5 tips to increase Email Open rates

Email marketing campaigns are crucial to any marketing strategy and are one of the most effective and affordable ways to market their brand. In a nutshell Email marketing helps boost the companies ROI. Marketing professionals are constantly seeking alternative ways to improve customer engagement, improve email open and response rates and ultimately prevent emails from being “moved to the trash”. The question is “How do you do this?” There are thousands of email marketing campaigns being received all over the world just as you are reading this. It’s a competitive space so you need to ensure that your email marketing campaigns stand out and prevent your customers from "unsubscribing".

Finding the perfect time

What is the best time to send an email? In the evening - when people are winding down? Or in the morning - in transit to work? There is no single best time and day to send an email - it depends on your audience. Schedule your emails to deliver during times when subscribers actively check their inbox.Understanding the demographics of your audience is the most important ingredient to your campaigns success. If you are targeting the techno savvy crowd - you should probably ignore the fact of not sending emails at night as they really are the “night owl” generation. The main reason you want to know what the perfect time is to achieve a higher open rate and a higher click through rate to get more traffic to your website, right? MailChimp and Campaign Monitor have an analytics dashboard which shows you a detailed report on your open rate to help you optimise your campaigns. 

Catchy and to the point 

It’s so easy to get carried away and before you know it - there are streams of content to read through. When it comes to email marketing campaigns - people need to see the message quick and act almost immediately. Avoid using common spam words that may trigger an emails junk mail filter. The last thing you want is for all your hard work to end up in the spam folder.Keep it short and simple and start off with the “crux” of the message in the beginning and then build up your message eg: If you are offering coupons mention this at the beginning of the email rather than at the end. Avoid ambiguity and be clear why your subscribers should click your Call To Action. 

Personalise automated email campaigns 

Personalise your email marketing campaigns - your audience are humans and not robots,that extra personal touch makes a difference. Personalisation is the future of marketing. Based on research by Experian in 2013,it was found that personalised emails not only increase the interaction with your audience but have resulted in a 29% higher open rate and a 41% higher click through rate. Setting up an automated email campaign is the ultimate solution - which can create a series of auto response emails based on specific actions your subscribers took whilst visiting your site and completing your online sign up form. This automation will allow your emails to be customised which will send your response rates through the roof. There are various platforms such as Hubspot which allows you to market to prospective and current customers depending on the actions they take. When users complete sign up forms - without thinking it they are segmenting themselves within a specified target audience,which in return allows them to receive content that they are interested in which further increases the open rates and conversion rates of the email marketing campaign.

Split Testing (A/B Testing)

Optimising and testing your emails is essential - it's simple - if you don't test - you wouldn't be aware of what you need to do to improve in order to fully optimise the campaigns. Split testing gives you the ability to send different versions of the same email to a small sample of your customer database. Are you not sure how your audience will react to your subject line that contains the word “free”? You can test it. The response of your audience will be monitored and the results will be analysed and created into a detailed report. From this report you can ascertain what works and what doesn't,and ultimately achieve a higher open and click through rate. It could be as simple as changing the colour of a button or as complex as a complete redesign of the message. 

Proofread

Email marketing campaigns with spelling errors and poor grammar can cause subscribers to delete the email before they have even opened it. Ensure that you proofread your content until it's perfect. Perfect spelling and grammar is vital as this is what a search engine uses to analyse when categorising and prioritising websites when it measures the relevancy of content,as well as ranking organic search results. Poor content quality results in lower rank positioning - reducing traffic flow and ultimately preventing customers from finding your product or service. In 2005 Mizuho Securities Co.,a division of a large national bank in Japan, attempted to sell shares of a recruiting company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Instead of offering single shares for 610,000 yen a piece, a typing error led to the sale of 610,000 shares for 1 yen a piece. the company lost $340 million in one day!

Stay in the Inbox and out of the "trash"!