5 email marketing tips to help you increase your open rates

TommyCarey Level X³

May 20, 2017, 9:00 am

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5 email marketing tips to help you increase your open rates

Email marketing works well because everyone checks their email accounts on a daily basis. This is why people still gravitate towards large campaigns targeting millions of people and invest thousands into servers just to randomize IP addresses and the sending emails in order to get all the emails inboxed. The downside of this is that if you're super technical and server savvy, you might not know how to get people to actually open your emails. You could lack the skills it takes to convince people to click on your emails rather than just spam them and move on.

Do you know how to increase your open rates?

I hear loads of people asking something similar to this and it's actually easier than you would think. You can write up two very similar titles but one gets opened twice as often because of little factors you're not even seeing, but I'm here to help you see them

If you already have a great open rate for your campaigns, that's awesome, but not everyone is as lucky as you. If your rates are good for you, then you're likely doing some of the things I'm about to cover below

5 Tips To Increase Your Open Rates

1. Your Subject Line
When it comes to your first wave of attack, you need to think of your title line. This is due to the face that it is the first, maybe second, thing that people see when they go to their inbox. Your title is meant to get people to click through, which is the first battle you have to win.

There's a fine line of getting your point across but not looking spammy at the same time. You want people to click through but you don't want them to just trash your hard work.

Extremely basic email titles like "(business) Newsletter for January" isn't going to convert well because no one wants to hear about an update. You need to word it differently so that they're intrigued and want to read what is just behind that title

5 email marketing tips to help you increase your open rates

You'll likely have to split test a few different titles to make sure what works. But here are some tips on how to make one that will work well:

Ask a Question: Asking a question will get people to answer it in their head. If the answer agrees with them, they will likely click through. Now if you're asking "Are you a girl?" then you'll obviously have a low click through rate. You'll want to make it intriguing like "Have you made enough this month to buy what you want?" This will get people to say "No, I want everything!" and they will click through. The only downside about my title is that it could trigger spam filters lol.
Be Commanding: In some niches it will pay off to be a little more demanding. You'll obviously have to test this out to see if it's your niche, I can't tell you. This isn't like the questions, this is telling people what they should do. An example of this would be "Make it or don't. We push our people to success".
Tease your list: Have you ever watched a TV show and it leaves you wanting more? That's likely due to a cliffhanger ending which was done to keep you coming back. You can do the same thing with your email titles. Think of your title as the first episode and the body of the email as your second episode. You'll want to get people to be enticed into clicking through to see what happens next
People like lists: If you can title your newsletter something like "6 new ways to clean your car" and you're in the automotive niche, you'll likely get people to click through because they may not know one of the ways to clean their car lol.
Announcements: Get right to it and just launch an announcement. If this email is just to get the word out about something you changed, then say that. Don't act like you're walking on eggshells, just put what you want in the title and people will know it's important.

2. Edit your "From" name
Many people don't think twice about this because it should be all set up, right? Well that's a naive way of thinking and you should definitely edit your from, or sender, name in order to increase your click throughs. The sender name lets people know exactly who is sending them an email, and usually if you set it up right it will help out quicker than later. Not editing your name could make it confusing to your list to determine exactly who is emailing them, and they will just delete the email.

With all the scams and hacks going around in recent years, people have become weary when it comes to opening random emails. If you edit your from name to something that is recognizable then you're increasing your click through rate since they will trust the sender more.

You'll need to link the from name to the email for best results. Normally I just use my business or websites name so that people will link the sender to the title and then to the actual content of the email when they do click through. You should never use your personal email or a random gmail you set up to send out business emails.

3. Figure out the best times to send out your emails
You'll need to figure out when the best times are for sending out your emails. This sometimes depends on your niche, but it more depends on your time zones. If you're targeting just the local economy around you, then you can send out your emails whenever the sun is up. Normally I like to send them out around lunch time which is around Noon or 1pm, or send them out around 6pm when people are either just sitting down for dinner or finishing up

By sending out my emails at these times I'm increasing my chances that they won't get buried under 100 other emails that the person is likely getting every day. Well, maybe they're not getting 100 a day, but it's still likely that the email will get buried lol.

One way you can actually figure out the best times to send out for your list is to split it up into 4 different sections and sending at different times. You will send out an email to list 1 at 4am, send to list 2 at 9am, send to list 3 at 2pm, and finally send to list 4 at 7pm. After this you'll be able to see the best open rates for your list based on certain times. I would do this for 1 week and you can get a good idea of an average for each time. Pick the highest average and that's your main time to send out

4. Know who you're sending to
It's easy to figure out what your customers want, but do you actually know anything about them? It's likely that you don't because they're just an email within you list.

A few questions to answer:

Do you know why they actually joined your list?
Do you know what they're interested in, besides your website?
Do you know what they need help with?

If you can answer these 3 basic questions you will be a pretty wealthy person

When you can answer the 3 questions you're basically getting to know your list.

Below are a few ways you can know your list.

Post Surveys: Having a short and sweet survey will let you get to know people on a basic level. Your survey doesn't have to be a full page of questions when just 5 will do. Ask basic questions and you can get a good understanding of who they are

Post Polls: Your polls don't have to be extravagant either. Just have a Yes or No poll and you can figure out if someone likes something. Obviously this will work best if it's a multi-poll set up that has a few different polls mixed into one, but that could take some extra coding.

5. Look over your email capture process once again.
Looking through the whole process of email capture to email sending will help you increase your click through rates a lot. If you can streamline the entire process and make it easier for people to sign up, you're likely to get more sign ups

That's not exactly a tip on how to increase your click throughs, but it's a nice one to have lol.

You need to make sure that your users know for sure what they're signing up for. If your description is kind of cloudy and not straight forward, you'll likely get a good amount of unsubscribes after your first send.

Look through your process and answer these questions to increase your chances of getting a click through after you send out an email.

Do they know the value of signing up?
Do they know what they're going to get after signing up?
Do they know how often you'll be sending them emails?

In addition to all of this, you'll need to have your subscribers double opt in so that you can avoid any type of spam complaints later on after sending out emails. You will also need an unsubscribe link within every email to avoid spam complaints.

In Conclusion:
It's actually a long process to figure everything out when it comes to increasing your click through rates, but it can be done. After you figure out how to do everything it will be much easier to duplicate when you set up more websites and want to capture emails for sending out your emails

Remember to follow me!
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Razzy

Thanks!

Razzy

Comments

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idealmike

Wow Raz this is awesome information mate! I don't do that much Email Marketing myself. In and with some of my old sites I used to do a fair bit of it though as I was growing my list and getting some conversion from my newsletters and things. Although, it was kind of "hit and hope" if you know what I mean and I never knew much at all about smart email marketing methods like these back then. It was good to get the occasional response, reply or conversion from my call-to-actions etc. And I think this was mostly in part because I did know and understand why they joined my list and what it was they was interested in so I used to give them things about that. More just mostly writing an article on my site that would review/sell something then send them emails about these new posts/products and why they would need them etc etc as just another way to drive traffic back to the site.

Another thing I used to do was send series of emails telling them how to do something. So I'd do a 5 or a 10 part series, a tutorial, walk through or coverage of doing something like setting up an affiliate site or making a WordPress plugin or something. I never really used to know much about it back then and would just wing it and make it up as I went along and learned it myself lol. But they used to do quite well and it gave people a reason to stay subscribed for other than me just sending them something they might want to buy lol

And I think that's one of the key things about Email Marketing that many, even long time experts neglect to do. They send so many emails for things they might be interested in. They forget to send things that those people will actually like or things that will keep them subscribed. Finding out what those things are is key to growing and maintaining your list if you ask me.

Great stuff though Raz cheers!

Mike.

9 years ago

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Tronia

Great tips Razzy. I would like to add to the importance of time; it is also important on which day you send these emails. Certain days have higher chance of the other person opening it. Saturday is suppose to be a really good day to send such emails.
Another tip is to try avoid the spam filter. You really don't want the spam filter to automatically put your email into the spam bin. Avoid using certain words in the subject (free, sale, ...).

9 years ago

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vinaya

I have never been a fan of email marketing because my email marketing campaigns have always failed. The email should have a good subject line, there is no doubt about it, however, a thing that a person considers good will be distasteful for other people.
having a human name for from works better than having company name or business name. If you use personal name, people will consider that the email has been sent by real person and not some automated software.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

Pardon me for this comment but I think email marketing is not that relevant anymore. To be honest, I don’t read emails coming from unknown senders especially if the subject is about a business. In fairness to me, I don’t delete such emails although I collect them in a folder for future reference. But to say that I read those email, frankly, I don’t. That’s why I really think that emailing has given way to social media because I tend to read a post in Facebook when it looks interesting even if it’s about business.

8 years ago

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SEOClerks

5 email marketing tips to help you increase your open rates

5 email marketing tips to help you increase your open rates

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idealmike

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