Email marketing is one of the most popular marketing tactics of this era.
It is free to get started and can be leveraged by any business, no matter budget, size, or niche. This is because today, virtually everyone has an email address, and most of the time, the very best way to reach customers is through their email.
But as with all marketing tactics, email marketing comes with its very own set of challenges.
Over the years, as email marketing has proven to be effective, it has become a part of more and more brands’ marketing strategies. Today, 93% of B2B marketers practice email marketing and the percentage of B2C marketers who use it is very similar.
This means that the number of emails that come to your customers’ inboxes is higher than ever.
In fact, email volume was up 18% in 2017. As a result, it means that the competition for people’s attention using email is tougher than ever. But that is not to say that it isn’t effective.
Because of the increased competition in email marketing, the open-rate of emails has steadily decreased over the years. But despite this, email marketing still proves itself to be tremendously effective, mainly because the cost of it is minimal or non-existent.
Because of all of this, one of the greatest challenges of marketers when it comes to email marketing is getting people to actually open the emails that they’re sending.
Fortunately, there are numerous approaches you can take to improve your open-rate, and that’s exactly what we’ll look at in this post. Here is how you can skyrocket your email open-rate.
1. Include the word video in your subject line
Simple as that?!
Well, marketers don’t seem to think that it is that simple, because the vast majority aren’t leveraging this, despite the fact that adding “video to your subject line” boosts your email open rate by 19%, as well as increases your email click-through rate by 65%
Of course, if you include the word video in your subject line, you need to actually live up to your promises and actually incorporate one in your email, and this is where many marketers struggle. They just don’t know how to incorporate videos into their emails the right way. The good news is that with Sendpulse, incorporating videos or other types of visual content can be done in a heartbeat.
Just drag and drop your video and you’re all set!
2. Use Artificial intelligence
Most things are easier said than done, but this point is actually the opposite.
By using Sendpulse’s service that leverages artificial intelligence, you can actually see a 50% increase in your open-rate. The best part? You don’t have to do anything. What it does is automatically determines the best delivery time for each subscriber through artificial intelligence, and thus, is able to send emails to your subscribers when they are most likely to open it.
Of course, I said that doing this was easy, and it is – for you, but it’s quite impressive what technology can do if you think about it, because doing this manually would firstly not be possible, but if it would, it would take countless and countless of hours to just send the emails. With Sendpulse automation service, however, you can create your message, and then set and forget and let it do the sending for you.
Increasing open-rate by 50% while saving time sounds like a good deal to me, don’t you think?
3. Personalization
Personalizing the subject line of your email is a small change that makes a huge difference.
Of course, if you would manually add the name of each of your recipient and send them one by one, it would be the opposite, but using Sendpulse, it takes care of that for you and allows you to send personalized emails just by clicking one button.
A study has found that personalizing your email subject lines with a name can increase open rates by 50% and lead to 58% higher click-to-open rates. Yet, despite this, 97.7% of emails sent in 2017 Q2 didn’t use personalization in their subject lines.
Just imagine the huge potential that marketers are missing out on.
And a reason that marketers neglect it is that they believe that it is simply too much work, or that they don’t know how to do it effectively. Fortunately, since you are here, you have Sendpulse at your disposal. Using it, you can place personal details or information directed towards a particular recipient. The most common information added to recipients is their name, which is not very strange considering its benefits.
The best part is that the software is not only limited to the subject line, but the service also allows you to use an unlimited number of fields to include a number of different details about your subscribers. This means that you’ll be able to personalize the email subject line as well as the email body quite extensively. This does not only contribute to making your subscribers more loyal, but including their name in the subject line can also increase the percentage of emails that get through spam filters (which further helps increase your open rate).
4. Update your list of subscribers
If you’re not actively adding new subscribers to your email list, your open-rate will continuingly decrease over time whether you like it or not.
People change email addresses, change jobs, stop using old ones, and so on. All of this contributes to a decreased email open-rate for you.
Many marketers don’t like to refresh their subscriber list because they like to have a high number of email subscribers, but the thing is, your goal of email marketing is not to have lots of email subscribers, right?
Your goal of email marketing is to stay in touch with your customers and ultimately get them to purchase more. But if you’re constantly sending out emails to people who don’t open them, or to email addresses that aren’t used anymore, will you get closer to that goal?
Nope.
This is why, every now and then, you need to update your email list to keep it fresh and up-to-date. And you do this by removing inactive subscribers.
If you don’t, you’ll eventually get very misleading statistics and it will be hard for you to properly evaluate your results.
Now, while this approach won’t increase the number of people who open your emails since you’re not adding new ones to your list, but what it will do, however, is increase the open-rate since you remove an email address that doesn’t open your emails.
You’re probably thinking: “but how do I know which subscribers are inactive and should be removed?” Fortunately, Sendpulse has answers to that. (Hey, not even myself stop getting surprised by the fact that Sendpulse seems to have answers to everything).
An inactive subscriber is considered to be someone who hasn’t engaged with any of your emails in the past 6 months or more.
If you don’t want to take the risk, it can be a good idea to send one last email to these individuals before you remove them forever.
Here’s an example of what one of those messages can look like:
(source: https://www.slideshare.net/SteliEfti/closeio-email-sales-webinar)
If you still don’t get a response or interaction after this email, then you can feel comfortable in removing that subscriber from your list.
5. Resend emails to those who haven’t opened
This is an insanely effective way to increase your emails open rate, yet despite this, it’s a tactic that isn’t very widely used.
Once you’ve sent your emails, simply use Sendpulse’s advanced analytics program to identify the people who haven’t opened your emails. The best part is that you don’t have to manually look for the people who haven’t opened your emails. In fact, SendPulse includes the ability to resend emails to subscribers that haven’t opened the email you sent to them. Doing this has found to result in a 30-80% increases in open rates.
In doing this, you can either send the same email a second time without making any changes to make it appear at the top of people’s inbox again, or, you can change the emails’ subject line, because when you do this, you will give the receiver the impression that it is a completely new email, while, in fact, the only thing that is changed is the subject line. With Sendpulse, resending emails to those who haven’t opened them yet is as easy as 123.
Conclusion
Email marketing has proven to be incredibly effective in marketing, but in order to have any effect with email, the first challenge is to get people to actually open your emails. But as more and more emails are being sent, and virtually all brands leverage email marketing in their marketing strategies, cutting through the noise is getting increasingly difficult, especially since the open-rates of emails have decreased as a result.
In order to get people to do what you want them to do, you need to first get people to open your email and get impacted by your message, and this is almost solely dependent on one simple thing: your subject line.
Yourn subject line is the firs, and essentially only thing people will see when they receive your message, and therefore, a lot of the success of your email is dependent on it.
