Email marketing is one of the best performing forms of lead generation, but we need to get smarter at it. That’s because email subscribers get about 140 emails a day, so yours need to stand out to avoid getting sent to the spam folder.
So to ensure that your email reaches your readers’ inboxes, follow these 5 tips and increase your click-through rates too.
1. Keep your subject lines short
If you want your subscribers to notice your email out of all the others, you need to write a great subject line. Some of the best performing email subject lines have just a few words, and are no longer than 40 characters. That means you have to make sure you use punchy and vivid language to get to the point while still creating excitement.
Another way to encourage opens is to use common email terms like ‘RE:’, ‘Fwd:’ or ‘FW:’, as it gives the impression that the email is from a real person. To give that effect, you should also use a real person’s name as the sender.
2. Segment your campaign
Segmentation is where you sort your subscriber list into groups so you send relevant, personalised emails to your subscribers. According to Hubspot, personalised emails increase qualified leads by a huge 451%.
So group your subscribers together by product or any other relevant objective, and see how much of a difference it makes.
3. Make it more difficult to subscribe
Sounds wrong, doesn’t it? But there’s good reason to require double opt-in for your mailing lists. This means subscribers need to confirm their email before they’re subscribed.
Yes, you’ll get fewer people signed up, but it means that they want to hear from you. So you should see higher click rates if your list is double opt-in.
4. Remove subscribers with low engagement
If you’ve not cleaned your subscriber list in a while, you’ve probably got lots of old subscribers that rarely engage with your emails, if at all. If you keep sending them emails when they haven’t opened your last few, you could end up with high unsubscribe rates and complaints. People get frustrated when they keep receiving content they’re not interested in any longer.
5. Carry out tests and experiment to find the best time to send
Have a go at finding the best day and time to send out your email campaigns. Although for years it’s been said that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best, recent research found that the highest click-through rates were from campaigns that were sent over the weekend. The research also found that Tuesdays had the highest unsubscribe rate, which seems to show if subscribers get multiple emails on one day they get frustrated and unsubscribe.
The best thing to do is to experiment with sending campaigns on different days and at different times. But you could also A/B test to send the exact same campaign to half your list at two different times.
Refine your subscribers, optimise your subject lines and carry out tests. You’ll soon see an improvement – let us know how you get on by tweeting @LeadsDoWork.
