How To Get Your Emails Opened And Clicked

How to get more opens and click through rates.

Sending emails to your subscribers is only half the battle; you should also ensure the recipients are opening and acting on your mail. This can be trickier than you might think. Open rates vary between industries and even demographics, yet there are common elements and tactics that can usually help you improve your statistics.

So what tactics do we recommend for improving your open rates and click-throughs?

1. Personalisation

How do you get your audience to care about your message? Make the message about them with personalisation. This can be done with a simple insertion of the recipient’s name; though that isn’t always enough.

Sometimes you have to try something more advanced, such as sending campaigns that are segmented based on subscriber behaviour or demographics. The more specific the information to the reader, the greater the chance they will take action.

2. Pre-header Text

Sometimes a subject line isn’t enough for your audience to act; they need more information. While information within the email is probably sufficient, some mail browsers aren’t going to display this. Instead, you need to use pre-header texts.

These should be about 100 characters long and give detailed information about what is included in the email including a strong call-to-action.

3. Use Powerful Call-To-Actions

A call to action is the tool you use to ensure your audience takes further action. However, too many small brands don’t use the best call-to-actions when encouraging readers to carry on the purchasing journey. For instance, many use ‘click here’ which is overused.

A call-to-action should have three parts to it:

  • Urgency (so the user doesn’t wait for fear of missing out).
  • Definition of the action to take (so they know what to do).
  • Value (so they know what their reward is going to be).

Without these elements, call-to-actions are pointless.

4. Mobile Friendly

More than half of all emails are now opened on a mobile device. If your email isn’t optimised for mobile devices, which includes phones and tablets, then you can lose out as when the customer gets to a desktop, they’ve received other emails which they want to deal with.

Some of the major issues with emails on mobiles is the image size. If it is too big then it will consume time and data limit on mobile devices. Limit images to the proper size, no more than 600 pixels wide, and minimise their memory usage.

5. Send Your Emails At The Right Time

Different audiences will read and respond to emails at different times. If you don’t send emails at the right time, then you will find that less emails will be read. There are numerous studies into when the best time to send emails is; however, they rarely agree.

The only way to ensure you are sending your emails at the best time for your audience is to test. This should be done via split testing, where two times are tested and the result analysed. This should be done several times with the best time from the previous test pitted against a new time.

The test should also be done with regards to day. Some brands find that weekends are better than weekdays.

6. Be Concise

Try to limit your emails so they are only about 150-200 words long. This gives the audience enough data to make an informed decision but isn’t too long that they get bored while reading the message.

If your content needs more information, try linking it to a landing page where users can read more.

Conclusion

Your emails are the best marketing platform you have. They consistently have the best return on investment and you can monitor direct results.

However, that doesn’t mean your campaigns will automatically be great. You will need to optimise your campaigns to ensure audiences are opening and responding to your campaigns. Use the tips above to help guide you to improve your email campaigns and get the best results.

Do you have any email marketing tips? Do you optimise your emails for mobiles?

Let us know in the comments below.

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