Following on from our series of articles about getting better engagement with your email marketing. Today we are going to look at one of the earliest and possibly most important stages of this email marketing journey; reads
Without a good level of reads in place, you can’t move on to the stage of making your email marketing appealing enough for those reads to convert into clicks.
There are a few tried and tested principles to have in place and techniques to try in order to really maximise your reads.
Really, the task of getting more reads can be split into two parts; getting your emails into inboxes and then standing out in the inbox. So, each of the points that we are going to discuss will be focused on these two points.
Qualify the recipient’s email address
Your emails will get much better read rates if they are sent to the correct person. It’s a worthwhile exercise to contact everybody on your list on a regular basis and enquire if the email address that you have on file is the best address to reach the company decision-maker or principal contact.
So many campaigns fail to convert into reads because the email was sent to a generic address such as contact@ – or the person’s email address that you have on file has left the company.
Personalisation
People are much more inclined to read an email if it’s addressed to them by name, it’s a very simple but very effective way to boost your reads massively. Make sure that your email contains the person’s name in the ‘dear’ section and/or the subject header line.
Nobody likes to feel that they are part of a huge marketing campaign and that the sender has very little knowledge of them.
As well as personalising your email by addressing it to the person, you should always personalise by also sending from yourself, don’t send from marketing@ – send from bob@ or claire@ for example. Also, sign off your email from yourself (as you would when writing a letter).
Your email campaigns should always be addressed to a person and from a person. This is a surefire way to boost your email marketing reads and interactions
Use A/B testing
A/B testing is the perfect way to take the guesswork out of your email marketing. No matter how well we think we know our target audience, or how confident we are in our product, A/B testing will always tell us something that we didn’t know.
With the ability to ‘try’ different variants to small sections of our database, we can then use this knowledge to boost the read rates with the main body of your email database.
Use emojis
In order to get your recipient to read your email, the first obstacle that you need to bridge is how to get them to see it. All of us nowadays are receiving an ever-increasing volume of emails every single day.
It’s so easy not to read an email purely because we missed it in the inbox. So, it’s really important to stand out!, a great way t address this problem is with the use of emojis.
When used in the subject header line of your email, they really can make your message stand out in a sea of new emails. Whilst they may be considered a little cheesy but used sparingly and tastefully they really do achieve the goal of making your email stand out.
Spam score your mailer
Following on from the last point, the initial objective is to get people to see your email. One of the main reasons why campaigns fail to convert into reads is because it ends up going into junk – meaning your recipient never see’s it.
It’s well worth spending a bit of time making sure that your email is as inbox friendly as possible – good delivery put’s you on course to good reads. One of the most common reasons that emails go into spam is because of spam phrases in the body text and/or subject header line.
Any decent email marketing software will give you the ability to scan your email text for spam phrases. Fixing any spam phrase issues will make a huge difference with your inbox placement.
Use custom preview text
When you send an email, your recipient’s mail filter will grab the first few lines of text and show it in the preview pane.
Often, viewers will decide if they want to read your email skim reading what they can see in the preview pane. The problem is often that the text that appears first, may not be your first choice. Often it can be information such as an unsubscribe option, which isn’t really the ideal choice.
This is why it’s a really good idea to make sure that your first few lines of text will work well as preview text. Modern email marketing software will let you add your own custom preview text.
Use an opt-in statement
Sometimes, people just don’t remember opting in to receive your emails, this can mean that they may just delete your email without reading it. People are much more inclined to read an email if they are expecting to receive it.
This is where an opt-in statement can really help. If you add a small line of text at the very top of your mailer, reminding people of why they are receiving your email then this can stop them from deleting your email without reading it.
Segment your data
One of the most important factors in getting great engagement is looking at how people interact with your sends and splitting them into groups based on similarities in their behaviour. This is known as segmenting your data, this really helps to boost your reads as you are really ensuring the right type of message is sent at the right time to the right people.
Use your name@ as the send-from address
Following on from the earlier point on making sure that your email is personalised to the recipient, it’s equally important to ensure that your email is sent from your name@, not a generic mailbox address such as marketing@ or info@.
Earlier on, we discussed how people like to see that the email they are receiving is from a person, not a faceless department. There is another reason why it’s important to use your own name though, this is inbox placement.
Lots of spam filters penalise senders using generic send from mailboxes such as marketing@, using a generic can make all the difference in whether your email is delivered to the inbox or the junk filter.
