Five tried and tested ways of improving the effectiveness of your emails
Email can give you something special – instant, live, two-way communication from every address you deliver to. That’s right, every single one. Even if some of your emails are bouncing back (and some will) you’ve still learned something – it’s likely those addresses are dead and you need to update your database. If you are getting 20% opens and only 22% reads then you know something about your email isn’t connecting with your readers. If it was, they would be reopening the email to re-read it, so you would be getting a much higher percentage of ‘reads’ to ‘opens’.
With that kind of in-depth information you can begin to mould your campaigns and target your messages. Improve your response rates and follow up on click throughs. In essence, learn from your mistakes and find out what works for you.
To start you on the right track. Here are 5 tried and tested ways of improving the effectiveness of your emails.
1. Keep your subject lines short and to the point. Longer than 40 characters and they’ll be cut off by many email clients. Don’t use words like OFFER or FREE or exclamation marks for emphasis!!! You’ll be relegated to the spam folder.
2. Keep it simple stupid. Don’t make your emails too long or try to cram in too much. You’ve got a second or so to grab your readers attention so keep it concise. If you’re targeting your readers well, this should be easy.
3. Let your readers know what to do next. Put a clear call to action on your email. A link to your website or your telephone number, big and bold.
4. Make it time limited. Putting a deadline on your email has been proven to increase response rates. Make it clear to your recipients that if they snooze they loose!
5. Time it right. Don’t send your email at 10’o’clock on a Monday morning when everyone is manic. It’s going to get deleted. Timing is everything so choose a time of day when your recipient will be more receptive.
Pay close attention to just these five rules and I guarantee you will improve your response rates. Good luck and remember the power of email marketing - customer knowledge!