▷ Email Marketing: 5 tips to increase open and click rates

When used well, email marketing is a powerful communication channel for engaging your audience and increasing sales. This marketing technique allows you to maintain relationships with your target audience, move prospects up the product ladder, or follow up with customers. But in order for it to help you achieve your goals, the email must first be opened and then move your contacts to action. So how do you stand out and attract the interest of a recipient who receives twenty or so other emails? Here are 5 tips to get there.

1- Optimize the email subject

The first purpose of the object is toconvince the reader to open your emailmake them want to know more. No direct sales. Everything happens in a few seconds, with just a few characters to capture the attention and arouse the interest of the recipient.

Here’s how to optimize your objects:

Be concise and impactful

The recipient’s attention span is limited. Get to the point and avoid sentences that are too long to avoid inboxes cutting them off. Make sure to put your keywords at the beginning of the subject line. Run a test preview before scheduling the email and see how it looks.

Arouse emotions

To do this, rely on the cognitive biases of urgency or scarcity. These are powerful psychological levers to increase the opens of your emails.

Mention a promise

It must be related to your target audience’s problems and what they want to achieve. However, be careful with implausible promises, which risk scaring the recipient instead of obtaining the desired effect.

Customize the email subject

You can mention the recipient’s name to make him feel special. This technique allows you to humanize your email. Most email marketing tools like Klaviyo, ActivCampaign, or Mailchimp allow this customization option.

Catch the recipient’s eye

You can adopt these copywriting techniques to grab your readers’ attention:

Engage the prospect or customer by asking a direct question;

Arouse curiosity by referring to something new or current events;

Use a magic number, like 3 or 5.

You can also use an emoji linked to your message, to stand out from other emails.

2- Focus on high-impact content

This is the fundamental element for writing emails that convert you know your target audience by heart. Address your ideal customer or customer persona/avatar in your email, not in your subscriber list. To convert and engage customers, adopt a personal tone and speak their language. Added to this are these additional suggestions:

The content must be related to the subject of the email;
Get straight to the point, use short sentences and provide value in your email. The content must be relevant and directly concern the recipient and their problems. Depending on your marketing goals, you can share a helpful tip, an irresistible promotion, an inspiring story;
Adopt the 80%-20% strategy to build a strong relationship with your subscribers. 80% value, 20% promotional content;
Use storytelling to create a connection between you and readers;
Include a clear CTA (Call To Action) or call to action in every email. It can entice people to read a book, watch a video on YouTube, or take advantage of an offer.

You can also use artificial intelligence to write effective emails.

3- Segment and optimize your subscriber list

By segmenting your contact list, you can write personalized messages that will have more impact on them. In fact, the approach is different for subscribers, depending on their position in the customer journey. With segmentation, offer each subscriber what they need at the right time.

Here are the segmentation criteria you can consider to personalize your content and increase open and click rates:

Subscriber stage in the purchasing journey

Cold prospect: just signed up and discovered your brand;
Lukewarm leads: they are interested in your products or services and have already interacted with your content;
Interesting prospect: has shown strong interest and is now ready to buy;
Customer.

Purchase history

Analyzing your subscribers’ purchase history allows you to:

offer complementary products to customers who have recently made a purchase,
relaunch inactive customers by sending them special offers,
present new features that are of interest to subscribers.

Online behavior

Thanks to this segmentation you will be able to, for example:

Target abandoned carts and relaunch them,
Subscriber engagement rate is another criteria to consider when personalizing email communication.

The email marketing process, including writing, subscriber segmentation, scheduling, or email automation, can be complicated. The best way to obtain the desired results is to rely on marketing professionals such as the Annecy web agency. Such service providers take care of your entire email marketing strategy, depending on the goals you want to achieve.

User feedback is very helpful in improving your hub. Encourage your team to provide feedback and make changes accordingly.
This might involve reorganizing categories, improving the search function, or adding new features. Training is also very important.

4- Improve the deliverability of your emails

Deliverability is the ability of your emails to reach recipients’ inboxes, not spam. For good deliverability, here are the good rules to follow:

Avoid “spam” words.

These are words perceived as promotional, which risk automatically including your email among unwanted content. This includes words like free, promotion, or special offer.

Take care of your subscriber list

When registering you can opt for double opt-in to ensure that the subscriber is actually interested. Also, keep your contact list clean. Remove invalid or inactive addresses:

contacts exhibiting frequent soft bounces or frequently reported as hard bounces,
contacts who never open your emails.

Authenticate your emails

Authentication proves that your email address exists and is real. This is why it is essential to implement the SPF, DKIM and DMARC protocols. These protocols authenticate your emails and reassure email providers of their origin. The authentication process varies depending on the tool used.

Good to know: To get further results, you can delegate your email research to a specialized service provider like Quality Call.

5- Analyze and monitor the indicators

It’s essential to monitor your email marketing campaign numbers and adjust your strategy accordingly. Continuously analyze these indicators:

Open rates. They tell you the most effective email subjects and headers that led to a high open rate. At the same time, you can identify the ones that worked the least, and improve them for your next emails;
Click-through rates. They give you an idea of the value of your content and the effectiveness of your call to action;
Bounce rateswhich measure the percentage of emails that could not be delivered. A high number could be a sign of a delivery problem or a low-quality contact list.

You can test your emails with A/B testing. This allows you to send two versions of the same email to a small portion of your subscribers, to see which works best.