Email is still the number one channel for driving sales for e-commerce business. For many years marketers have touted the decline of the channel, but it is still here. It is still getting strong. With new tools such as AppBoy, Marketo and HubSpot, the abilities for customizing and refining campaigns is endless. However, the original principals of email marketing still hold true. Retaliate1st list their guide to increasing your open rates.
How To Increase Your Email Open Rates
- Don’t Send Unnecessary Mail
As business owners and growth hackers, we subscribe to a ton of mailing lists. We consume info at an amazing rate. Some of the lists are better than others, and though we love to learn, we all know that there are those businesses that send garbage email blasts. It annoys us, but we stay subscribed. Then they do it again. We unsubscribe.
They lost a warm lead.
Don’t be like them. Keep your mail marketing messages to the most important. Do not simply send out blasts because you think you should.
New product, really exciting news, a big re-cap of the latest info, discounts, sales, or free stuff? Send it.
Short emails pushing half-hearted promotions because you either feel you haven’t emailed enough, or you want to generate a few extra sales? Don’t send it.
- Personalize Your mail
Yes, we all know that it’s auto-generated, and most customers realize that at this point.
However, seeing our names in the subject is a powerful attention grabber.
Dear Customer, or Hey Business Pro are horrible ways to start an email. Hi Jennifer or Good Morning Darryl are going to get your email opened, and will get your first few lines read.
- You can further increase your open rate by adding “Re:” before the personalization, even if it’s the first email in the chain. This can be used in your personal and intra-office communications as well, though over-doing it will diminish it’s power.
Personalization and Targeting
You should also personalize your “From.” Use your name or Name + Business. Jim at WidgetCo or Domenica from SalesBooster gives your list a warmer feeling than an email from SalesBooster.
- Write Powerful Headlines
We’re talking about email marketing. Remember that every word you write for your business is marketing. And, email subject lines are pure copywriting.
Weak subjects don’t get opened.
If you are doing a lot of email, it can be fatiguing to come up with killer headlines consistently. The way around this is to split test subject lines, and parse your list so that you can use variations of the same subject for multiple parts of your audience.
- The words Free, Incredible, Sale, Deal, and Discount are always powerful
- Name + benefit is still a great lead
- Re: Name + benefit is even better (save this for your most important email)
While it can be tempting to write “weird” subjects to get higher open rates, please remember that they have to relate to the content of your email, your product, and your brand. For example, one large personal training and fitness related business was famous for sending out emails with salacious subject lines that had zero to do with their product:
“Weed, whores, and whiskey”
“Re: A duffle bag full of guns”
“Re: Are you in the mafia?”
They’re now out of business.