Email campaigns are essential to your business. They keep people in the loop; provide valuable information on promotions, business advice, and other helpful content; and they help you stay in contact with people who aren’t ready to buy or still need a little more encouragement.
Your email campaign is only as effective as your open rate.
If people don’t see your emails, your offer might as well have never been sent. That’s why it’s critical to get your audience to open your emails. Generally that’s not too hard if you follow a few basic tips for better email marketing.
Here’s the tough part though — it’s much easier to start off with a good campaign than it is to try and recapture your audience’s attention once you’ve hammered them with terrible content. Most people don’t return. If your content is particularly underwhelming to them, they may unsubscribe or worse — send you to spam.
Getting marked as spam is bad news for your delivery rating. Too many of those designations and you look bad, really bad. So bad it will impede your ability to sell, which leads us to our first tip.
Create an Easy Opt-out
As weird as it seems to tell you to make your opt-out options prominent in your email, you want to. If someone doesn’t find value in your email any longer, an opt-out is preferable to a spam designation. Make it easy for them. You can also make it fun and creative with a humorous meme link, which may change their mind about unsubscribing.
Give Them Other Opportunities to Connect
If someone does opt out, give them other opportunities to stay connected through the opt-out page. Say you’re sorry to see them go and ask if they’d like to stay connected in a different way and offer up your social media networks. Sometimes people opt-out because they’re receiving too many emails from other sources and they’re not currently in the market for what you’re selling. That’s okay, but try your best not to lose the connection entirely. Give them communication options that work for them.
Personalize Email Content
People trying to improve open rates always talk about subject lines and senders. These are the two most important things you can control that affect your open rate. However, once email recipients have opened it, the thing that will most affect their interest in opening your next email is your content.
You want your content to be as personalized as possible. This, at the very minimum, includes a name and can also include past interactions, where you met/were introduced, purchase history, or other ways that help you establish the relationship. Most important is content they are interested in. Use the technology out there to understand their interactions with your site and previous content to get a better idea of what they are interested in. Then provide information on those topics for free without asking for anything.
When running an email campaign there are a lot of details and ways to make it more effective. Forbes has some additional tips for better emails here.
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