Most times, you might receive an email from one business or another, advertising a new product on sale, or informing you that you have won a 10% discount on your next purchase. This is a good example of email marketing.

Email marketing generally describes all forms of promoting a business product/service through information sent across emails. It is simply marketing through emails. To effectively employ email marketing, you will need the emails of your customers or subscribers.

Why Use Emails for Marketing?

Through email marketing, you can regularly stay in touch with your customers virtually. You can pass across any information concerning any offers or promotions that you might have ongoing.

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However, customers will only receive the information about the offers and promotions if they click on the email, open and read it. Your emails will only have the required impact if customers open them up to read them. If you notice your emails are not being viewed, it means you have a low open rate.

What is the Open Rate?

Open rate is the rate at which your customers or subscribers view the emails you send them by clicking on them and reading them. You can measure using mail per customer (the number of emails a particular customer opens), or customer per mail (the number of customers who open a particular email).

What Can Cause a Low Open Rate?

• Your emails are dull.

• Your emails are logged into your customers' spam folder, when this happens, your customers won’t be able to see the mails.

• Your emails are too lengthy.

How do I Increase My Open Rate?

1. Personalize your emails:

Write to your recipients like you are talking to them personally. Address them by their first names. Write your emails to just one customer/subscriber at a time taking good care while doing so. Customers are more likely to open your emails when it addresses them by their first names.

2. Inspire their curiosity:

To make them want to read more of your emails, you can make the headlines of your emails very fancy and eye-catching. Use headlines that will make the customer want to read the remaining part of the email immediately.

3. Don’t neglect humour:

Your email may come off as strict and stiff when you don’t include a bit of fun for the reader to have a little laugh. You can include a few humorous lines in some parts of your email, but don’t make it overbearing. Customers will want to open your emails when they discover that it always brightens their day a bit.

4. Take note of spam filters:

Most times, customers wouldn’t even receive your emails even after you have sent them repeatedly. This is because they have been caught by your customer’s spam filters. To avoid this, you could try:

• Avoid words like ‘free’ in your subject line.

• Including an option to ‘unsubscribe’ from receiving your emails.

• Avoid using upper case letters for your subject line. Use lowercase letters instead.

5. Don’t be scared to use emojis:

Your customers need to see your humanity through your emails. Using emojis can help you achieve this. You can also use emojis in your subject line. This can easily grab your reader’s attention and make them click open to read more.

6. Center on reader interest:

While using email to want to increase sales, you should also focus on the interest of your customers and readers. Doing this will keep them engaged with your email and read it to the end to see how your email addresses their interests.

7. Get feedback from ex-customers:

Whenever a customer decides to unsubscribe from your emails, do well to include a section where the customer can freely express why they are unsubscribing from your emails. You can then use this feedback constructively to become better in your emails.

8. Always proofread your emails:

You should regularly check your emails for misspellings or occasional grammatical errors you may have made while writing them. Your customers might get turned off permanently at the sight of one grammatical mistake in any one of your emails. Do well to diligently review your emails after writing them. You can employ Grammarly to do this.

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9. End with curiosity:

It is good practice to also end with curiosity (after starting with curiosity using your headline) at the end of your emails. This would leave your customers wanting more and equally anticipate your next email. You can spark this curiosity by asking a seeming puzzling question.

10. Don’t be overbearing:

Avoid sending your subscribers too many emails over a short period. Be sure to regulate how much you send them emails. Sending too much may make your emails overbearing to them. On the other hand, sending too little may not give your emails the attention they deserve.

11. Give your subscribers choices:

You can allow your customers to choose how often they want to receive your emails. This would give them more control and will help them open your emails more at a time that is most convenient for them.

12. Have great content:

The content of your emails matters a lot. It shouldn’t be something your customers would have seen regularly in other places. Your content should be unique, captivating, interesting, and have reliable, useful, and relatable information.

13. Include images:

Images boost the aesthetic of your emails and give your emails an attractive outlook. The images should be colourful and optimized; positioned in strategic areas of the email where the reader can easily view them.

14. Be brief:

Don’t make your emails a long essay that your customers will have to read through. Your emails should be brief while still putting out the main purpose of the email in clear points.

15. Resend emails left unopened:

Sometimes the emails you send can escape the sight of your customers because they may have a lot of other emails coming in. Try resending unopened emails whenever you discover a customer hasn’t opened or interacted with them. You could modify the subject line when resending it.

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Conclusion

These email marketing tips would help your emails stand out from the regular emails your customers receive. This will in turn increase your email open rate and you now gain more audience and attention from your customers.

We at SmartSMSSolutions can help you with email marketing by allowing you to send messages from your email directly to the phone numbers of your recipients. This is part of our Bulk SMS service. Sign up with us and get started!