Improving your email open rates can be challenging at best.
More often than not, you may find your open rates are low and your emails winding up in the SPAM folder or getting buried deep within someone’s inbox.
However, there are a few things that you can do—read on to learn more about how to increase your email open rates.
Avoid Buying Email Addresses
Purchasing an email list is a huge no-no, and nobody on that list has opted in to receive your content—and this means that you have no idea if they are the right audience for your product or services.
Follow CAN-SPAM
The “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing” or CAN-SPAM act went into effect in 2003. It contains a list of do’s and do not’s that you need to follow to comply with the law.
For example, here are a few of the bigger ones:
- Use clear “To,” “From,” and “Reply to” language that accurately identifies who you are
- Avoid selling or transferring emails to a second list
- Include a legitimate physical address in every email you send out
- Give people an easy way to unsubscribe
Email New Contacts Quickly
You need to strike while the proverbial anvil is hot whenever you receive a new email contact that opted in. Send them an email within 12-24 hours for the best chances of success. The longer you wait, the less likely they are to engage.
Don’t Send Emails from Your Company
Avoid sending emails from your company. Instead, choose a person, such as the VP or CEO, or marketing manager as the sender. The reasoning behind this is that emails from a company have a very corporate and salesy feel to them. Your open rates will skyrocket if you have a live human being send the email instead of a nameless and faceless corporation.
Tweak Your Subject Lines
Keep your email subject lines to 60 characters or less. This helps bypass some of the many spam filters, and it allows the reader to instantly get the gist of what the email has to say. Use clear and concise subject lines and avoid using spammy exclamation points.
You might want to have a thesaurus website open in another tab. It’s often very easy to take a 150-character subject line and condense it to less than 60. You should also avoid using SPAM trigger words such as:
The SPAM filters will immediately send your email to the SPAM box if they detect those words in your email subject line.
Keep the Body Content Short
Your email should serve one purpose—to get the recipient to click the CTA link and get taken to your website or landing page.
Nobody wants to sit there and read a long-winded email in an email client such as Outlook or Gmail—save it for your website.
Avoid adding too many links as well. This can cause confusion on the part of the email recipient. Too many outbound links are a huge red flag for the SPAM filters.
Optimize for Mobile Users
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Make sure the email templates you use are “responsive.” Otherwise, images and text that otherwise display normally on a desktop or laptop screen will look cut off or scrunched up on a smaller cell phone.
The CTA link buttons should be no smaller than 45-57 pixels, as this is the average size of an adult finger. If you go any smaller than that, people could have difficulty clicking on the CTA button inside your email.
Preview and Test Emails Before You Send
Countless New Bern business owners have sent out an email blast only to realize something got accidentally messed up. Avoid the temptation to click the “Send” button. Preview and test your emails to ensure that they look good on all devices, the links work, and there are no typos or wrong information.
Clean Your List Often
If you’re not actively cleaning your email list and removing bad or outdated email addresses, there’s an excellent chance your open rate will plummet, and the SPAM filters will start to take notice.
Use a 3rd Party Sender
There are many 3rd party email sending services out there that will send your email blasts using their own domain name. This is important because if you find your emails continually hitting the SPAM box, using the domain of the email sending company will prevent yours from being blacklisted.
Email Marketing Help in New Bern
The above tips will help you increase your open rates while decreasing the number of times your emails get sent directly to the SPAM folder. At AlphaGraphics of New Bern, we can help you with your existing or future marketing efforts. To learn more about how AlphaGraphics of New Bern can produce and design your next project, you may email us, request a quote, or call us at (252) 633-3199.