Email marketing is one of the best performing forms of list building, however, we have to get smarter at it. That’s due to the fact that email subscribers get about 140 emails a day, so yours have to stand out to avoid getting sent to the spam folder. So to ensure that your email reaches your readers’ inboxes, follow these 5 tips and increase your click-through rates too.
1. Keep your subject lines brief
If you want your customers to notice your email out of all the others, you must write a great subject line. Lots of the best performing email subject lines have just a couple of words, and are no more than 40 characters. That means you need to ensure you utilise punchy language to get to the point while still developing interest.
Another method to encourage opens is to utilise common e-mail terms like ‘RE:’, ‘Fwd:’ or ‘FW:’, as it offers the impression that the email is from a real individual. To give that effect, you must also use a genuine individual’s name as the sender.
2. Segment your campaign
Segmentation is where you sort your subscriber list into groups so you send relevant, personalised emails to your subscribers. In accordance with Hubspot, personalised emails increase verified leads by a substantial 451%. So group your customers together by item or any other goal, and see how much of a difference it makes. You should see your click-through rates increase.
3. Make it more tough to subscribe
Sounds wrong, doesn’t it? But there is good reason to add double opt-in for your mailing lists. This means customers need to verify their email prior to being subscribed.
Yes, you’ll get fewer people registered, but it means that they wish to engage with you. So you should see higher click rates if your list is double opt-in.
4. Remove customers with low engagement
If you’ve not cleaned your customer list in a while, you have actually probably got great deals of old subscribers that rarely engage with your emails, if at all. If you keep sending them emails when they have not opened your last couple, you might wind up with high unsubscribe rates and grievances. People get frustrated when they keep receiving material they’re not thinking about any longer.
5. Carry out tests and experiment to discover the best time to send
Have a go at discovering the best day and time to send out your email campaigns. Although for years it’s been stated that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best, current research suggests that the highest click-through rates were from campaigns that were sent out over the weekend. The research also found that Tuesdays had the highest unsubscribe rate, which seems to reveal if customers get multiple e-mails on one day they get disappointed and unsubscribe.
The ideal thing to do is to explore sending out campaigns over different days and at various times. However you might want to A/B test to send out the exact same campaign to half your list at 2 different times.
Improve your customers, optimise your subject lines and bring out tests. You’ll quickly see an improvement – let us know how you get on by tweeting us at @full_circlem.