How to Get People to Open your Emails

So, you’ve got a huge list of customer email addresses, they’ve all opted in to receiving information according to GDPR guidelines and you’ve signed up to Mailchimp to give yourself an easy way to send emails to all of them at once. So, why is your open rate so low? Having the ability to send marketing emails is one thing, but getting people to actually open and read them is quite another. With that in mind, we’ve put together five tips to help take your email marketing strategy to the next level.

Be Personal

When you send out an email, are you allowing the ‘Name’ field to be personalised with your customer’s data? Receiving an email with your name on it, rather than “Dear Customer” (or even worse “[insert name here]”!) makes your customers 26% more likely to open and read it, according to surveys, and offering personalised recommendations within an email increases conversion rates by 10%.

Think About Frequency

One of the quickest ways to get your emails consigned to spam is by sending them too often. Unless you’ve got something to say which will somehow offer added value to your customer, try to hold off on the emails until you do. People want to hear about offers, new products or things that will benefit them in some way. Beyond this, you’ll just end up looking like a pest and people will either send your future emails straight to spam, or worse, unsubscribe completely.

Don’t Use Spammy Subject Lines

There’s a fine line between adding a subject line that will entice customers to read your email and sounding spammy or clickbaity. Using lots of capital letters, exclamation marks or words like “free” or “percent off” have actually been proven to be off-putting rather than enticing and could tank your email marketing campaign before it’s had the chance to make an impact. If your email title looks like something from a dodgy Facebook advert, trying to promote a miracle cure for something, rethink it!

Keep Your Subject Short and Sweet

Using long, meandering subject lines won’t improve your chances of the email being opened – in fact it could hinder your chances altogether. Studies have shown that email titles of ten words or less, or more specifically 25 characters in total, have the best change of being opened by the recipient, so try to keep your subject lines engaging and snappy. Don’t forget, around 50% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, and many mobile email clients only display three to five words of am email title, so using more than this is a waste.

Credit Your Customers with Intelligence

There’s been a massive rise in last last couple of years in the “OOPS” email – companies send out emails highlighting some mistake they’ve made and leverage the opportunity to offer some sort of compensation, like a percentage off of their next purchase. Oops emails actually have extraordinarily high click through rates, so there’s no doubt they work, however a lot of companies started making deliberate mistakes, like sending out one email containing an incorrect code, and following it up with an email saying “we’re so sorry, here’s the correct code”. Oops emails need to be authentic and rare to work – start using them nefariously and your customers will see straight through it, and potentially view your company as dishonest.