To practice good inbound marketing, you should send emails only to people who have signed up to receive them and who are therefore interested in hearing from you.
The emails you send often get lost in your customers’ inboxes or spam folders, and even when someone opens your email, they don’t click through.
Want to learn how to increase your email open rates? Let’s consider some important facts:
1. Do not buy email addresses
At the beginning of an email marketing campaign, it is important to do whatever will make the campaign successful and get people to notice your business. However, you should not buy an email list even if you see it as an option online.
There are many ways you can acquire an email list, but none of them will actually be beneficial to your campaign. The reason being is that the owners of these email addresses did not explicitly agree to receive content from you, so there is no way to gauge how interested they are–or if they are even a good match for what you have to offer.
Purchasing an email list is a violation of GDPR regulations.
2. Ensure your opt-in process complies with GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation is a new law that was enacted in Europe in May 2018. This law was created in order to better protect internet users’ personal data.
We don’t expect you to have this long piece of legislation memorized. However, if some of your email recipients live in Europe, there is one key guideline by which you should develop your email marketing campaigns:
If you’re looking to collect personal information from your website’s users, you might be tempted to include a pre-checked box that opts them into an email campaign. This way, they can receive updates and special offers related to your business.
As of today, it is against GDPR to have this box pre-checked. In order to comply with GDPR, you must make sure that your European users and customers are given the option to sign up for your email newsletter themselves – do not make the decision for them.
Sending fewer emails can actually improve your open and clickthrough rates.
Only sending emails to people who have explicitly signed up to receive them will result in only the most interested people receiving your messages. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of converting readers into qualified leads.
3. Email new contacts within 24 hours
It’s important to take advantage of the window of opportunity when your company or brand is top-of-mind for your prospects.
The best way to gauge what future engagement will look like is to measure how people respond to your emails within the first 24 hours after subscribing to your newsletter or signing up for an offer. This is also a great opportunity to establish your brand and set people’s expectations.
If you are not using automated email workflows, you may be missing some major opportunities to connect with and support your current contacts.
With HubSpot’s Workflows App, you can create automated email workflows that are triggered by a number of different events, such as when a contact is added to a list, submits a form on your website, clicks a link in an email, views a page on your blog, clicks on one of your AdWords ads, or becomes a marketing qualified lead.
4. Send your emails from a real person, not your company
The open rate for emails is increased when it is from a real person.
We’ve found that people are more likely to trust a sender with a personalized name and email address than a generic one.
Nowadays, people receive so much spam that they are often hesitant to open email from unfamiliar senders. They are more likely to trust a personalized sender name and email address than a generic one.
At HubSpot, they found that emails with “Maggie Georgieva, HubSpot” in the sender field have a higher open and clickthrough rate than emails with just “HubSpot” in the sender field. So, it may be best to use your name in the sender field when sending emails.
- Sender name: Paul Smith
- Sender email address: psmith@company.com
Instead of this:
- Sender name: Marketing Team
- Sender email address: marketing@company.com
Our tests showed that personalization works well, but we also found that using a combination of a person’s name and a company name in the sender name works well, too.
You need to experiment with different strategies to see what works best for your company, brand, and industry. You also need to consider who you’re sending emails to.
5. Pre-set the preview text
Email clients often display the first few lines of text from the body of your email alongside the subject line. This can be helpful in determining whether or not an email is worth opening.
The text shown in an email client is a preview of the content inside the email. The amount of text shown depends on the email client and user settings.
If you don’t set the preview text, the client will automatically pull from the body of your email, which not only looks messy, but also wastes an opportunity to engage your audience.
6. Keep your emails concise
Nobody wants to read a long, rambling email when they’re already busy. Keep it short and to the point.
Email recipients prefer shorter, more concise emails to longer ones because they are easier to follow.
Your users are more likely to find the overall message when they are scanning through all their emails in a short amount of time and they are more likely to take action.
Spam filters tend to flag emails with too much text as spam.
To make your emails more concise and engaging, write them as if you were speaking to someone in person.
If your email is long, break it up into multiple paragraphs. This will provide visual breaks and make it easier to read.
7. Include one call-to-action button per email
When I said that a lot of people who receive your emails will scan them instead of reading all the text, I was remembering something.
The CTA button should be visible and easy to find for people who quickly scan emails.
If you don’t have a CTA button, your recipients won’t be motivated to take any actions that would be beneficial to them or your business.
Choose a location for your CTA that is easy to see and makes sense for someone to click.
For example, if you were writing an email about new strategies for using your product, you could include a CTA to download a free ebook.
After deciding where you want your CTA to be, it’s time to design the button.
8. Email open rates and subject lines
Be honest — no cheap tricks
Email readers do not enjoy being tricked by clickable subject lines. Make sure that the subject line of your email matches the content of the email.
The reader of that email is likely to be left with a bad taste in their mouth, which will make them less likely to open future emails, or even unsubscribe.
Don’t be spammy
Everyone gets spam so you should be familiar with how to identify it. Do not act like the people who send it by using weird characters, all caps, or excessive punctuation.
If you want to avoid being misidentified as spam, use your from name wisely. However, make sure your subject lines don’t make readers question whether or not the email is legitimate.
In the past, emails with spammy-looking subject lines were more likely to be sent to the junk folder.
Having a good sender reputation and domain reputation matter more now than in the past. Nevertheless, enhancing email deliverability can assist in getting more people to open them. The majority of emails that go to spam are not opened by subscribers.
Use subject line split testing
If you have ideas for a good subject line but are unsure of which would increase email open rates, consider testing it out. Subject lines are one of the most important and impactful things to test in email marketing.
Random split tests are not very useful if they are only done occasionally.
You need a methodology that is used consistently and that will give you data and results over time. Something like setting up tests that only send emails to a portion of your intended audience.
The email that gets the best response rate is sent to the rest of the list. Some ESPs have this type of subject line testing built into their platform.
Avoid repetition of language or strategy
If you want to get a lot of people to open your email, it’s important to be creative with your subject line. For example, using a pop culture reference like ‘Star Wars’ is a great way to get people’s attention.
But if you keep putting Star Wars references in your emails, your readers will eventually catch on.
You should be careful when split testing email subject lines. Just because one subject line works well, doesn’t mean you should use it all the time. Use it sparingly and look for other subject lines that are effective.
Types of subject lines that increase open rates
Here’s a quick rundown with examples of various types of subject lines you can use:
“Can you believe this happened? See what our CEO said when she saw these numbers.”
“Did you like the webinar we had last Friday? Would you be interested in this product, since it goes well with your last purchase?”
“Luke Skywalker and watermelons” is an example of two contrasting, unrelated ideas. “Email open rates and the Eiffel Tower” is another example of two contrasting, unrelated ideas.
“The deadline for conference registration is tomorrow and the coupon code expires at midnight.”
Authenticity/casual language: “Monday” or “Our call.”
The goal is to make the person feel a need or desire to find out more. This is how you want the reader to react.
9. Email open rates and personalization
When people think of personalization, they usually think of using the subscriber’s first name.
Subject lines with a person’s first name are just one tool you can use. Overusing them will make them less effective.
But personalization is really about customizing the content based on what you know about the subscriber — which is often much more than their name. Here are some other ways to feel more like a neighbor than an intruder:
Use demographics
Which demographics you include in your email depends on your company and the information you have on your email subscribers.
There is a lot of information you could use to personalize a message, such as the city they live in, their age, special dates like birthdays and anniversaries, home values, number of kids, and so much more. A subject line like “Kids leaving for college soon?” would be personalized to people who fall into that demographic.
Previous activity
This could be referring to purchase behavior or other types of engagement. For example, if you have a subject line that says something like “a special message to everyone who attended last year’s conference,” that is speaking to a particular subset of your list.
Unresolved product engagement
If you have customers who create wish lists, you can send them emails offering special discounts on the items on their list. You can also track abandoned carts and send personalized emails to those customers.
The data you use for your email marketing campaigns needs to be of good quality for your strategy to be effective. You will need an email system that allows for customization to be able to personalize your campaign to this degree. The following article has a list of 35 of the best email automation platforms.
Adjust the “from” name
Changing the sender or “from name” in your campaigns has been shown to be an effective way to increase email open rates.
This technique is effective because it creates the impression that the message is coming from a real person, rather than from your company or brand.
You can make this even more fun by sending an email from your company’s mascot or a well-known thought leader.
You can also use different departments as sender names, with the main company name used as the sender in all of them. For example, JCPenney menswear vs JCPenney kids.
Adjust the reply email address
The worst reply emails are those that are no-reply@businessname and admin@businessname.
Addresses that are not personal make the recipient feel like they are being emailed by a robot and not a person. Most people do not enjoy being emailed by robots.
Many companies invest heavily in marketing and processes to try and make customers feel special, and not just like another number. A no-reply email address sends the complete opposite message.
Addressing your subscribers with a “no-reply” address can result in fewer people seeing your message, as many people have filters that block messages from such addresses.
People don’t like it when companies send them unsolicited text messages, because it’s annoying and it can also get the company in trouble.
Additionally, why would you not want to take the opportunity to interact with customers? Most likely, you encourage individuals to leave comments on social media, so why would you not do the same with your email marketing campaign?
Instead of replying with a general email address, use a person’s name or the name of the department the customer is trying to reach. This way, customers can interact with someone directly.