If your marketing emails are not getting opened, then you are wasting your time sending out emails. But how do you go about improving your open rate? Getting more people to open a marketing email takes more than a sensational subject line. To increase the number of people who are reading your marketing emails, you must work on nurturing your mailing list over time. Here are ten ways that you can get more of your subscribers to open the emails you send them.
1. Treat Your Subscribers Like People
The first step to improving your open rate is to start treating your subscribers like individuals and not a list. No one wants to see hundreds of emails with clichéd subject lines appearing in their inbox. So, think about how you would react to the emails you are sending to your subscribers. Would you open your marketing emails?
2. Build Trust in Your Brand
If your subscribers know that you only send relevant and useful information to them, they will be more likely to open your emails. Mix up your email marketing campaigns so that you provide both informative and valuable content as well as sales content. Never send an email to your subscribers that might damage your brand. It only takes one poorly worded or misleading email to make a subscriber unsubscribe.
3. Segment Your Mailing List
You will see your open rate increase if you target your emails at the relevant subsets of your mailing list. If you segment your mailing list by subscriber interests and demographics and target your emails accordingly, you could see the number of people opening your marketing emails increase by as much as 15%.
4. Get Your Timing Right
The time of day that you send your emails can have a dramatic effect on the number of people who will open your messages. The best time of day for sending marketing varies according to the target market. One way of finding the best time of day to send your emails would be to look at the peak time for visits to your website.
5. Personalize the Message
Personalize your emails by including the subscriber name in the subject line and the body of your email. Word your marketing emails in a friendly, conversational way, and make your emails sound like you want to build a relationship. Remember, you will always open an email from a friend, but you will often skip the over-hyped sales emails.
6. Offer Something of Value
Give people a reason to open your emails by telling them what is in it for them. Whether it is something for free, a significant discount just for them, or some valuable information they need to know, tempt people with something of value in your marketing emails.
7. Appeal to Your Subscribers Needs
An excellent way to grab the interest of your subscribers is to offer them a solution to a problem. Consider what issues people on your mailing list face and how your products can solve those issues. Highlight in your emails how what you re offering will improve the lives of your subscribers.
8. Use Humor
If your email subject line puts a smile on someone’s face, they will be more likely to open your message. Everyone likes to have their day brightened up, so inject a little fun into your marketing emails, and then you will see more people opening your emails and reading your content.
9. Make Every Email Count
Getting people to open your emails is only half the battle. When people do open your messages, you must make sure that they find something of value. The quality of the last email from you that a subscriber read will influence the person’s decision to open your next email.
10. Value Your Subscribers
Treat your mailing list like the valuable asset it is. Aim to build a relationship with your subscribers and build their trust over time. Building a loyal list of subscribers is much like building a community. Become a trusted friend of your subscribers, and then they will be more likely to open your emails.
Conclusion
Nurturing a mailing list takes time, so don’t expect your open rate to increase overnight. Even so, the above tips should boost the number of people who open your marketing emails. Try out some of the above ideas and track the results. When it comes to email marketing, the best way to improve your success rate is often through trial and error.
