Email Marketing – Three Tips for Higher Open Rates
Email promotion can be tough. It takes hours of work to write good copy, come up with a snappy title and find images that are on-message and aren’t a copyright violation. Then you remember that half your mailing list reads email on their phone and spend another eight hours trying to get everything to display properly on a mobile device.
And when you check your statistics, only around one out of 20 recipients bothered to open it, much less click on anything.
This is a familiar scenario to anyone who has worked on an email promotion before. Email marketing is hard, but there are some simple steps you can take to make your life a little easier. Here are three tips for getting higher open rates on your next email campaign.
Ditch the Teaser Title
“Clickbait” subject lines can seem like an obvious solution to your email marketing woes. After all, look at the success of websites like Buzzfeed on Facebook. While it makes sense, data from Mailchimp actually shows that descriptive, straightforward titles have the highest open rates. Subjects like “[COMPANYNAME] May 2005 News Bulletin!” get an open rate of 60-87% while things like “The Future of International Trade” only see a 1-14% open rate. So keep it simple. Recipients want to know what they’re getting when they read an email’s subject line.
Refine Your List
How did you get your email list? Did customers sign up at some point to receive information about your company? Or did you buy a list from some shady website? Nothing is worse for an email marketing campaign than a poorly curated list. Make sure you are only sending emails to people who have recently expressed interest in what you provide. Sending emails to a year-old list is useless. Get rid of old recipients and ones that aren’t interested in your business to make sure your emails are going to people who will want to open it.
Make it Responsive
If your emails aren’t responsively designed, you may as well not even bother. Responsive design means that your email will adapt to the platform that it was opened on to display properly, whether it’s a desktop, smartphone or tablet. Sometimes non-responsive emails will display alright on mobile, but most of the time it’s just a jumbled nonsensical mess. Make sure your emails display properly to everyone who opens them by choosing responsive design. According to litmus.com, 49% of emails were opened on mobile devices in the first half of 2015. That number is too large to ignore.
Hopefully these tips gave you some ideas for your next email blast. A good email marketing campaign is extremely important. Gigaom’s Workhorses and Dark Horses: Digital Tactics for Customer Acquisition report showed that email is the single most-effective tool for customer awareness, acquisition, conversion and retention. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and still aren’t confident in your ability to create a successful email campaign, don’t worry. We’d love to help. We offer content marketing and digital marketing services and will put our expertise and experience to work designing and writing emails that people will see.