Lite1.8 Blog

 

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.

Habits of Top Performing Email Marketers

 

Here are 5 habits of successful email marketers that keep their campaigns alive, fresh, healthy, and thriving.

1. They personalize (always)
Email is not a flyer that is pasted to a telephone poll, or an infomercial that you immediately want to mute. It is a personal channel that is permission-based, and as such, you should treat it with the respect it deserves.

Give respect to your subscribers and their inboxes by sending them relevant, personalized and ultra-targeted emails. You may ask how ask? You can start by segmenting your list with things like customer behavior, demographics, and you can take advantage of powerful tools like the dynamic content. The point is to be sure always that your emails are speaking to each subscriber’s interest and needs.

2. They test
Surprisingly the secret to email success isn’t luck – it’s simply testing. By you simply testing different elements of your campaigns, you can learn about your audience and you can optimize your strategy every time you send. These are few things to start with:

Your subject lines. The Split testing of your subject lines is easy, and it’s a surefire way to get the highest open rates possible.

Your send times. One of the best ways that helps you to figure out the ideal time to reach your audience is for you to test different options – For instance Tuesday afternoon might be great for a B2B brand, while Sunday night might be a better option in performance for a retailer.

Your CTA buttons. Test your color, placement, copy, or all of the above! Optimizing your CTA will enable you to boost your click rates in no time.
Your content. You can never tell what your audience will find most valuable until you begin experimenting with different types of content, from video to blog posts.

3. They automate (when possible)
At 1st, looking at email automation may seem too good to be true. With much research carried out, experts claim that it saves you time and effort, and also it helps foster long-term engagement from your subscribers, and it boosts your open and click rates. I know you would want to see it to believe it, right?

Well, the truth of the matter is that the numbers don’t lie: Automated email messages average of 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click rates than the non-automated sends (Epsilon). And if you want to think about it, what are the attributes of a successful email? It’s personal,relevant, and timely. By firing based on the actions your subscribers take, automated emails check all three boxes – and you never even have to press the send button.

So for you to maintain your status as a highly effective email marketer, you need to be sure you automate everything you can: birthday messages, thank you emails, nurturing series, welcome series etc. Your subscribers will be happy and will love it, and you’ll reap the rewards that come with a super smart (and efficient) email strategy.

4. They monitor their results
It is noted that the most effective email marketers don’t just consistently test any different elements of their email – they will also adequately consistently monitor their results. Your subscribers are people that are real whose needs and interests can change per time, so there’s a very good chance that the kind of messages they like and respond to will also change.

That’s why it’s very important that you regularly review your email results and adjust them accordingly, because something that works today might not be so successful to continue same function tomorrow. And be very sure to keep an eye on your open and click rates and not only it, but also things like opens by clients, opens by device, and the kinds of content your subscribers will be engaging with the most.

5. They keep email design best practices in mind
Once a subscriber access or opens your email, they’ll often decide whether to keep or delete it or to keep scrolling based on the look and feel of each message that was sent. When it is been done right, visual design does not only draws in your audience, it also inspires action. Some tips to remember:

Lay it all out. Formatting and organization are very key and should not be ignored, cos it is use to creating reader-friendly emails, especially when more than a half of your readers are now opening on a mobile device.

Tell your story with images. With clear verified findings, it is noted that the human brain is conditioned to process images 60,000 times faster than words. So it’s not a surprise at all that about 65% of recipients prefer emails that contain mostly images over just copy of written words.

Play with color. 85% of people will tell you that color is the main reason they want to buy a product. Every color you see invites a different reaction from the reader, so ensure to make use of color psychology to your advantage. For example, it is said that red inspires urgency, while blue promotes trust and security.

 

Sending legitimate emails is key to a successful email marketing.

Here we highlight the major key steps to sending email without spamming.

3 Major Issues That Influence Email Reputation

1. Technical settings
2. Email content and design
3. Recipients’ reaction to your bulk emails

1. Technical Settings

A. Correctly format headers
First of all, it should be noted that emails should undergo an accuracy checkout of DKIM-signature and SPF-record. The SPF-record must be available in the domain of DNS and allow email sending on behalf of the domain’s name from a specific IP-address. The DKIM identifies a sender.

B. Ensure the email must be checkout
To ensure “if or if not” that the email underwent DKIM and SPF checkout, just open its headers in your email client, and then find “Authentication-Results” make sure there is “pass” after the SPF and DKIM. This simply means that the email was thoroughly examined and with the test it underwent the checkout was confirmed “tested OK”.

C. Use a special header
You have to make use of a header “precedence:bulk” in bulk emails so to enable people to know what you have sent.

D. Include an Unsubscribe Link
Be sure to make inclusion of an unsubscribe link in the email. It should be made easy-to-see, have adequate size and a nice font color.

E. Collect a legitimate mailing list

Don’t try to buy mailing lists from other companies. Recipients on purchased lists are more likely to mark your email as spam, reason because they may be not have interest in your emails. You have to collect your client base (mailing list) with the help of a subscribe link and then double opt-in.

This pattern or these method includes registration and also the subsequent email campaign in any of these cases that a user has to confirm the efficiency and accuracy of the data. A user will receive a confirmation email with the link. In so doing, your client base will contain only valid and legal addresses.

F. The reputation of the IP-address and domain

Your sender’s reputation consists of just 2 components: the reputation of your domain and the reputation of the IP-address.

Bulk emails that are sent via good services have an excellent reputation due to the domain’s authority. If you truely want to be fully responsible for your reputation, you can buy a dedicated IP-address and then you link it with your domain.

If you are making use of a free email account (like that of the Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) as a sender address, or by default, note that your emails are already authenticated with digital signatures of SendPulse to help in improving the deliverability.

But if you are making use of a corporate email account as the sender address, it is highly recommended for you to do the set up of DKIM and SPF for your corporate email domain. Once you have finished the set up your SPF and DKIM for your domain you can keep following the best mass mailing practices, you will develop a good sender reputation for that domain and also for that email account, which should result in increasing the deliverability of your email campaigns.

2. Email Content and Design

A. Don’t use suspicious links and attachments
The links you make use of are vital. If a link leads to a questionable resource, it will be blocked in no time. Don’t attach links in the subject line and also avoid shortened links, which may be viewed as a fraud.

The same thing goes for the documents and for attachments. Files that has content of suspicious titles, archives (especially those ones that are password-protected), that are showing you links for downloading a file from different free file hosting services, can quickly spot your email and mark it as spam.

B. Check the design
Try to stay away from using these following; Caps Lock, spelling mistakes, hidden text (tiny font), exclamation marks, too many images and very little text.

C. Provide a plain-text version
Always include a plain-text version of your email, as you know that spam filters don’t like its absence, and it can be also useful for some recipients. So many email clients cut off an HTML version of an email and show simple text. If the HTLM version is exempted, a recipient will see the plain-text version.

3. Recipients’ Reaction To Your Bulk Emails

A. Reactions to Your Bulk Emails
Include an unsubscribe link
Every email must contain this link as it makes it possible for users to unsubscribe rather than marking your emails as spam.

B. Use familiar name and the address
It is very important to make sure that your subscribers know that the email is yours, and not a spammer’s. Making use of a name that is familiar, company name, and an email address will help to reduce a recipient’s suspicion. Remember to be consistent with the names that you make use of in your emails, if changes occurs to your usual naming pattern, it may result in recipients perceiving your emails as spam.

C. Provide Opt-out option: Do not forget to provide a link below your emails where users can opt out if they choose to stop receiving your mails.

 

Tags:

Lite1.8
Lite 1.8
Lite18
Lite 18
Lite1.8 Email Extractor
Lite 1.8 Email Extractor
Lite Extractor
Email Extractor
1.8 Lite
1.8Lite
Extractor Lite