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With all the talk about design, segmentation, analytics etc, most advice on email marketing runs the risk of leaving you blind-sighted to fundamentals. Those that truly get people to want to read your email. Or any marketing artefact for that matter. Those rooted – like all marketing best practices – in human behaviour.
So, if the question you’re trying is to answer is “how do I get my audience to open my email?”, take a step back. Instead ask, “what does / would my audience want from me?”. Or “from a business like mine?”.
Here’s a list of some of the things they do – in no necessary order of priority.
1. Recognize you quickly – without having to put in additional effort
2. Understand – equally fast – what your value proposition is
3. Be rewarded for time spent on your content – leave feeling smarter, entertained or trusted
Your mission, then, is to address these needs. You can leverage the power of email marketing and its tools to do so. How? Exactly what we’re on about in this blog.
IN THIS BLOG
1. Why bother about Open Rate, anyway?
2. Up-to-date Back-end
a. Qualified Subscriber List
b. Segmented Subscriber List
c. Anti-SPAM Approach
d. Timing & Frequency
3. Relevant & Efficient Front-end
a. Optimized Envelope
b. Efficient Design & Layout
c. Quality Content
4. In Conclusion
1. Why bother about Open Rate, anyway?
Of the many good people who have subscribed to your email updates, only a few will actually open it. Even fewer will open it regularly. Some emails, in fact will bounce and stay undelivered. The percentage of how many of your DELIVERED mails get opened is your Email Open Rate.
Open Rate and Click Through Rate (CTR), which is the number of people who click on the link in your email, combine to form the most important metrics used to measure success of an email campaign. Give this read from mailchimp a glance to know more about email marketing metrics and benchmarks.
Open rate is a top of the funnel metric. If no one opens your email, other metrics like CTR will definitely suffer.
2. Up-to-date Backend
The backend system of your email marketing campaign is like the foundation of a building. A passer-by doesn’t see it, yet forms a quiet opinion about it. At the most basic, the backend support of your email campaign requires you to work on 4 components – quantity and quality of your subscriber list, navigating through SPAM filters, and the timing and frequency of your email.
A strong, up-to-date backend is the secret sauce to directing consistent, relevant, and high value email content to the right consumer at the right time. 
a. Qualified Subscriber List
Amongst the first decisions you make about your subscriber list is about how you want them to confirm their interest in your content. Through a single opt-in or a double opt-in. Former is when the user fills a subscription form and gets added to your list. In the latter, you follow up the form with a confirmation link in the email. A link they must click before they’re added to your list.
Single opt-in obviously gets you more leads but the double opt-in gets you more qualified ones. Those who shared their interest through your subscription form, and in the interim you sent the confirmation link, did NOT lose that interest.
In the battle of quantity vs quality – choose quality. Successful Digital Marketing is not about numbers. It is about ensuring you or your clients get good return on those numbers.
No matter how good you are, you will have a few people lose interest in or value from your offerings. It’s a good idea to periodically remove inactive subscribers – those that haven’t shown any engagement for 6-months or more. A few ways to gently nudge your sleeping beauties:
– Check if they want to update their contact details
– Take their feedback on what’s working and what’s not – incentivise it. Throw in a goodie – gated content, limited period offer etc
– Craft that one win-back email campaign/last ditch effort
b. Segmented Subscriber List
Fact check – Segmentation of subscriber list means classifying your customer database into smaller groups and adapting contents to their profile, interests, and implied needs.
How does it impact your email open rate?
– Ensures your emails are relevant to the groups you’re writing to. For example, if running a campaign to promote a Life Coaching business, your email marketing content to entrepreneurs should be VERY different from that you send to corporate professionals
– Helps prioritize groups that have historically given you a higher ROI – that, my friends, is what Digital Marketing strategy is about
– Helps send emails in accordance with the funnel stage your subscriber is in
How can you segment?
At the most basic level, you can start with geographic, demographic, and psychographic classification. The foundational exercise of spending a couple of days interacting with your targeted consumers and crafting that buyer persona/s will go a long way in making this quick and dirty.
c. Anti-SPAM Approach
For that email to be opened, it needs to move past the SPAM gate keepers. Doing a few basic checks and sticking to some proven best practices are an absolute must.
– Ensure your recipients have actually opted-in to receiving your emails; double opt-in safeguards you against SPAM filters
– Place a tiny section in the email that educates subscribers about how to whitelist your emails, add you to their address book, and if needed – how to opt-out
– Send emails from a safe IP address that has NEVER been used to send spams
– Use verified domains and keep the code clean
– steer clear of “salesy” language and excessive use of words like rich, wealthy, cash, mortgage, casino, win, act now, click now, limited time, open now etc
– avoid too many URLs, ALL CAPS, exclamations!!!!!!!
d. Timing & Frequency
The best day and time to trigger emails for a student who is in classes from 9am to 3pm is very different from the one you should choose when targeting a middle-aged working professional. So, what’s the best way of getting the timing right? Get clear about what a day in the life of your buyer persona looks like. When do they wake up? What do their commute time looks like? How late do they stay up at night?
Here’s a fun fact for you – Campaign Monitor in its study revealed that emails sent on Friday saw the highest open rate and its close cousin Saturday was the worst.
A question that plagues marketers and small businesses about email marketing is about the right frequency of emailing customers. Too many may make you look like a spammer and too few may disengage. To know what’s best for your campaign, take note of these…
– Make a schedule to ensure have a steady, consistent and productive campaign
– Ensure it allows you to send at least one to two emails per week so you don’t run the risk of losing sales opportunities
– Unless you have very strong content that is delivering high value, do not send emails every day or alternate day – that too will lead to lower engagement levels
A simple tweak to test what subject line works or what timing is great for your users could significantly increase your open rate. That’s why A/B diagnostic tool must be a part of your email marketing strategy.
2. Relevant & Efficient Front-end
a. Optimized Envelope
The most important part of the front-end that gets your subscriber to click on that email is your envelope. A 2019 Litmus study revealed that the 3 components of your email envelope combine to convince your subscriber to open that email and give it a gander.
Read more about optimizing envelope content here. In the meantime, here are a few musts you shouldn’t lose sight of.
– Use merge tags to personalize the “To:” field of your campaign
– Keep your subject lines short but powerful – employ personalization
– Consider including numbers, whenever you can realistically – they draw attention
– Don’t build unwanted hype by using deceptive subject lines or spammy pre-header texts
– Consider including Call the Action in your pre-header
– Do A/B testing of your shortlisted subject lines & pre headers
b. Efficient Design & Layout
Efficient email design means your readers spend less time in sifting through your email to find what’s relevant to them.
A clean, uncluttered layout is crucial in ensuring that the reader feels ready to open the email right now and does not resort to that proverbial “later” part of the day.
Read more about efficient design here. Meanwhile, follow these basics:
– Generally speaking – keep your emails short
– Design keeping your mobile users in mind – vertical, therefore, is preferable
– Use white space to afford easy understanding and synthesis of information
– Follow visual hierarchy – large images and fonts carry important information
– Make your CTA prominent and quick to understand
c. Quality Content
Eventually, whether or not your subscribers open your emails regularly is a result of how much value they derive out of your content – each time. What is this effort giving them in return?
– Do you enrich their lives with tools and tips they could deploy every day?
We recommend that at least 50% of the mails you send in a campaign include a clear, easy-to-use tool or tactic. For example in the email campaigns for a Life Coach, we give productivity hacks and performance optimizing tips that readers can implement immediately.
– Do you invest time in creative story-telling, narrative, design techniques that carry an element of interest – leaving them entertained?
This may sometimes mean beginning with a startling fact or a hard hitting question or just some interesting, funny punch line.
– Do you trust their intelligence? And therefore offer greater, deeper insights into your world? Or does your content move in circles about the same beaten to death idea that they probably lost interest in about 5 years ago?
While it’s important to repeat information that’s directly relevant to your value proposition, too much repetition is boring, predictable, and ready to be blocked. Weave in novelty through new trains of thoughts. For example campaigns of one of our ecommerce clients that sells hand-made clay artefacts range from informing readers about local artisans and their lives, to specifics about certain deign and its historical relevance, user stories, impact on environment etc.
When crafting that copy, it helps imagining you’re writing to one person only and not thinking all the thousands you’re aiming to address. In fact sometimes it may also help to imagine yourself and write about what else you would like to read and know. This mental shift allows you to write more personalized subject line and message as well as bring novelty.
In Conclusion
First up, invest in healthy email practices so that you never find yourself in that dreadful, old SPAM bucket. Once you’ve crossed over to the inbox, your biggest bet in ensuring the readers open your email in the few second break they’re taking from work is the right envelope content and your reputation. Optimize your envelop by ensuring your Subject and Pre-headers are relevant, powerful, and super easy to understand.
The reputation of your email lies in its copy. Good copy adds value to the subscriber. Good copy is why your subscriber will open your mail – again and again.
Have you tried any of these practices in your email campaigns? Tell us how that worked out for you. Or let us in on something else you did to improve on this metric.
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