You’re sending marketing emails and newsletters regularly. Also, you have a few faithful subscribers who always open your emails and give you good feedback. But you wish your open rates were higher so you could convert more people. This is any email marketer’s goal. Achieving it may take some time and effort, but with the tips below, you’ll boost your email marketing results more easily.
Email marketing: why are you doing it?
First, ask yourself a question: why have you started sending marketing emails to your customers and prospects? You could have several reasons:
- you want to boost your website traffic and sales
- keeping in touch with your audience via email builds your brand
- you just enjoy writing emails and connecting with your subscribers
No matter your reason, there’s great satisfaction in seeing your open rates go up. That means your content is interesting so people engage with you. When your purpose is to increase your return on investment (ROI), this is your first goal to accomplish.
So, how do you give your engagement rates a boost? Getting more people to click on your emails isn’t that hard. Let’s get into some of the best ways to improve your results.
Use a validated email list
It’s the most important thing to cross of your list – pun intended! If you email invalid email addresses, all you can expect is for your bounce rate to increase. As an email marketer, you don’t want that. Here’s why:
- bounces are emails that never made it to the inbox or even the spam folder. They’re simply a waste – for which you pay.
- on top of that, they tarnish your sending reputation. A bounce rate higher than 2% lets internet service providers (ISPs) know that you haven’t been keeping up with your email hygiene.
- as a result, the subscribers who really want to hear from you may not see your emails anymore: they’ll either land in spam or never make it to people’s mailboxes.
Furthermore, you could have other risky contacts on your list. For instance, people who mark you as spam, or disposable addresses which bounce. Or spam traps, which are a spam prevention method and don’t even belong to real people.
If you’re wondering what to do, consider using an email list checker every once in a while. An email checker evaluates every email address in your list and weeds out the bad ones. Spam traps, disposable or invalid emails – you can get rid of them within hours or minutes, depending on how large your database is.
Double-check your subject lines
Spammers send a lot of dangerous content, so ISPs have implemented different kinds of spam filters to keep email users safe. Sometimes, even legitimate marketers get caught in these filters, and their content can have a lot to do with it.
That means your email can go directly to your subscribers’ junk folder. In some cases, it may never reach them because ISPs block it altogether.
So, before you send out your campaign or newsletter, take a closer look at your content. Are there any risky words – such as money, save now, or income – that may hurt your email deliverability? If so, you may want to remove them just to be safe. Your goal is to reach as many inboxes as possible, so it’s not worth the risk of including any spam trigger words in your emails.
Also, pay attention to your subject lines. They’re the first thing people see and they matter a lot when it comes to open rates. Make sure your subjects are intriguing and that they reflect the content of your message.
Email regularly, not only when you want to sell
Of course, you always want to sell, whether it’s products, services, or a blog article you wrote and to which you’re trying to drive traffic. Nonetheless, you have to think of your audience: how would you feel if a brand was constantly trying to sell you something? Sooner or later, you’d get annoyed and unsubscribe. You don’t want to be that brand.
Instead, email your list regularly and limit your promotional content to 20%. The rest of 80% should be useful, entertaining content that your subscribers look forward to receiving. In time, this approach will help you build trust and drive more sales.
Furthermore, keeping a regular sending rhythm is good for your deliverability. It keeps your IP warm and supports your inbox placement.
If you want to get an idea of where your email is going to land, you could use an inbox placement tester. Thus, you can make adjustments to your emails and help them land in the inbox. Additionally, you could use an email server tester to ensure your server is configured according to best practices. That will give you a chance to fix potential issues before you send and increase your chances of reaching the inbox.
Your email marketing depends on every little action you take
There are so many factors that make or break your eCommerce email marketing. The quality of your email list and your content, the configuration of your email server, and the number of promotions you run – they all matter. For starters, apply the tips above to your strategy and we promise you’ll start seeing better email marketing results. Later on, you can continue to finetune your approach to get even higher open and click-through rates.
