36 | How To Increase Your Email Open Rate
Email marketing is a powerful marketing strategy to help build rapport with your prospective clients. In fact, it’s a necessary next step in your marketing sales funnel to help your prospective clients convert into paying clients. After all, we tend to buy from those that we know, like and trust.
However, you won’t be able to connect with your prospective clients if you have poor email deliverability or no one is willing to open them.
In this episode of the Online Business Clinic podcast, I’m sharing with you my top 10 email deliverability best practices.
After all, why put energy into writing email campaigns if they don’t make it to your subscriber’s inbox, or give them the opportunity to read it.
Listen to the podcast and use these 10 guidelines to increase your email open rate and keep your subscribers engaged, warm and ready to do business with you.
10 Ways To Increase Your Email Open Rate:
1. Keep Your Email List Clean - believe it or not, it’s NOT the size of your email list that matters, it’s the quality of your list. Your open rate will shoot up when you’re well-crafted emails and being sent to inboxes of your ideal client, those that you best serve and who want to hear from you regularly.
Once a quarter scrub your email list, doing so will minimize negative metrics. Delete anyone who hasn’t opened an email from you in the last 3-6 months.
If you’ve pivoted your business or changed your ideal client avatar, remove anyone from the list that you know isn’t a good fit for the products and services you offer.
2. Don’t Purchase Lists - not only is buying subscribers lazy, emailing them directly without their consent is illegal. Buying a large list from a third party will most likely include many unverified email addresses. Those emails will only elevate your bounce rate and majorly ding your metrics.
3. Set-up a Double-Opt-In - maintain quality assurance by setting up a double-opt-in process. After your subscriber enters their name and email address, require them to take one more step by heading to their inbox and clicking on a verification link. Doing this will help to ensure you filter out fake subscribers and spammers.
4. Establish a Domain Name - creating a custom domain name for your email address, not only helps to build brand awareness, but it can also help increase your email deliverability by helping inbox service providers see that you’re not a spammer. This helps to bump up your inbox placement.
For example, Gmail. Gmail has three primary folders, Primary, Social, and Promotions. The goal is to get your emails automatically put into the ‘Primary’ folder.
5. Give an Opt-In Incentive - to increase engagement rate, create specific incentives that attract the people who would be most interested in buying what you have to offer. Then reverse engineer your email campaigns to best help your new subscribers (ie. prospective clients) make a well-informed decision to business with you.
6. Keep the Design Simple - fancy, complex HTML designs with large photos are fun, but if your open rate isn’t currently high due to having a hot and eager audience, it can majorly hinder your open rates because your emails will be most likely flagged as promotional messages and sent to a filtered folder that your ideal client rarely if ever opens. Again the key is to have all of your campaigns delivered to their primary inbox, so keep your text and email design simple.
7. Optimize Your Subject Lines - the subject line is the first thing subscribers read. Be selective and challenge yourself to craft engaging subject lines that entice the email recipient to open the email and read more. Write a compelling subject line that teases the reader, but that also isn’t misleading. A few examples could include how to’s, address them by name or asking them a question.
8. Avoid Trigger Words - From your subject lines to the content of the message, don’t use the words like free, financial freedom, make money online, credit card offers, cash bonus, apply now, $$$, weight loss, order now, price, increase sales in your emails, as they have typically been abused by spammers and tend to flag your emails as spam too.
9. Add Alt Text to Your Images - if you do use an image in your email, it’s a good idea to include alt text that properly describes the image depicted. That way if for some reason the image doesn’t load properly, the email subscriber will still be able to understand what was meant to be represented. You come across more polished and put together even when tech isn’t on your side.
10. Request VIP Status - when a new subscriber joins your list be sure to ask them to make you a VIP in their inbox with one of your first email sequence follow-ups. Set their expectations as to how often they can plan to hear from you and the type of content they’ll be receiving.
Let them know why it’s important that your emails stay top of mind and why they’ll never want to miss an email. Ask them flat out to move your emails out of their spam and promotion folders and into their primary inbox. This will alert the inbox service provider that your content is welcome and will help to increase your future email open rates.
Now I want to hear from you leave a comment down below letting me know which of these 10 tips you'll use increase your email marketing efforts.
Looking for email marketing tool with high deliverability rates? Check out SMART TOOLS to explore my favorites.
Don't forget to Subscribe & Review the podcast on iTunes
Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, we encourage you to do that now so that you never miss an episode. Just scroll to the top of this page and click the GOLD BUTTON.
Also, subscribe on iTunes by clicking here☞The Online Business Clinic
Feeling extra generous? Leave Molly Ann a 5-Star review. Your review helps other people find the show.
Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let her know what your favorite part of the episode was. Doing so will help others find the show.
We appreciate your support!