Email marketing has changed the way a business promotes their products and services. During this uniquely challenging time for businesses, utilizing and growing your email prospect list matters more than ever. However, in order to maximize the power of your email list, you must create emails worth opening that in turn will increase your email open rates to help make your upcoming campaigns a success. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the best ways to make your emails enticing and boost your open rate in the process.
The Importance of Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to connect with your customers and potential customers. In a fast-paced digital world, emails allow you to directly connect with your ideal audience. The average person spends 2.5 hrs per weekday checking their personal emails at work. This goes to show that email plays a significantly important role in our daily lives. Email marketing is also more effective when it’s personalized, tailored to driving a specific action or goal, and relevant to customer interests.
4 Easy Ways to Improve Email Open Rates
There are many reasons to use email marketing, but most are irrelevant unless you focus your efforts to create emails that will actually be opened and read. The ultimate goal of a reader is to act on your call-to-action (CTA). Below are four easy ways to improve your email open rates.
1. Recognize the Value in Regular Data Hygiene
One of the best ways to improve email open rates is to make sure your subscribers are interested in what you have to offer. It’s important to stay in contact with everyone on your email list, but what happens when someone’s needs change, they are no longer interested or have changed their email address?
It's essential to keep your list fresh and full of highly interested and engaged subscribers—those are the people who are most likely to open your emails, read what you have to say, and convert to customers or clients.
To make this happen you need to periodically remove any inactive, disengaged subscribers from your email list. Before you delete their contact information from your list, send a follow-up email campaign to see if they are still interested in your products and services. Use subject lines like “Are you still there?” or other personalized questions to get their attention. You can also try to incentivize your current list by having them fill out a survey to get feedback on how you can improve your business (offer a prize or gift card to get people paying attention!)
Exact Data makes it easy to take a proactive approach to data hygiene and transform pieces of information (like an email or phone number) into a complete customer profile so you can better understand your customers. Use data enrichment to refresh your database by adding missing or incomplete data, merging duplicate records, and removing outdated information.
2. Personalize Your Emails
Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates. Consumers are more likely to delete emails that feel generic and like they were sent to thousands of people instead of meant just for you. So how do you fix this problem? Write your emails as if they were going to one specific person. Focus on topics that your ideal customers are interested in, and speak their language. This means that you have to know your customers to make this effective. You have to understand their problems, challenges, goals, and values.
Another great strategy is to write like you’re emailing a friend. Instead of feeling bland, inauthentic, or salesy, appeal to your email subscribers and encourage them to not only open but also look forward to opening your emails by writing to them like they’re a long-time friend. 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone, so make it count! From the moment someone sees your email they should be intrigued and feel like it’s specifically meant for them. Research also shows that on average emails with less than 160 characters have significantly higher open rates.
3. Avoid the Spam Filters
Spam filters are often the cause of low open rates. There are few proactive steps you can take to stop your emails from dropping right into a spam folder, doomed to be forgotten and deleted.
- Regularly practice proper data hygiene
- Use a verified domain with security
- Use a reliable email service with a good reputation.
- Encourage subscribers to respond to emails by asking questions
- Ask your subscribers to add your email address to their contact list
- Avoid adding too many links, emojis, and images
- Avoid “spammy” words as well as using ALL CAPS
- Provide Valuable Content In Every Single Email
4. Provide Valuable Content In Every Single Email
If you provide lackluster, sales-y emails that feel stale or inauthentic time and time again, chances are you will eventually see a dip in your open rate. The content you provide in every single email should be relevant to your target audience. When people are excited about your content, they’ll look forward to seeing your emails pop into their inbox. Instead of deleting it without ever opening it up, they’ll click on it feeling eager to see what you have to share with them today.
Make your content valuable by adding resources and free content to subscribers. Provide special promotions or offers for your email list, and let them know it’s exclusively for them. Add deep, relevant, and personalized information that will actually help your customers solve a problem or fulfill a need in their lives. Don’t just send emails to send emails. Your emails should be a huge part of your marketing strategy, so use it like a conversation. What’s the topic today? Why should they care? How will you make this worth their time to read?
The more valuable your emails feel, the more your subscribers will love hearing from you and continue to open your emails in the long run. This pays off for sales, too: consumers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers.
Email marketing is incredibly powerful no matter what type of business you run. Focus on these four areas to drastically improve your open rates for future email campaigns. When you’re learning how to optimize email open rates, remember to continue focusing on building your list. Exact Data is an excellent source of targeted email lists, as well a great resource to clean up your existing email list. We look forward to helping you grow your business with email marketing.
