You wake up and receive a ping. You unlock your phone and there is an email notification waiting for you.
Will you open it?
As an email marketer, I get excited about receiving emails from other brands. I want to know what is working for them, how are they navigating the market and if their customers are satisfied.
But what about the ordinary users?
As per OmniSend and MailChimp, the average email open rate across industries is close to 21%. This means around 79% of emails go to waste.
Considering these alarmingly low numbers, one might think it is useless to spend time on email marketing. However, this is not true. With a thoughtful strategy, the right format, and a powerful targeting plan, brands are actually doing wonders.
If you are a business owner or email marketer and you are just getting started with email marketing campaigns, here are some of the simplest, yet most creative tips that will help you instantly boost your email open rate.
Interesting Subject Line
It always starts with an epic subject line.
That’s how you grab attention and that’s exactly how you convince someone to read your email till the end. Study shows that 69% of people decide if an email is spam by just looking at the subject line.
From pleading and begging, to threatening, teasing, and cracking jokes, we have seen all sorts of subject lines. However, it all comes down to the tone of your business. For small, personalized, or fun business tones, cracking jokes might help but if you are managing a big B2B-based business, an informal tone or experimenting with the subject line might not be ideal.
The subject line offers a basic opportunity to capture the attention of your potential customer. So, if your subject line piques the curiosity of your reader, intrigues excitement, or offers value, you have successfully built a long-term relationship with your client.
Just like the email segmentation process, where you get to categorize the contact list based on the efficacy of the campaign and the preference of the client, the subject line will help you boost the precision and effectiveness of the campaign.
While creating your subject line, understand the brand ethics, its tone, and overall persona. If the overall brand tone is informal, you have a lot of room to play.
Tip: Clickbait or spammy words in your subject line can drop your rate of email opening. Moreover, if you continuously add these words to your email marketing campaigns, it might result in surging the number of unsubscribes.
A/B Testing
You have written the best email of your life and now you are thinking of launching your first email campaign.
But wait! Is this actually going to work?
Most email marketers will tell you to test it first. Launching an email campaign is not a guesswork, so you need to know if your email will perform well with your clientele. A good way to determine this is by simply running an A/B test.
Nearly 89% of the companies today run an A/B testing before launching their email marketing campaign. Your A/B testing can have two similar emails with different graphics, subject lines, or email bodies.
One of the best and most notable examples of A/B testing is the presidential campaign of former president Barack Obama. The email campaign mainly tried variations of the subject line to help them generate donations for the campaign.
Study shows that for the presidential campaign, the subject line “the one thing the polls got right” was the poorest performing so far. On the contrary, “I will be outspent” performed best.
The results of this testing concluded that adjusting the subject line helped the campaign generate an additional 2.2 million in donations.
Tip: Apart from the subject line, you can also test things like address, plain text, HTML campaigns, long emails, and short emails.
Pick the Right Time
With marketing, timing is very important.
This is the reason most marketing campaigns are considered time-sensitive. From event-based marketing to the optimum daily time, time sensitivity can be of many types. As a marketer, you need to know when to launch your email campaign to get the maximum ROI.
For instance, everyone has a different time to open their emails. Most people like to check emails early morning with their breakfast, while others like to check email when stuck in rush hour. Apart from this, daily office breaks, and right before bed are also considered a suitable time to check email.
As an email marketer, take time to study consumer behavior, learn about the daily habits of your subscribers, and explore their time zones.
The simplest and most effective method of determining the optimum time to send your email is via split testing. You can build a simple schedule with the same email and launch the campaign at different times, days, or events.
For example, check if your email campaign performs better during workdays or weekends. Similarly, you can also test between different time zones, locations, and times of the day.
Tip: Email campaigns perform better on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, between 10-11 am. Moreover, 53% of the emails are read during work hours i.e. 9 am -5 pm.
Keep It Mobile-Friendly
When you receive an email on the go, how would you check it? You’re probably thinking about your phone.
This is the reason your email marketing campaign needs to be mobile-friendly. Based on a study, 46% of the marketing emails in 2022, were opened on the mobile phone.
Thanks to affordable and reliable phone and internet service like the ones offered by Verizon Internet, keeping tabs on emails has become easier. Moreover, through mobile phones, revenue per email is 4X higher than on desktop.
This means that if you do not make your campaign mobile-friendly, your email open rate will be quite low.
Now you might be thinking, aren’t all emails mobile-friendly?
Well, technically you are right. If you have a smartphone, you can open and read emails on it. However, for an email campaign, you need more than just an email that you can open on your phone. Your email needs to be optimized for the mobile, so the reader can experience the design and a fully functional template.
Moreover, in most emails, a CTA compels the readers to perform an action. This action can be buying something, visiting a page, subscribing to a channel or just following a page. Each CTA has a clickable button that leads to the required page.
So, how do you optimize the campaign for phones?
The answer is simple; you need to make sure your email design is responsive. Moreover, you need to focus more on the CTA, making each button more visible and responsive. Finally, focus on the subject line and keep it simple, short, and easy to read.
Tip: Phone sizes, software, and layout vary across the board, so before launching the email campaign, make sure to test it on both Android and iOS.
Categorize Your Recipients
Within the email marketing world, segmentation works like magic. Most email marketers rank segmentation as one of the top initiatives for email marketing.
Why?
The reason is simple. If you segment your database, you can easily target the campaign for your audience.
So, how can you segment your contact list?
For this, consider a hypothetical scenario where you are expected to design an email campaign for a small haircare business. Your goal here is to make sure your audience visits the store for the new haircare line for curly hair.
To start, you need basic data about the hairstyles and hair texture of your audience. This data will help you segment the contact list. You can then divide and categorize the receipt based on their address, hair queries, and haircare routine. All these details will ensure that you get maximum foot traffic in the store.
For instance, the address will help you ensure that you only target people who live nearby and can actually visit the store. Most email marketing CRMs offer a segmentation option, so you can easily keep your audience at laser focus to get more precise results.
If you are interested in segmentation for your email campaign, here are some simple ways to categorize your contact list for a better open rate. Segment your list based on business industry i.e. product, service, account, or company size i.e. strength of company, and sales cycle i.e. pre-sales, post-sales.
Tip: Start with a broad or general segmentation and then narrow it down with time, based on the overall response rate and the data you gather via replies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the 5 T’s of email marketing?
The five T’s of email marketing include Tease, Target, Teach, Test, and Track.
What are some of the ideal tips for better email marketing?
Start with an audience and content audit, and then set goals to align with the product. Make sure that you have the right dashboard and tools at your disposal. Finally, create an email list and map out the customer journey that you can follow and trace at every stage.
What are the types of email marketing?
Some of the major email marketing types include welcome emails, newsletters, milestone announcement emails, feedback requests, promotional emails, abandoned carts, marketing, event reminders, educational or informational emails, and finally, transactional emails.
