There are possibilities for your email marketing campaigns to be effective only as long as they are getting opened in the first place. If you notice that your open rates are lower then you would want, here are easy ways to improve them.
1. Keep Your List Fresh
Do your subscribers still have interest in hearing from you?
You’ve probably heard advices that it’s very vital to email your subscribers on a constant basis so your list will not go stale.
But even at that, over time, email subscribers can still possibly go stale. Some of your subscribers may have changed email accounts, or they are just no more interested in your brand anymore.
So if you want to keep your list fresh and filled with engaged subscribers, it’s a very good idea to periodically remove all the inactive subscribers on your list.
A subscriber that is inactive could be anyone who has not engaged with any of your email in the past 6 months or more.
But before you will remove them, try to send a win back email campaign to them, try to re-engage your inactive subscribers.
For example, Carol Augustus sends a last effort email to her subscribers that are inactive that says, “Do I bore you?. Some people will give their responds, but all others get purged.
You can to revive a cold list, by conducting a survey. In exchange for answering your questions, you can offer your subscribers free gift (like a gift card, for example).
2. Segment Your List
When people choose if they should open an email or not, one of the important factors is if they think the email is relevant to them or not.
So what are the best way to increase the relevancy of your emails? Simply by segmenting your email list.
Lyris after a survey found out that about 39% of marketers who have segmented their email lists experienced a higher open rates, then the 28% who experienced lower unsubscribe rates, and about 24% experienced greater revenue and better deliverability:
List Segmentation Results
You can begin by adding tags to your subscribers based on their behavior, like their purchase behavior. So when somebody becomes a paying customer, you need to start sending them different types of emails than you are sending to someone who has not yet purchased anything yet.
You could even send emails different from others based on the specific products your subscribers purchased.
You can segment also your lists based on demographics (like the location), or interests.
3. Avoid Spam Filters
Spam filters have improved and gotten more sophisticated in the past several years, but still they’re not perfect. Your emails can still get caught in the dreaded spam folder even your best email, and never to see the light of day.
If you are going to maximize the reach of your email marketing campaigns, you’ll have to do everything possible in order to avoid your email being flagged as a spam.
Here are some best practices that will keep your emails from being flagged into spam folders:
1. Make sure all of your recipients have actually opted-in to receiving your emails.
2. Use a good IP address to send your campaign; that is, an IP address that someone else hasn’t use to send spam in the past.
3. Send through verified domains.
4. Keep any code clean.
5. You can personalize by using merge tags “To:” field of your campaign.
6. Ask your recipience to add you to their address book, and show subscribers how to whitelist your emails.
7. Avoid making excessive use this language “salesy” (these words are spam trigger like the, “discount”, “buy”, “clearance”, or “cash”).
8. Include your location.
9. Give your subscribers an easy way to opt-out of your emails.
4. Make Your Subject Line Stand Out
Your subject lines are everything, when it comes to email open rates. The job you have is to make your subject lines stand out.
Many companies have used email marketing for years, often having to copy the same subject line formulas. These common subject lines are often filtered out as white noise as a result. You’ll have to get more creative with your subject lines, to break away from the competition.
Here are some crafting creative subject lines tips:
1. Don’t be too clever, but you can entice curiosity.
2. Insert numbers. One thing about numbers is that it draws the eye.
3. Make use a joking, fun, or conversational tone.
4. Speak in the style and the language that your subscribers use themselves, especially like you are talking with a friend.