Email marketing remains one of the highest ROI activities you can do to grow and expand your business – Especially if you’re good at it! However, to get the most out of email marketing you need to have a respectable open rate. Below I’m going to list four different ways you can achieve just that. Continue reading and learn how to make your email marketing campaigns more successful and profitable!
1. Clean Your List – If you already have a large email list which you have been building for a while, then you may have noticed there are people on there who are unresponsive. That means they don’t open emails or click on any links. Essentially, they just ignore you. The two biggest problems with having these types of subscribers on your email list are that they increase costs (since most email service providers charge by the number of subscribers you have) and they will make your entire list less deliverable. That’s because major email inboxes (such as Gmail) will look at those who never opened and figure you don’t have anything of value to send. Depending on your industry, a good rule of thumb is to get anybody off your list who hasn’t opened an email or clicked a link in 60 to 90 days. You can either send those subscribers a small 3 or 4 email “last chance” sequence offering a special discount code to try and get them to open or click (which would re-add them to your main list), or simply just purge them completely.
2. Split Test Different Subject Lines – Once you have a clean and responsive list of people, then it’s time to start getting the responsive list to open more of your emails. The fastest and easiest way to do this is to test your subject lines. Many email service providers (such as Aweber and MailChimp) will allow you to send out a test email to 10% or 20% of your list with different email subject lines going to different people. Most of the time subject lines will only make a small difference, but sometimes they can make a drastic difference in both open rates and earnings, so it’s always worth testing!
3. Survey Your Customers – Another effective way to make sure you’re creating content that your subscribers want to read is by surveying them. Aweber has an excellent feature that allows you to create in-email surveys. With more and more people reading emails on mobile devices, it’s important to get them to take as much action within the emails as possible rather than sending them to outside websites. Try using one of these with your customers to find out what they actually want. This way you’ll be able to start writing more emails with content they want to open and read.
4. Tell Stories In Your Emails – As humans we’re naturally wired for storytelling. Centuries ago people didn’t have pens and paper handy to write things down. Therefor, traditions in history were passed down from one generation to another via stories. Anytime you start an email with a story, it immediately gets people’s attention in the way that facts alone can’t. People like to interact with stories and telling them will often make your email open rates go up.
