Six Rules Of Email Marketing – How To Increase Your Open Rate
How do you get more opens of your emails?
The success of your email marketing campaigns is all about how many people open your emails. There are several ways to encourage this so you get more subscribers open your emails every time you send them a promotion, brand news or simple message.
Our six rules will help you get better results:
1. Long Subject Lines
Get Response studied the results from over three hundred emails. They found that those that contained more than 61 characters in the subject line got more open rates. According to the study, the highest open rates were approximately 12.38%.
Split testing can help you find the perfect length for your audience. Consider testing subject lines at 60 characters, 100 characters and 130 characters to see which gives the best results.
This tactic also increased the number of people who clicked through.
2. Preheader Text
Use your preheader text to give a brief outline of what is contained within the email. Preheaders are like an elevator pitch, so keep them relative, enticing and readable on mail clients. Some like Gmail and Yahoo will only give you preheader lengths of 100 characters, so keep it that short.
Preheaders should be changed for each email; they should never be the same as the title, and you should attempt to include a call to action.
3. Create Intrigue
If you want people to open your emails, they’ve got to want to find out more about your message. That is harder to do if you give away the whole story in the subject line and the preheader.
This technique is called the open loop. People become interested in the content without knowing exactly what it is about, so they open it to find out more. Then in the mail, you close the loop. An example of this would be:
“This is how you get more emails opened…”
See how this doesn’t actually mention what technique you are using. Therefore, it creates curiosity and compels the reader to open the email.
4. Subject Line Capitalisation
Having every word in capitals is not a good idea as it gives the impression that you are shouting at your audience, and nobody likes that. However, most businesses write subject lines with the first letter of every word as if it is part of a document title.
This is not how people write emails to each other. Instead, they may capitalise the first word but leave the rest (except nouns) as lowercase. You can mix it up by using special characters in your subject lines and by also adding the odd word in capitals (when you want to emphasise certain points).
5. Double Opt-In
Research has shown that those using double opt-in subscription methodology can increase subscriber engagement and increase open rates. It also helps to decrease spammers subscribing to your mailing list.
To help you keep audiences engaged, immediately after they sign-up, send them an email immediately and then send them a reasonable amount of further engaging mail in the days that follow. Research has shown that this increases the number of people who convert from strangers to customers within four weeks – making your email campaigns so much more effective.
6. Be Negative
Sometimes negative words can be more compelling for your audience. Using words like ‘the worst’, ‘absolutely wrong’ and ‘no fewer’ can be used to attract subscribers to open your emails.
This works because people like to feel that they can prove they are better than others – but what happens is that they realise they are making those mistakes, and then want to contact you to improve.
Conclusion
Your email marketing campaigns are important, but they are only a success if you have people open your emails. There are several techniques to get more people to open your emails, but the best strategy is to always split test your campaigns to see what works for your audience.
What is your open rate? How much higher could you go?
Let us know in the comments below.
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