You’re a busy business owner that works really hard every day to make money, increase your profits, and provide for your family. You’re diligent about collecting information from your customers, like email addresses. It’s a critical part of your marketing efforts.
Because you’re working so hard, you want to make sure as many people read your emails you send, but how do you increase email open rates?It’s frustrating. You put out forms to fill out in your store, on your website, and through social media. Even though your email is great, for some reason it doesn’t get read like you hoped. This post will show you the top techniques to ensure that your messages are opened, read, and acted on.
Write enticing subject lines
Everyone knows that headlines of articles or news stories and titles of books are written to grab the reader’s attention so that the article or book gets read. The same holds true for emails. You want to write subject lines that do any one of the following:
- Creates urgency, i.e. “A Limited Time Offer from…”
- Describes how to do something, i.e “How You Can Get More…”
- Lists Something, i.e. “Five Things To…”
- Promises something
By doing so you give your subscriber a reason to open and look at the email that you send. If you don’t do something like this there’s no reason for them to open the email. So, keep something like that in mind when you write your next email message.
Put your customer’s name in the subject line
When you are collecting information from your customers you are doing so for future purposes. Hopefully, you are collecting at minimum your subscriber’s first name and email. That’s really all you need. When you have collected the subscriber’s email and first name, you then can use it in the subject line of your next email. Good email programs like MailChimp, Ontraport, Infusionsoft, etc. all allow you to use mail merge codes to insert the subscriber’s first name into the subject line. You do this because everyone likes hearing or reading their name on their screen or device. This extra step of personalization to get people to read your important message.
Use your customer’s first name in the email salutation and the body
The same principle for the subject line applies to the body of your email. Email, for me, is still a letter sent electronically, so it should follow the standard letter format:
Dear ____________:
Body
Sincerely,
You
So, make sure that you insert whatever mail merge code for your mail system uses to put their first name in the salutation, and once or twice in the body of your email. When they see their name in the salutation they see that you are taking that extra step to personalize the message. They see their name and will want to read more of the message you send, and putting their name in the body of the email will keep them reading.
Use emojis in your subject lines
One of the latest trends in social is using emojis, those cute little pictures of smiley faces, objects, animals, etc. These little gems will help entice your customer to see the email and click it to open the email too! Be creative with them and be sure to use emojis that compliment your industry or whatever special you’re running that week. Wine glasses, party emojis for sales, etc. Ultimately, the goal in using email is to send targeted messages to your customers to build that know, like, and trust factor with them. You also do this to inform them of events in your store, new products you offer, and other news. Email is still the best way to ensure that your customers get those messages, because you can get around whatever algorithm social media changes, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or other social media.
Conclusion
With these tips; writing effective subject lines, using a subscribers first name in a subject line, using the subscriber’s name in the body of the email, and using emojis you’ll be sure to see an increase in your email open rates.
Question: So now that you know how to make sure your emails get read, how are you going to implement these tips? What other tips can you think of that I haven’t mentioned here? Let us all know in the comments below!
