every digital marketing strategy these days. With increased use of smartphones and tablets, this is one aspect that you can never overlook. Around 40% of all emails are now opened using these devices. This number just keeps growing all the time. As such, you need to have your email optimised for mobile devices so that your viewers are able to view it properly on any device. You can also use email services to do this for you. Such services also give you detailed statistics about how many of your emails are opened on mobile devices.
- Analyze and Monitor
You need to analyze and monitor the behaviour of your email recipients. This will help you understand what content they prefer, when they prefer, and other such minute details. This will help you build better strategies and succeed in your ventures based on these statistics.
- Update your Subscriber list Periodically
You need to keep this one point in mind. “Keep only those subscribers who open your emails”. This is an overlooked point that usually no one cares about. One sure thing is that every person is not going to open your email. The smaller the list, the higher will be the open rate you can achieve. Just keep those people in your list who are interested in receiving your emails and reading them. There is no point in keeping others there. You need detailed statistics to know how many of your emails are being opened and by whom. Once you have this ready, you can direct your emails to specific targets.
Based on the emails opened over the course of a few months, you need to edit your lists and update them. If there are subscribers who have had no interaction with you over a few months, there is no logic in emailing them all the time.
Before you cut them down, you could send them a small notification as to you are deleting their subscription or so. Another thing you could do is ask them if they are interested in receiving your emails. If you get a response, keep them in. If there is no response, you could surely delete them from the list. This is a subtle way of letting them know.
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- Encourage Email Classification
You need to ensure that your recipients receive your emails bypassing any of the possible filters. This is a way to make sure that they open all your emails. You could send them detailed instructions to prevent the emails from going in to the spam folder or promotions tab. They need to follow the instructions to prevent it with the email provider. You could ask them to add you to their contacts, or even better, to their favourites.
- Reward them for reading
Give your readers some kind of rewards for reading your emails. You could share a useful tip to make them benefit or try something simple like that. This inspires them and makes them feel better.
These simple and easy techniques will surely help you go a long way in getting your emails noted and opened by your recipients. Every Digital Marketing Agency is sure to suggest you the above. Email marketing is one with great scope. If you use it smartly, you can get lots of benefits out of it.