Description: Email marketing is still counted amongst a priority digital marketing practice. Despite the rise of social media, email continues to hold its grounds in terms of onboarding prospects and leads. We look at some ways to boost open rate in an email marketing campaign.
Email marketing
Digital marketers continue to rely on email marketing to meet their goals. In addition to social media, email marketing represents one of the few ways to directly interact with prospects and leads.
The challenge in email marketing lies in inviting prospects to open the email in the first place. A normal person receives a number of emails each day, a number of them promotional in nature. Subliminally trained to ignore ads, most people ignore such emails. Herein is the challenge for digital marketers, which is to write genuine emails which inform users about useful information.
This article goes through some tips which digital marketers should use to increase open rate and boost an email marketing campaign.
Do check: Boost Your Website Traffic Through Email Marketing
Subject is King
The role the subject line plays in a prospect opening an email cannot be understated. A good, personalized, and engaging subject line can increase the open rate multi-fold and in turn boost lead generation.
The content of a subject line depends on the purpose of the email marketing campaign. The idea is to make a reader curious enough to open the email. Anything too blank or obvious is most likely to be left unread.
The key here is to make a prospect see the benefit in opening the email. A reader should ideally feel that there is an incentive in opening the email. The nature of the incentive can vary. Some might open the email in the expectation of getting some information. Others might open for some amusement value. The challenge is to make the incentive seem apparent.
Using relevant emojis in the subject is also not a bad idea; however, this is purely subjective. A subject line with emojis might not suit the brand perception of some companies while fitting perfectly with others.
A subject line should ideally be short and not longer than fifty characters.
Do check: Practicing Inbound Marketing with an Email Marketing Campaign
Get an idea about your leads
Before sending hundreds and thousands of emails, digital marketers should segment their leads into different categories. The same email content may not be suitable for all the people in a given set of target customers.
For instance, a mobile company sending out emails to prospects should ideally have separate strategies to tackle young, middle-aged, and old leads. Each of these demographics has a different set of needs and should not be subject to the same email marketing campaign.
Analyzing the leads is followed by creating the right content for the email marketing push. Content creators should work with digital marketers to come up with the right message to push the lead further towards becoming a customer.
Opt-ins and CTAs are a good option to further filter out probable customers from a set of leads. They are a good indicator of whether an email marketing effort is working to its full potential.
Do check: Why You Should ‘Embrace’ Those Who Unsubscribe From Your Email List
Improve Sender Score
A sender score is calculated based upon the response to emails sent by a company previously. If the sender score is low, the email may be sent to spam directly.
After all the effort of improving the subject line and writing an audience-specific email copy, being sent to the spam is excruciating. Thus, digital marketers have to work constantly to improve their respective domain’s sender score. A good way to do so is by sending quality content which people are more likely to open.
Following Up
This is a trick many digital marketers do not follow while running an email marketing campaign. Following up with leads who do not respond is a good practice and establishes a great deal of credibility for the brand.
In a time when the typical customers appreciate a more personalized approach from companies, following up on cold emails is a practice every digital marketer should incorporate in their campaign.
In Conclusion
Getting a higher open rate is not an easy task and requires discipline from digital marketers. Email marketing will remain a solid channel for promotion as long as digital marketers continue to work on making email content engaging and useful.
About the Author – Gaurav Heera is a well-known content strategist and digital marketing entrepreneur. He currently heads operations at DelhiCourses.in, a place ranked #1 consistently for its digital marketing course in Delhi. The institute also offers courses in other fields such as cyber security, business analytics, and cloudcomputing
