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Improving Your
Email Open Rate
I have some exciting news for
you. Email Marketing is alive and well!
Email marketing is a great opportunity for you to communicate
with your customers and to promote your business. It is very
important that you take the time to set your goals and to know
the market before you develop your email marketing campaign.
This will ensure it is successful.
While you want your email marketing strategy to be unique and
creative you need to keep the wants and needs of the customer
in mind. You can choose to develop your email marketing strategy
on your own, using software, or by hiring a consultant. Getting your
email to the consumer is only half of the battle.
You will have to work hard to make it very appealing and get the
response you expect.
I've been getting a lot of emails from
Unlimited Wealth Secrets readers
asking me to write a detailed articles on Email Marketing.
So today I continue to share some
views, killer tips and techniques
I personally use. When I first implemented them, my
email response
more than doubled.
Hope you use them and enjoy an increase in your
online income.
Best wishes,
Ike Johnson
Whatever email open rates you get in your email marketing
software or service reports, you obviously want to improve.
Since the open rate is a measure of success, improving open
rates is simply about doing better email marketing.
And that's a giant subject.
So here's a list of the main things to consider to get
those stats up. Take the keywords and plump them into your
favorite search engine (or use the box at the bottom of the
page) to learn more about how you can make them work for your
own email marketing efforts.
I've also listed many good articles on this topic in the
recommended reading section at the end of this article.
Long-term efforts
1. Improve overall strategy and approach
Adopting best practices in all aspects of your email
marketing produces sustainable, significant improvements in
all success measures. A commitment to professional
permission-based email marketing practice is your best
long-term hope of raising open rates.
Where to start?
I suggest reading Creed
for Email Marketing over at Squidoo for an overview and
pointers to the people and places that give out the
information and tools you need.
To summarize: if you send useful, relevant, engaging emails
to the right set of people at the right time, then open rates
will rise. Easy, eh?
2. Improve deliverability
Facetious I know. But the more emails get delivered, the
better chance you have of people actually looking at them. No
changes to the actual email itself will help if they never
land in the right inbox.
Keywords: email deliverability
3. Refine sign-up procedures and targeting
Reader interest in your emails depends on how targeted your
audience are. The better you target, the more likely you are
to plunk your email in front of someone who is interested in
the contents (i.e. higher open rates).
Targeting starts with where and how you gather email
addresses.
You need to ensure that you set expectations correctly, so
people sign up because they want what you send out. And you
need to ensure they really do want those emails. Only add
addresses to your list when the owners explicitly requested
you do so. Respect that permission.
Keywords: permission email
Targeting also comes into play when you send out your
emails. It means matching content to reader. Which is where it
helps to split up your list into smaller groups sharing
particular characteristics, letting you fine tune your
messages to their needs: segmentation.
Keywords: database marketing, email list segmentation
4. Get people to add you to their address list
In your welcome
message or at the top of each email you send out, you can
invite people to add your "from" address to their
personal address list.
As well as helping you bypass spam filters set up by that
individual, it often means their email client or web-based
email service will now display images that were previously
blocked in your emails. Which means the tracking image gets
requested and opens show up where before they were missed.
Keywords: whitelisting
Short-term efforts
1. Subject lines and other headers
The subject line is probably the single most important
in-email element that drives open rates. Bad subject lines,
poor open rates. Good subject lines, good open rates.
When you're exploring the potential of subject lines, don't
forget the other elements that appear in the headers of an
email and get displayed in a reader's inbox. The
"from" line in particular needs your attention.
Keywords: subject line(s), from line(s), email headers
2. Timing
Open rates will vary for the same email sent on different
days or at different times of the day.
There are a lot of folk who will claim various days and
times are best. Like our open rate benchmarking problems,
these recommendations are based on averages and not on the
specific characteristics of your list and situation.
Use your intuition to gauge when people are most likely to
have the time and interest to view your email and go from
there. Then test alternatives and see how they work out.
Keywords: best day to send
3. Frequency
Send too much email and people lose interest. Send too
little email...and people lose interest.
What's the right amount of email to send out? It depends on
your situation. And don't forget that responses to your
marketing emails are affected by all the email your company or
business sends out to recipients (transactional emails,
personal emails, account updates, welcome messages etc.)
As a rule of thumb, it's hard to sustain open rates when
you send more than two marketing emails a week to a recipient.
Ditto at once a month or less. Not impossible -- just hard --
as you're fighting email fatigue and forgetfulness on top of
all the usual problems.
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