In a constantly evolving marketing environment, email is still and always will be, a valuable tool to communicate in a personal manner with your potential customers. As an email marketing professional, one must always look to improve his productivity. You may already be aware that email is your single most effective tool to increase your income and improving the productivity will pay you huge dividends.
On an average day, nearly 144 billion emails are sent. More than half of them are marketing ads sent from various eCommerce platforms. To be a bright star among this stardust is not easy. Thankfully, there are some tried and tested strategies that will help you get your emails clicked.
Go for the double opt-in method
In the double opt-in method, the subscriber is required to validate his email address after entering it in your subscription form before continuing.
Unlike the single opt-in, where people can enter any mail address in order to access the important content you have to offer, the double opt-in makes sure the email ids you get are worthy. It’s not just about growing the user database, it’s about how much you can do with little. It also provides the first line of defense against spam bots.
Stats show that using this method increase conversion rates. This can be attributed to the fact that the subscribers earned this way are more real and interested in your product and in the end, may be willing to commit. You can escape the spam folder this way.
Personalizing without using the recipient’s name
This idea of personalized email seemed so game changing to me that I decided to do some research on it. Turns out that a numerous people actually feel concerned about security threats like phishing when they see such kinds of personal mails.
Intimacy is something earned over time. Faking to know the person can actually be a bad idea. But it doesn’t mean that personalization in any and all forms is a turn off. A person’s individuality, his likes and dislikes can be understood as personalization too. Example: purchase history or his location. A study shows that suggesting products based on a subscriber’s purchase pattern got positive responses from almost 98% customers.
This means that sending personalized mails in a more meaningful way, like being specific to his needs and liking is a better strategy than jumping the gun.
For a change, give them what they really want
A report by Bluewire media says that the chances of people clicking your CTA mail goes up to 66% when they see a free banner. I am not saying that a free trial to a physics tutorial is going to get the same response. But people are so fed up of seeing marketing mails in their inboxes of absolutely no value to them at all that giving something of value is sure to make them open it.
Some popular ideas for free stuff are eBooks, coupons, vouchers, discount codes etc.
Subject lines
Let me keep it simple here, short is sweet.
To support my seemingly ambiguous claim, let me present extracts from a research report by Adestra. To their credit, they have tracked nearly 900 million emails. They say that, subject line with a character length 60 to 70 have no significant effect on open rates or clicks.
On the other hand, character lengths of 10 and below had a 58% open rate. All those “hey” and “wow” seem attractive now, isn’t it?
Subject lines with over 79 characters also had good click rates and 49 characters and below fared extremely well too.
The next big question is, where to use long and where to use short subject lines?
One simple suggestion would be to use long subject lines for emails that need subscribers to click through or convert. If you are starting a website for say, a fundraiser, then short subject for just getting clicks to open emails would do. Short or long, make sure to keep it within the above suggested limits.
Limit the count of emails you send everyday
Productivity is not about doing more but about how best you do whatever little you do. It is about getting maximum output from the input. That is why your strategy should be building a strong customer base.
Sending emails often can have a drastic impact on the amount of effort you put in them. It is important to give customers exactly what they want, all the while keeping it related to your brand. This is how we attract the target audience.
Pioneers in marketing suggest that we send out emails at least once a month, if possible every two weeks. But that’s not all. You can select prime times to send out mails like weekends, festivals and clearance sale days. It is all about fine-tuning when you need to send by analyzing data about how mailing frequency affects mail open stats.
Knock the door when everyone’s home
Research by Experian marketing has found that the prime time for sending out emails is not during the day (business hours), but during the night, specifically from 8 p.m. to midnight. During this time, not only the open rate but the conversion was also better.
This is largely due to the fact that the mails sent during this time has more probability of standing out from the crowd that is the bulk of business and other mails that knock during the daytime.
People also seem to have the proper mindset to spend time on your mails during these leisure hours.
Again, the strategy should be to find the perfect time by trial and error.
Wrapping UP
As with all marketing strategies, the best way is to give it a shot and see for yourselves. The road to better productivity begins with an open-mindedness to try every possible tactic. Rest assured, the above few strategies are surely worth your while and are proven to do wonders for your email marketing productivity.
Author Bio: Catherrine Garcia is a passionate blogger and a freelance Web Developer. She along with her group of freelance developers, are experts of creating Websites on CMS.
