Though email marketing may not be as popular as it once was, it can still give you a good bang for your buck—if you do it the right way. Some companies can benefit from email marketing alone if they have a solid email list of customers or prospects and they can increase their results even more if they pair their email marketing campaign with a robust social media or online ad effort. No matter which route you choose, there are a few ways you can ensure your emails get delivered and opened instead of landing in the spam box or being ignored.
But first, let’s a look at a few key statistics.
- Mobile opens account for 46% of all email opens.
- 35% of business professionals check their emails on a mobile device.
- 73% of millennials prefer any communications they have with a business to come via email.
- More than half of Americans check their personal email accounts more than 10 times per day.
- The most-opened type of emails relate to hobbies. These emails have an open rate of 27.35%.
- Emails with personalized subject lines were opened 50% more than those that did not.
Pretty powerful statistics, right? So this tells us that you need to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile devices and that your emails need to be personalized. But how else can you make sure your emails have the highest probability of being read? Here are some tips.
AVOID USING CHARACTERISTICS OF SPAM EMAILS
If those on your email list get a whiff of spam from your emails, they’ll likely delete them (or worse yet, report them.) But what do spammy emails look like? They usually have a lot of caps and exclamation points and are littered with grammar and spelling errors. Many spam emails use the same phrases, such as buy now or lowest price, so you should avoid spam trigger words like these. Don’t attach anything, either, as this is a red flag for those who are wise to email marketing scams. Checking your email’s spam score before sending is always a good idea and a last line of defense before you hit that ‘send’ button.
OPTIMIZE READABILITY
Because emails can be opened on a number of devices and are often opened on mobile devices, you need to make sure they are properly optimized. Since you normally write your emails on a desktop, you need to see what they will look like on mobile. This means ensuring images and texts appear correctly on a mobile device, that your font colors are legible on all devices, that your images appear correctly on all devices, and that your message is short and sweet. What might look like a brief email on a desktop can look very wordy on mobile and large images not only distort emails on mobile devices, but they can also slow downloading speeds. Send out a test email when you’ve composed your message and open the email on a variety of devices to ensure it looks good before actually sending it.
USE SENDER SCORE BEST PRACTICES
There are some best practices you can abide by that will up your email’s chance of being open and read. They include:
- Using a double opt-in for subscribers that sends a follow-up email with a confirmation link. This ensures they actually want to receive email communications from you and will increase the integrity of your email list.
- Refer to the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Those in Europe have had to follow this regulation since 2018 and it’s best to apply this practice now even though not legally required in America. It may not be long before it’s required here as well, and then it won’t disrupt your email marketing strategy.
- Ask subscribers to add you to their address book. Spam filters get more aggressive all the time and if your recipients don’t mark you as a contact, you run the risk of ending up in the spam folder.
- Personalize your emails by including the name of the recipient in both the subject line of the email and in the body of it. This shows you are familiar with the recipient.
- Test emails before sending to make sure all images are loading and links are clickable. Send it to yourself and a few others and test it on all mobile devices.
- Don’t buy or rent email lists even though it’s appealing to those who want to jumpstart their email marketing programs. Because your emails to these recipients are unsolicited, they’ll likely get marked as spam right away and damage your email reputation and future deliverability.
- Don’t email people whose emails have bounced repeatedly. This means you should remove them from your list or it could hurt your email reputation.
MONITOR YOUR REPUTATION
Having a good email reputation is necessary for effective deliverability. However, many business people may not know if their reputation is good or not. It’s important to find out if your IP has been blacklisted as those who have a bad reputation or are blacklisted will make it much harder for your emails to reach inboxes successfully. You can check your reputation on a few different sites such as MxToolbox. Keeping your reputation positive or improving your reputation can be done by following best practices over a long period of time.
If email marketing is part of your advertising campaign, improve its effectiveness by developing a clean list, using sender best practices, testing your emails, and optimizing readability. Of course, one of the best ways to make sure your emails are read is by having informative and engaging content! If you need help with your content, please reach out to angela@pixelfiremarketing.com for help. Looking for assistance with your email marketing or other online marketing campaigns? Email info@pixelfiremarketing.com to set up a time to chat!
