Your business email subscribers are your potential customers who will generate more sales and revenue for you than the sales you will generate from social media and paid ads.
With a successful email marketing campaign, you will generate more than $40 on every $1 that you spent.
If you can come up with great content for your email marketing campaign and send it directly to the mail box of your email subscribers.
You will get great results and earn a massive return on investment (ROI), but the problem now is that the average open rate of emails was barely more than 23%.
It looks like a big percentage but from a marketer point of view, it is not high.
Most businesses have not more than 10,000 subscribers.
If you have 10,000 email subscribers and your email open rate is not more than 23% at the count of your 10,000 subscribers that means that not more than 2,300 subscribers are the ones seeing your emails.
That is a really small number compare to the possible results you are supposed to be seeing.
As an experienced SEO professional, I have been able to increase my clients email open rates to an average of 40% across multiple industries, and today.
I want to share few of the strategies I used to increase email open rates.
Effective Strategies To Increase Your business Email Open Rate
1) Feel Free to Ask a Question
With over 900 million users, Gmail is the most used email service provider.
To protect users from spam, it has a unique feature of dividing emails between, Primary, social, and promotional inbox folders.
Most businesses find it difficult to send messages that will land in the primary inbox of your email subscribers.
I frequently ask my email subscribers questions in order for me to send email that will be delivered to their gmail primary inbox, and persuade them to reply to some of my email messages.
Receiving response from your email subscribers signals to Google that the recipient welcomes your mail.
This will give your email a better chance of getting into their primary inbox, which will lead to an increase in the open rates of your emails.
Even if your potential customers did not reply your email, asking them questions will communicate to them that you are interested in knowing how to serve them better.
Most businesses don’t care to ask their potential customers questions, meanwhile doing this will help build trust between you and your customers.
2) Write Out At Least Five Headlines
Before you send any mail message to your subscribers you need to write as many headlines as you can write so that you can pick the best one among them.
If you are new to copywriting you might find it difficult to create 5 to 7 samples of different email headlines.
You need to take your time, because your headline samples must be meaningfully different to pick the best from.
Let me give you an example; if your first headline write up is talking about benefit, you need to rethink about the benefits you are offering in your content and come up with another headline which can focus on another angle, like “expressing the benefit.”
3) Build Anticipation for Your Emails
This is one the most important things you need to do if you really want to drastically increase your email open rate. Anticipation is a powerful marketing force.
If your business has a new unique product, you can create anticipation around it and make them wait for it while you increase their desire.
A lot of email marketers run anticipation-building email campaigns that are designed to increase your email open rate.
Although this strategy is effective in increasing your email open rate; But you can simply hint your subscribers about your upcoming emails.
Sending regular emails that your subscribers are aware of will increase your message open rate.
Next time you send message to your subscribers, make sure you end your message with a promise that you will offer them some form of value in your next email.
4) You need to identify the Right Frequency for Your Subscribers.
Any successful marketing strategy starts with a goal.
You need to have a business goal before you implement your marketing strategy.
If your email marketing goal is for the increase of your website traffic, sending one email message to your subscribers will increase your website traffic.
Meanwhile, if your goal is to increase your email open rates, it will be a bad ideal to send message to your subscribers frequently.
There is an ideal rate of consumption that your audience needed when it comes to your content.
They might legitimately want you to send content to them every day. Or, they might be interested in hearing from you one a week, or once a month.
My audience basically responds best to one email per week.
This doesn’t mean your own audience will respond to one email per week, they might respond or may not respond.
Test and learn.
5) Your Email should be delivered at the Right Time and day.
If you are new to email marketing, you might not want believe that time and day could have an effective in your email marketing campaign, hence you will want to send email to your subscribers at any time that is convenient for you.
The truth is that, sending email messages to your audience at any time you like will have no positive effect in your email marketing campaign.
As an experience SEO Professional, I want to tell you about my two discoveries that can increase your email open rate.
Number 1
The message you sent at the right time or day will have a significant results in your email marketing efforts.
Number 2
I discovered that your email open rate increase over time because your subscribers will constantly expect you to send message at a particular time and day.
6) Don’t Send Emails with no value.
The best way you can significantly decrease your email open rate is to send many emails with no value attached to it.
Meanwhile, in many ways, the opposite is true.
The easiest way you can improve your email open rate is to send valuable emails that they will be happy to read.
I am an email subscriber of many businesses that send email message to me on a daily basis.
The emails I open the most are emails with compelling headlines.
Some of the emails I will mistakenly open it if I am in my email inbox.
There are few businesses that I prefer they send emails to me each week because the email provide me with high value content.
This value is great as it actively improves the way I do my business.
If I don’t get to read their content in a week it will feel like I am missing out on something great.
If you want to increase your email open rate, you should also try to consistently deliver high value content to your email subscribers.
7) Segment Your Email List
Segmenting your email list is one of the email marketing techniques most businesses don’t implement simply because it requires a lot of work and a bit of setup.
Yet it is very important if you want to be successful with your email marketing campaign.
If you really want your business to be successful, you will take your time to create multiple list segments and create marketing campaigns that align with each segmented list.
Doing this will significantly increase your return on investment (ROI).
Email segmenting is all about creating a content that will resonates with the interest of each of your email subscribers.
As an experienced SEO Professional I have worked with many businesses that only have one email list which gives them zero understanding of the interest of their subscribers.
You need to know why your subscribers sign up to your email list. Did they love your email marketing articles? Or did they get to know of your website when they are looking for a particular service and will they like to learn more about that service in the future?
For example, I created a new email segment list for every successful signup on my website.
Having created this segment lists, I am fully aware of how and from which web page of my website my subscribers signed up and the type of incentives they downloaded.
This will give me a better understanding of how I can target them with content they love and are interested in.
Sending them the content they want will increase my email open rates.
Most of my segmented email lists get as high as 45-60% open rates.
You might likely feel intimidated by the complicated set up process, using the right email marketing tools like Getresponse, mailchimp will make it easier for you to create segmented email lists.
Key Takeaway:
Email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy with high return on investment (ROI) if done effectively.
Start sending valuable and target messages to your email subscribers.