Email marketing works exceptionally well for reaching your customers through their inbox. It represents a direct, more personal mode of contact through a channel that people seek out everyday.
It’s easy, right? You have the email address, and you send off your message. But getting the email into inboxes, intriguing people enough to open it, and then convincing them to take action is more difficult than you might think. Even businesses with solid open rates often experience a plateau. Here are a few strategies for keeping your deliverability high, boost open rates, and protect your sender’s reputation along the way.
1. Use an Email Checker to Protect Your Domain
Your sender’s domain is your most important asset when sending and receiving emails. Without a functional domain and email service provider, you simply cannot launch a successful email campaign.
The status of your domain is based on your sender reputation. In order to ensure your reputation remains safe and secure, use an email checker to verify the email addresses on your list. The more emails that land in spam, the more at risk your sender rep is. Additionally, an email checker benefits inbox rates and your overall deliverability, which is both better for your campaign and another factor in calculating the quality of your sender domain.
2. Make Your Email Sign-Up Clear and Informative
Get a head start right from the beginning by making sure that when people sign up for your emails they know what they’re getting. People who actively opt-in to receiving emails are much more likely to open emails when they arrive.
The more your email campaign matches the expectations people had when they signed up, the more likely they are to open your emails. Let people know what the likely content will be and why they will be valuable to open.
3. Ensure Recipients Can Easily Identify You
People are more likely to open emails from names that they recognize, so make sure your email username and address clearly identify you. Email addresses must be unique out of necessity, but sometimes the closest you can get to your business name is ‘MyBusiness28924@ email.com’. Check your email software to see if you can change your display name while keeping that email address.
Better yet, purchase your own domain, and you can create cleaner, recognizable email usernames. As an added bonus, your own domain looks more professional. Just be sure to stick to the point above and use a service to verify the emails on your list and protect your domain.
4. Use Intriguing Subject Lines
The subject line is perhaps the most important component of your entire email campaign. You want it to be interesting, intriguing, and relevant enough to entice the recipient to open the email. Make your subject line a conversation starter.
Here are some prompts to think about for better subject lines:
- Make it a question: Worded well, the recipient will want to open the email for the answer.
- Tell the recipient to do something: Direct the reader to take action, such as “Learn About X For…” or “Improve Your X By …”
- Tease the recipient: Use language that generates curiosity and anticipation. “Big Changes Are Coming To..” or “Get the Inside Scoop…”
- Make announcements: Use the subject line like you would use a clickable article title. “MyBusiness Expands to New Territory” or “Ten Ways MyBusiness Succeeded This Year”
5. Test and Analyze to Improve Open Rates
Try testing if the time of day is a factor in your open rates. Break up your list into equal-sized segments, and send them out at various points of the day. You might find differences in your open rates depending on the time of day. Experiment this way over the course of a several weeks to acquire enough data for comparison.
If you are tracking your open rates, then you are likely using some sort of analytics software that will have additional data you can review. You can track what links in your emails are being clicked, how often, and tailor future content to exploit the interest.
