Boost Your Open Rates, Click-Throughs, and Shares by Using These 13 Email Marketing Tips

When you’ve got something to say, you want to make sure your customers are actually listening. Not just because they happen to be listening, but because they actually want to be listening to you. Ensure that your emails are properly arriving in inboxes and that your recipients are opening, clicking-through and even sharing the information by following these marketing tips.

Listen to the rules of CAN-SPAM

If you aren’t following these rules, there’s a good chance your emails aren’t even getting through to your recipients properly. Ensure you’re CAN-SPAM compliant by following these rules:

• Include a valid physical postal address in every email sent
• Provide recipients with an obvious opt-out, should they want it
• Clearly state with accuracy who the messages are “From,” “To,” and who recipients may “Reply to”
• Don’t sell or transfer email addresses to another list

Get more details about what you need to do in order to avoid violating the CAN-SPAM rules by visiting the FTC’s website.

Send out a welcome email within 24 hours

Set up an automated workflow to welcome new customers and subscribers with a welcoming email. If you’re not already doing this, you could be missing out on a big opportunity to capitalize on your reader’s interest within 24 hours after signing up. It’s also a great way to open the doors of communication and begin establishing a positive relationship from the start. Create and send out great email campaigns using the affordable email marketing service IContact. They’ll provide you with ideas for your email campaigns, design basics and more. Each of their tools and resources is designed with your success in mind, making IContact a popular choice for results-oriented email marketing.

Use a real person as the sender

It’s been shown that sending an email from a real person helps to increase your open rates, as opposed to sending it from a company name. Personal names give off a greater feeling of trust with a person, and less of a feeling that they are being spammed or marketed to. Go even further and personalize the email address it’s being sent from, rather than just sending from a generic ‘marketing@company.com’ email address.

Determine your preview text

What a recipient sees in their inbox before they even open the email will have a huge impact on whether or not that email gets read or trashed. Many email apps and services will show the first few lines of text in an email, so keep this in mind when you’re writing those emails. You can actually set this text to appear as you want it, which is generally 50 characters or less. Using an email service can help you to create impactful preview text that helps boost your open rates. A service such as AWeber or Paper Fellows is the perfect tool for composing and sending out targeted emails to your database.

Put emphasis on creating subject lines

You want to create those subject lines that your recipients can’t help but want to click on. Even if you’ve got a great message inside, if they aren’t enticed enough by the subject line to click and open, your message will simply go unread. Spammy words and phrases should be avoided, but specific promotional details are a great way to get readers to want to learn more by opening the email and clicking through.

Short and to the point is best

Inboxes are generally stuffed to the brim, so your email has got to get straight to the point if you want it to have a good chance at getting read. Even if someone is truly interested in what you’ve got to say, they may not have the time to carefully read everything in your message if it’s too lengthy. Conversational writing, that is writing as though you were speaking to someone, is also a much more engaging way of putting together messages that people will enjoy reading. Staying on top of the length of your message means keeping track of your word count. A simple tool like Cite It In can give you a quick and accurate count of how many words you’re using. If you want a little professional help in editing your messages, you can outsource the work to a professional editor at Boom Essays or Essayroo to ensure that any and all mistakes are caught and any awkward or unclear text is fixed.

One single, clear call-to-action per message

Don’t jumble your message by adding multiple calls-to-action throughout. Your readers will get confused as to what exactly you want them to do. Scale down the calls-to-action to just a single one per email message, with a clear and easy to find button that recipients can click on to take that action. Make your call-to-action front and center in your message, where recipients can’t miss it. When you’re trying to put together an effective and enticing call-to-action, there are a number of professional copywriters at Oxessays or Elite Assignment Help who can lend a hand. Each team member there is a vetted professional, with the expertise necessary to compose a call-to-action that works.

Make your images into links

Images are much more visually attractive than text, for the most part, and draw your eyes to them. If your image relates to the link you want readers to click on, why not just make the image into a link itself? It’s a simple way to help boost your click-through rate without adding additional text to your message. Look for help from an all-in-one email marketing service, like GetResponse, where you can have all of your email marketing, automation and landing page needs to be looked after. Plan, build and manage your interactions with your customers through your marketing automation.

Use the space above the fold wisely

The first page that loads on a screen, without having to scroll down at all is known as ‘above the fold.’ This is the most predominant and important part of a message because it’s the first thing readers will see. It can make a huge impact on whether they keep reading or not, and whether they take action and click-through. It’s important to place at least one clickable element above the fold, including a call-to-action button, text link or clickable image. This gives readers an opportunity to act immediately, without having to read further or scroll for information. Cake Mail provides you with easy and helpful email marketing tools that allow you to focus on the message you’re sending, while letting them worry about the design details. Their professionally designed templates will place the most important items in their ideal spots, so you don’t have to worry about figuring it out.

Include social sharing buttons

The easier your information is to share, the more it will be shared. So, make it impossibly easy for recipients to share what you’ve sent by including social sharing buttons in your messages. When more people see your message, you increase your chances of getting more click-throughs.

Use pre-made tweets to make sharing easy

Lots of people are happy to take action, but only if you make it incredibly easy, with next to no effort necessary. So, help them take the action you want by pre-writing tweets for them to use and share with their followers. They won’t even have to think about what to write in those 140 characters because it’ll all be done for them.

Don’t forget your mobile users

Mobile users have now surpassed desktop users for the percentage of emails opened. With so many messages being opened on a mobile platform, you absolutely must make your messages mobile-friendly, so they’re easy to open, view and interact with on a mobile device. This number is only going to increase, and not making your emails mobile ready only means you’re missing out on the majority of your possible readership.

Always test before sending

Before you hit ‘send,’ double-check everything in your email for accuracy, functionality and other errors that may occur. Ensure your links are all functional, spelling is perfect and the images are appearing quickly and properly. You only have one chance to send your email properly and once it’s sent, you can’t take it back. Take the time to send out a test email before you do your mass mailing to your entire database. Use resources from State of Writing or Academadvisor to ensure that all of your content is going out error-free.  Always proofread your material, then proofread again. If you aren’t able to do it yourself, you can enlist some help from a member of the professional team at Dissertation service for proofreading assistance. It’s best to have a real person look through your work because they’ll catch mistakes a computer can’t. So a service like this is your best option for help.

Get the most impact from your email messages and see that reflected in higher numbers of open rates, click-throughs, and shares. When you follow these 13 guidelines, you will begin to see a boost in your numbers almost immediately.

About the Author

Gloria Kopp is an email marketing consultant and a content manager at Australian Help. She loves sharing her marketing advice in her posts at HuffingtonPost and Academized blog. Besides, Gloria writes academic reviews at Essayroo for students and educators