Get Those Emails Opened – 4 Powerful Email Marketing Tips

By Karen Cioffi

Whether you’re an author, freelance writer, or other, email marketing should be an essential part of your marketing plan. Part of the elements of sending emails is to know your open and click rates.

In marketing research conducted by MailChimp, the average email opens were under 20 percent. Knowing this information is important, so you can determine whether you’re:

a. Below average
b. Average
c. above average
d. a super email marketer

Well, let me backtrack just a moment. After you have an email list going and you’re sending out regular emails to your subscribers, you need to keep tabs on the number of Opens and Clicks. You can find this information through your email service provider; the service should provide reports.

Why is keeping track of your Opens and Clicks so important?

The answer: Email marketing takes time and effort . . . you don’t want to waste either.

In the simplest terms, the Open and Click rates are the only way to know if your email marketing efforts are paying off. If you have 500, 1000, 10,000 or more subscribers and only 10 percent of your emails are being opened, you’re losing a lot of your mailing list’s potential. The same holds true of your click rate.

If your subscribers aren’t opening your emails and aren’t clicking on your links, you won’t be selling much.

So, it’s easy to see that tracking those numbers is important, but since the Open rate is more important than the Click rate (if they don’t open your emails, they certainly won’t be clicking on anything), let’s go over how you can improve your Open rates.

4 Must-use Tips to Get Higher Open Rates

1. The title.

This is probably the number one Open determinant. If the title (subject line) of your email is engaging, offers to provide something your list needs, or has some other motivating factor, your Open rate will increase.

Effective titles include:

•    Secrets to success (Secret Steps to Building a Successful Information Product Line)
•    Tips (5 Critical Tips to Building an Information Product Line)
•    How to (How to Build Your Own Information Product Line)
•    Questions (Do You Want to Build Your Own Information Product Line?)

Effective titles should also be keyword effective. Using Adwords.google.com, I found that the keyword “information product” has 165,000 global searches and 60,500 local searches. This is valuable information. I know this is a keyword people are searching for.

2. Avoid ‘spammy keywords in the title.
While you do want to use effective keywords in your title you don’t want to use:

•    ‘Spammy’ keywords (#1, Free, Amazing, Earn, Guaranteed, Congratulations)
•    All CAPS
•    Excessive punctuation.

Remember keep it honest, simple, and to the point.

3. Skip the uninformative titles.

It seems there are more of these types of email subject lines lately, but they’re really not effective. These are titles that might say:

•    You must open now
•    Important – Read this now
•    Do you think this works?
•    You won’t want to miss this

People are too busy and have too much in their inboxes to play a guessing game of what the actual content will be about.

I quickly delete these types of titles.

4. The content of your email (or the link) must be relevant to the title.

As with everything in marketing, you need to be focused. Your title must be a foreshadowing of what the content will provide - it must be relevant to the information in your email.

There you have it – four tips to increasing your email Open rate.

After you develop a relationship with your subscribers through regular and helpful emails that follow the four tips above, your subscribers will trust that you are offering helpful information and be more inclined to ‘Open’ the email.

Try these tips today.



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What is Your Email’s Lifespan and What's the Best Day to Send

Email marketing is a must. It’s the only way to develop a relationship with your audience. It’s like visiting each one of your subscribers daily, once a week, or monthly. You visit however many times you and your subscribers feel is right.

This marketing strategy builds trust.

Now, although you may be sending your emails faithfully, are they being opened?

If not, that relationship becomes that of an acquaintance. You don’t really have the opportunity to build that trust. There’s no personal connection, all because you’re not getting to visit.

The importance of getting your email opened within 24 hours is critical.

According to a study by GetResponse.com (1):

23.8% of emails are opened within the first hour of delivery
After 24 hours, the chance of an email being opened is less than 1%

So, your email’s lifespan is short – it’s fleeting - barely one day.

Knowing this, it’s essential to know the best days and times to send your emails so they have the best chance of seeing the light of day. This should be the focus of your email marketing strategy.

What Hours Work Best

According to Campaign Monitor (2), 53% of emails were opened during work hours, 9AM to 5PM. The peak hours seem to be 9AM to 4PM, with a drop around 1PM (lunchtime).

Thinking about it, I can see that most employees would open their emails during work hours. Most people have too much to do after work to stop and get online after working all day.

Side note: some businesses are creating open floor plans for employees to discourage internet browsing and emailing during work hours.

One important and interesting note: Mobile devices seem to have the opposite relationship. Emails on the iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices are opened on off-work time – going to and from work, lunch hours, breaks, and so on.

Going back to the GetResponse analysis, 4-5PM saw the most email renderings. What I could gather is ‘renderings’ means ‘seen,’ whether glanced at or fully opened.

What Days Work Best

According to most statistics, as of last year, most emails were sent on Wednesday. Saturday saw the least emails sent.

However, in October 2014, GetResponse analyzed over 300 million customers’ emails and found “Tuesday won for best open rates, while Fridays got the highest click-through rate.”

The theory for Friday getting the highest CTR is possibly Friday emails also get read over the weekend.

Is your head spinning yet?

Test the Waters

Okay, it’s easy to see that email marketing needs to be tested. Aside from the fact that these statistics are from last year, every subscriber list is different. This means you need to find the days and times that work best for you.

Maybe you’re marketing to stay-at-home moms. The workday results won’t cut it with this audience. Or, maybe your list is retirees. Or, maybe, maybe, maybe.

As with everything else is marketing, strategies and what works is always changing and always need to be tested for your particular audience.

I’ve changed my email sends to Tuesday. Wednesdays were okay, but I want to see if changing the day will make a difference. After Tuesday, I’ll check out Saturday or Sunday.

Another note: From just about all the analysis going on, Mondays don’t work well because it’s the beginning of the work week and on Fridays people are thinking about the weekend.

Oh, well. That’s why testing is the only way to go.

References:

(1) http://blog.getresponse.com/whats-best-time-day-send-email.html
(2) https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/4207/best-time-to-send-email-campaigns-by-device

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