Whether you run a business or have a blog that you hope to monetize one day, you probably know how important your email marketing strategy is. Email is currently still the preferred method of communication between consumers and the brands they choose to follow. After all, email is non-invasive and allows for easy access. However, if your email isn’t being opened, you lose the opportunity to generate the leads you need to grow your business.
To truly leverage the power of email, you should have a strategy in place in improve your chances of having a successful email campaign. Just as you would read books and listen to an informative SEO podcast to learn about how your blog can appear higher in search engine results pages, you should implement different tactics and learn the various ways you can increase those open rates. Here are a few ways you can achieve this:
Use Consistency With Your Mailing Strategy
Every good email strategy is consistent. If you disappear for months before sending an email, you’ll have less reliability and your subscribers won’t take you seriously. On the other hand, too many emails could have a similar effect. In fact, 69% of the people who unsubscribe from emails do so because they are unhappy with the influx of emails they receive from that brand.
Finding the sweet spot for the amount of emails to send is important. What’s acceptable varies from industry to industry. To see how you stack up against others in your industry, you can use this Email Open Rate Benchmark Tool from Hubspot.
Segment Your List
Segmentation is the process of dividing your lists into several different parts to accommodate different groups. This makes it easier to reach different segments of your market, and helps personalize your campaign. A study conducted by Lyris found that 39% of marketers who segmented their lists experienced higher open rates. Furthermore, 24% saw greater revenue and higher deliverability. If you haven’t already started collecting data on your customers and subscribers, now is a great time to do so. The more data you have, the better you’ll be able to segment your lists. There are many ways to segment lists: you can choose to segment by gender, location, budget, and much more.
Send Your Email at the Right Time
The time that you send your email can make the difference between an opened email and a trashed or ignored email. Multiple studies have been done to prove how certain times perform well better than others. For instance, according to Mailchimp, the best time to send out emails is 10am during the local time of the recipient. However, according to another study from Experian, the best time to send emails is during weekday afternoons.
Of course, with such differing opinions, it’s important that you test different theories. You should use split testing to determines what works best for you. Split your campaign to send at different times based on the data you’ve collected and the results you’ve found so far. This will allow you to determine which times work best for your business specifically, in your industry. You should split test several times to ensure the results are as conclusive as possible.
Create a Powerful Line
Your subject line is what captures the attention of your recipients. If you don’t have a powerful subject line, you could lose the opportunity to capture your audience. One of the first rules you should follow is keeping your email subject lines short and simple. This is especially true for subscribers who are checking their emails on your mobile device, which is true for the majority of people today.
Encouraging curiosity is another way you can appeal to potential readers. However, it’s important to entice curiosity without being overly cryptic. If the subscriber can’t understand the gist of an email, they won’t want to know more. Furthermore, using numbers in your subject line can help improve their open rates.
Write to Your Buyer Persona
Writing emails to your hundreds of subscribers can result in some confusion. After all, when you’re writing to so many people at once, it can be confusing to understand the perfect way to reach all of them at once. This is where the buyer persona comes in. When you create a stellar buyer persona, it allows you to cater to that specific person while simultaneously addressing an entire group. Think about your ideal customer and what you know about them. What is their annual income? What are their hobbies? Marital status? Gender? When you create an ideal buyer persona, it allows you to hone in on them during your email creation efforts.