Increase your email list<\/strong><\/a> the \u2018white hat\u2019 way by providing users with valuable content and engaging content.<\/div>\n9. Use email authentication<\/h3>\n
Email authentication<\/strong><\/a> is a way to convince email spam filters that you are allowed to send emails from your domain (using a third-party provider). It\u2019s a bit of technical stuff but successfully implementing email authentication will definitely help in improving your open rates.<\/p>\n
Most known email marketing providers (i.e. MailChimp, Aweber) offer this service to their clients and even if it comes at an extra cost, it is certainly something you need to consider.<\/p>\n
Basically what email authentication does is to ensure that all emails are sent out on behalf of a known domain and it\u2019s not spam emails that the sender is not known.<\/p>\n
10. Segment your list<\/h3>\n
A very effective technique to increase your email open rates is to use segmentation.<\/p>\n
Segmentation allows you to break down a big list into smaller lists based on the preferences of your email subscribers, past activity or website actions.<\/p>\n
This makes your emails more valuable to users and this increases email and click-through rates.<\/p>\n
For example, in my email list, I have people that are interested in SEO topics only, people that are interested in digital marketing topics and people with different levels of knowledge.<\/p>\n
If I send to beginners an article that is more suited to advanced users, it has no value to them and this will reduce open rates.<\/p>\n
One of the ways to segment your list is to survey your users<\/strong><\/a>. As soon as they subscribe to your list, you can send them an email asking them what kind of content they prefer to receive from you and add them to the appropriate list based on their selection.<\/p>\n
This process can easily be automated by your email marketing software and it will help you understand your audience better.<\/p>\n
Another way to segment your list (without asking your users), is to send different kinds of emails and then use the email campaign statistics to add users to the different sub-lists based on their actions.<\/p>\n
For example, people that open my SEO related emails will go to the \u2018SEO list\u2019, people that open email marketing emails go to the \u2018email marketing\u2019 list and so on.<\/p>\n
11. Re-send emails to non-openers<\/h3>\n
Another technique that can instantly improve your email open rates is to re-send your email campaigns to non-openers.<\/p>\n
This is how it works:<\/p>\n
\n
You send your email campaign.<\/li>\n
In two days, create a new segment and add all subscribers that were sent the campaign but did not open it.<\/li>\n
Re-send the campaign to them with a slightly different subject line.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
It\u2019s a very simple technique and easy to implement (most email marketing tools have this ready for you) and can double your open rates.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re already sending out a lot of emails (for example 3 per week), you don\u2019t have to do this for all your email campaigns but only for the important ones.<\/p>\n
12. Make it easy to unsubscribe from your list<\/h3>\n
How is this related to open rates?<\/p>\n
When someone wants to stop receiving messages from you, they usually unsubscribe from your list and everything is good.<\/p>\n
If the unsubscribe button is nowhere to be found in your email (or too small to see it), they will most probably mark your email as spam so that they don\u2019t get it in their inbox.<\/p>\n
If a lot of people do the same thing, your open rates will gradually decrease.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t be offended if someone wants to unsubscribe from your list, it happens all the time so play it safe and give them the opportunity to do so easily.<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, you need active people on your list that want to get your emails and not people who don\u2019t want to hear from you.<\/p>\n
13. Send a great welcome email<\/h3>\n
When people subscribe to your list it\u2019s important to send them a great welcome email.<\/p>\n
Welcome emails tend to have a high open-rate and if your subscribers like your welcome email, it is more likely to open your other emails as well.<\/p>\n
A few tips to optimize your welcome emails.<\/p>\n
A\/B test different subject lines<\/strong> – The subject line is very important for all emails, including the welcome email. In your subject line make sure that you tell them exactly what\u2019s in the email.<\/p>\n
If they have subscribed to download a free ebook from you, make sure that in the subject line it says something like \u2018Download your free eBook from Reliablesoft\u2019 instead of \u2018Welcome to Reliablesoft\u2019.<\/p>\n
I found that having direct and specific messages in the subject line works better than general messages. You can do A\/B testing to find out what is working best for your list but don\u2019t ignore this step.<\/p>\n
You should aim at an open rate for your welcome email at around 60%. If your percentage is less than that, keep testing different subject lines until you reach close to that number.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Set the proper expectations <\/strong>– Within the email content, you can thank your users for joining your community and briefly explain to them what they should expect from you.<\/p>\n
Keep the emails to the point without giving them more information than they really need and don\u2019t make promises you won\u2019t keep.<\/p>\n
14. Keep your list active<\/h3>\n
Don\u2019t forget that your subscribers have voluntarily entered your list because they want to receive emails from you.<\/p>\n
Sending them too many emails and spamming their inbox is bad but not sending them any emails at all is not good either.<\/p>\n
You should take advantage of the momentum and engage with your audience as soon as they subscribe to your list.<\/p>\n
Email automation campaigns can help a lot with this but the bottom line is that you need to keep your email list active.<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t send them emails for a long time and suddenly you decide to start sending email campaigns, it won\u2019t have the same results.<\/p>\n
People that regularly engage with your emails are more likely to purchase a product you are selling and become part of your active community.<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, this is exactly the purpose of email marketing and the reason you are allocating time, money and effort to build an email list.<\/p>\n
15. Optimize the email preview snippet<\/h3>\n
All major email clients show a message preview next to the subject line. This is an additional line of text that needs to be treated as a second subject line.<\/p>\n
Some email marketing tools allow you to specify what to show in the preview. If this is not the case with your provider then make sure that you add a hidden section on top of your emails as described here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n
Use the message preview text to give additional information to users and \u201cencourage\u201d them to open your emails. Here is an example:<\/p>\n
$\"email$ Optimize email message preview text.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n
Key Learnings<\/h2>\n
The first challenge of email marketing is to get people to subscribe to your list. Once you have this process optimized and you get a constant number of new email subscribers per day, the next challenge is to get people to open and interact with your emails.<\/p>\n
The email subject line is the number one factor. If your subject line is interesting more people will open your emails. You can use 20% as your guide.<\/p>\n
If your email open rate is around that number then it\u2019s ok, if not then you need to do A\/B testing to find out what kind of messages can increase your email open rates.<\/p>\n
Besides the subject line, there are other factors that can impact the deliverability of your messages<\/strong><\/a>. If many emails end up in the spam folder, then your open rate will be low and you risk damaging the reputation of your domain.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t forget that what is preferable to have a small list of active subscribers than a big list of inactive subscribers.<\/p>\n
What other tips can you share for improving email open rates? Let me know in the comments below<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The money is in the email list, right? I am sure that you\u2019ve read this before but in order to take advantage of your list, you first need to improve your email open rates. According to recent studies, the average email open rate for all industries is 21.3%. This means that 8 out of 10 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[]},"categories":[493],"tags":[460,612],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17179"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30201,"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179\/revisions\/30201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}