Are your business emails neglected? Here are eight tips that will improve your open rate and help your message reach a wider audience.
Vision6 is an e-messaging solution which helps marketers deliver effective emails, SMS, social and lifecycle marketing campaigns. During the last six months of 2012, the company analysed data from over 359 million messages distributed via 114,000 sends by Australian based companies. Here’s what they learned:
1. Name and subject line
Use a ‘from name’ that the recipients will know and trust such as your company name. Also write a compelling subject line that entices recipients to open your email. You could ask a question or state a benefit to make your subject line interesting.
2. Target emails to smaller segments
If you have a large email list, try and send targeted emails to smaller segments so that the readers can receive highly relevant email content. Findings show that email sends to smaller recipient lists continue to out perform those sent to larger lists.
3. Relevant content
In order to increase your Click Through Rates (CTR), you must make sure your content is highly relevant and interesting. Include a strong call-to-action at the top of your email. Be clear on what action you want people to take from your email. Use headlines, colour, text formatting and images to enable readers to quickly scan through your email.
4. valuable content
You must make sure to provide valuable content which readers want to learn more about. Links are also an effective way to shorten your emails.
To ensure that your content, information and offers are relevant to your audience use conditional content to control what subscribers see based on their profile. For example, only show women’s fashion specials to female subscribers.
5. Click Through Rates (CTRs)
Use CTRs to determine what your audience is most interested in. This information is useful to improving subject lines and consequently your open rates. For example if the majority of your recipients click on competitions and not articles maybe your subject line should change from “10 ways to avoid hipsters” to “WIN great prizes and learn how to avoid hipsters”.
6. Bounces
Permanent bounces should be updated with a new email address or removed from your email list. If your bounce rate is 6 percent or higher, you should cleanse your data. Or you could contact them via other means to update contact details. Trades and Services have the lowest bounce rate (1.65 percent). Whereas the advertising/media/entertainment industry have the worst performing bounce rate (7.96 percent).
7. Habits and routines
Know your audience and their habits and routines. It was found that during weekdays, open rates are even. On the other hand, open rates decrease slightly during the weekends. To test your audience, send the same email to different parts of your database on different days.
8. Mobile
The use of mobile devices have increased dramatically with 33.05 percent of emails being opened using these devices. Test your emails across mobile platforms by designing your emails with mobile screen sizes in mind.
For more information, you can read the full report here.
