11 Email Marketing Strategies to Improve Response Rates

Email marketing is still an incredibly efficient way to reach out to prospective clients, drive results, and grow your business.

Effective internal communication is a fundamental part of successful businesses, with emails making up a massive part of this process. With close to 300 billion emails sent every day around the world, however, it is important to use them wisely to not get lost in the sea of communication.

We have compiled 11 effective email marketing strategies that will help you make the most of this valuable medium of communication. 

These email marketing strategies will ensure your content pierces through the avalanche of emails being sent and received every second. 

1. Get Organized

Organizing your email lists may seem boring, but it is one of the most effective ways of improving the response rates of your cold emails. 

Sort prospective clients in your outbound emails into lists that are formulated on specific criteria. 

For Example: If you are emailing out to clients in HR, their contact details should be separated from possible clients in the Digital Marketing industry. 

This can also be divided down further – remember the more meticulous you are in your process, the higher your response rates. If you are contacting within the same company, for example, contact lists should be segmented based on job roles within that company. An individual that is head of marketing will be much more interested in relevant marketing messages than if you were contacting a member in the IT department. 

This is considered to be one of the best email marketing strategies as segmenting your lists will help you ditch mass outbound emails and also protect you from being blacklisted. 

2. Understand The Psychology Of Your Prospect

Get to know your future client. Take the time to go through their content. Read their blog and browse their socials. Record what sort of language they use, how they conduct themselves, and what image they are putting out into the world. 

Tools that were originally designed to help companies monitor their competitors such as SproutSocial, are great ways to gather data and construct profiles on a client you are trying to reach out to.

Another quick way to gain insight into your prospect is by looking inward. What would you appreciate hearing if you were in their shoes? Who do you trust most? 

For most of us, the people who we know personally have a much greater chance of getting through to us with their comments and ideas. Our closest friends will often know what to say to cheer us up, or what sort of humor will make us laugh the hardest.

This means that your email must be personalized. Personalized emails are one of the effective email marketing strategies. Templates that have just been copied and pasted 100’s of times will be discovered within the first few lines of reading. 

Using the profile you have built in your head whilst deep diving into your client’s socials and blog content, you will now be able to write personally to your target. Include information that could only be relevant to this individual within the first few lines of copy.

3. Don’t Be Over The Top

I know it is tempting to use fancy words and complex language to sound smart, but that is not what we do not recommend as the best email marketing strategy for crafting these emails. Emails should be to the point and organized. They are a call to action. A solution to your prospects’ problems. To offer your hand in collaboration.

Showing your client why they should work with you as quickly as possible is of the utmost importance – successful collaboration in business is what drives companies to succeed, make sure that they understand how you plan to do this. 

Much like you and I, people do not have time to read through lengthy emails. So keep your emails efficient and sharp, much like how your service will be if you land the client.

One way to do this is to skip any wordy formalities and to keep your body text simple. Introduce yourself by all means, but do not give your client an entire backstory. Shorter emails also look less like spam to algorithms and therefore more likely to use these email marketing strategies to arrive in the desired inbox.

4. An Opening Line That Begs To Be Clicked On

Try to get your creative juices flowing for the opening line. It shouldn’t be too sales-centric or pushy – its primary concern is making your prospect curious about the second line. 

Take your time when formulating this opening line. It is arguably the most important part of your content. If no one ever clicks on it, the email copy inside that could have been written by Shakespeare will fall on deaf ears. 

Here are 25 email opening lines that will inspire you to come up with your own killer intro. 

Another thing to keep in mind while making your best email marketing strategies is how your opening line will appear to readers. Preview your email on mobile, as the majority of your client’s first interaction with your email will be on these devices. As a rule of thumb, typically: 

• Apple Mail (140 characters)
• Gmail (110 characters)
• AOL (75 characters) 
• Outlook (55 characters) 

5. Avoid Blacklists

Taking your time to create killer openers and an engaging copy will also help you avoid being blacklisted.

We get that with all these email marketing strategies you will be raring to go and will want to send out as many emails to prospects as possible, but it is important to remain organized and in control.

We recommend sending no more than 20 emails a day at the beginning of your cold email pitching process, especially if you have just set up your email account. Subscribe to newsletters and start active threads with friends or family in your inbox to reduce the risk of your account being flagged for spam. 

If you rush into this process, you run the risk of being blacklisted, which means the engaging emails you have worked so hard on will end up in the trash. 

6. Keep It Short And Sweet

Nobody likes writing tens of thousands of words a day. It’s boring and it takes hours out of the time you could be making money working for clients.

If you belong to this group of people, we have good news for you. Writing persuasive emails shouldn’t take you hours. In fact, data suggests that emails with word counts between 50-125 words had a response rate of 50% and emails with 200 words had the highest click-through rates. 

We recommend keeping your cold email under 200 words and using a simple writing technique called “the rule of 3” or “triples”.

Groupings of 3 occur naturally all around us. They occur in popular stories, stirring movies, and powerful speeches. For one reason or another, the rule of 3 has been entrenched in the human psyche. Use this in your writing.

Introduce yourself and what you do.

Personalize the email by referring to something only relevant to the prospect. Move on to how you will solve their problem in:

• Solution 1 
• Solution 2
• Solution 3

Or break down your plan simply in:

• Step one
• Step two
• Step three

This will make the content of your email easier to scan and process, making your mission much more clear. 

7. Learn From The Best

Don’t be afraid to take a leaf out of the winning playbook.

Find proven templates and utilize them. There are many digital marketing companies in Gurgaon out there that offer excellent cold email pitch templates for their readers. Take some time to read through their copy. 

Compare these templates with emails you are currently sending and be honest with where yours might be able to be improved. Note the layout and structure of the templates.

Do they use the rule of 3? 

Is there content short and sweet, or do they provide more information than you? 

It is also important to recognize that pitching within different industries will require different tactics. Some industries may require that your emails are much more in-depth, while others may value humor and intelligent word-play.

8. Include All Contact Information in Your Emails

This is incredibly simple but highly important. 

Give your prospective multiple avenues to reach you and make it as clear and as easy as possible for them to do so. 

Let’s say you have pitched to someone high up in a company and your opening line was enthralling enough to make them click through to your email.

Your copy is then engaging and you are making a lot of sense to them – your solution is one in which they want to invest. If you have not provided adequate contact information you may risk losing a client who was about to knock on your door asking for your services.

Always include complete contact info: your name, business address, website address, alternate email, and phone number. This will make your prospective client feel more inclined to contact you knowing that they can do so in many ways.

9. Be Direct, But Leave Space For Them To Manoeuvre

When closing your email, don’t corner your prospect. If they are busy, the last thing they will appreciate is a cold email demanding they get on a call with them at end of the weekend.

Instead, be direct enough to let them know you are serious about your services, but open enough to allow them to dictate the meeting time. Try closing your emails more like this: 

…If you have time this week, I’d love to get on a quick call and discuss this further?

OR

…if this is something you are interested to hear more about you can contact me at XYZ at a time convenient to you.

As mentioned before in the previous email marketing strategies, an excellent thing to offer is multiple avenues of contact. Let the client know you are happy to speak over mobile or will take the time out to show them how you plan to help their business via screen sharing with them. 

10. Test And Optimize Your Emails

Setting up A/B testing is one of the best email marketing strategies you can do to improve your response rates.

Test variations of opening lines, word count, and call to actions and take note of which campaigns are more successful. To record this data more accurately you can use a free email marketing tool that will show you which email campaigns are being opened and acted on.

Do not underestimate the impact of constructive trial and error. Playing around with subject lines and editing your content can lead to enormous changes in open rates. 

11. Follow Up

If you spent ages honing the perfect email and didn’t receive a response, do not be disheartened. 

Sending a follow-up email is often all that is needed to remind your client that they need your services and you are serious about providing it to them.

Make sure to change the content of the email as well as the subject line, given that the circumstances of your email are now different. Do not resend the same pitch. This is a sure-fire way of getting blacklisted and marked for spam. 

If you have noticed in the data recorded by your email marketing application that they have opened your email and read through your content, sending a personalized follow-up email a few days later will be well received. 

We recommend scheduling your follow up 3-4 days after your cold pitch has been read. 

You can also send what is known as a “closing email” or “breakup email”. This can be a powerful way to improve response rates. Try something like this: 

Hello X,

Looks like I may have caught you at a busy time! No worries, I understand how running a business can get sometimes.

If you change your mind and would like more information on the services I will provide your company, feel free to reach out whenever convenient to you. 

Speak then,

John 

In Summary

Authentically reaching out to business owners to provide your services will always be well received, you just have to be willing to have some setbacks and get a lot of rejections. 

Applying these 11 cold email marketing strategies will provide a massive improvement for your response rates. 

Remember to take your time constructing these emails and to always make them personal! Quality does trump quantity in this game. 

For those of you wanting to solidify this knowledge on your way to conversion greatness, read through our 7 best practices to help generate leads through email marketing here.

Originally Published at: Technians