How to Increase Open Rate of Your Promotional Emails

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How to increase open rate of your emails - Sreen Caption of Email Campaing Report

Different email marketer has different measure to success of their email marketing campaigns, for example, no. of sign-up to events or newsletter, no. of sales. However, the first thing to do is to get your email opened.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Some promotional massages to be sent by email
Opt in / Targeted / Relevant emailing list
Outlook / Mass Email Marketing Program with report of Open rate, e.g. Reasonable Spread

Step 1

What influence open rate?

What can recipients see in their inbox? "From" and subject. So, identify yourself clearly and concise and attractive subject line will help. In addition, the source of your email list can be critical, warm-call emails like newsletter to customers or members will generate more opens than cold-call emails.
Step 2

1. "From" or sender display name

If you are asked why you open emails, because you know and trust the sender, for examples, family members, friends. In commercial world, if you subscribe company's newsletter, you will open it. If you are customers purchased products before, you are interested to open emails from the company introducing latest products. Thus, you need to identify yourself in "from" field to include your company or brand, not mkt@reasonables.com but "Reasonable Spread". If you are distributor of a brand, you'd better include both your company name and the brand name.
Step 3

Which Subject line is more attractive to you?

2. Subject line

Writing good subject can be an art. The common saying is specific and relevant to the readers. For example, "Top 10 reasons to buy ...", "Save 10%", "5 Great ideas"

There are a no. of ways to think of subject line and the contents of the emails: before-after, fear, emotions, slice of life, fantasy, testimonial, authority, curiosity, sense of urgencies. For example, how to comply with a new law reinforcement; Sales Promotion: "3.7g Servo","11.1 LiPo" and "Fokker EDF Airplane";

Promotional words like "Special offer", "Free", "Limited time", "Buy now" may not improve open rate but it can boost your sales.

Experiment different subject line to see which one work best.
Step 4

Sample open rate in different week day and time

3. Timing

Timing is an important factor. If your products, services and news are seasonal, no one will buy your Christmas gift after Christmas, right? And it's tremendous sales during Christmas and New Year holidays.

Please see caption image for a sample open rate in different week day and time.

Why more people will open on Tuesday and Wednesday? In the context of business-to-business emails, business recipients get lots of emails in Monday morning after 2-day weekend holidays. What's they do is to filter which emails are spam mails, which are found to be valuable to read and which are the tasks assigned. They don't have "spare time" to read commercial emails. However, on Tuesday and Wednesday. They receive relatively fewer emails in the morning when they arrive at office at 9am. After they clean up and read emails, new emails arrive during 11:00pm and 12:30pm, they have more free time to read mindfully. Friday is a day before holidays, holiday's mood affect intention to read emails. Note that your result may vary very differently!

Comments

cygnetbrown said

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on 9/29/2009 Great insight on increasing the open rate of your promotional emails. What you're saying is a lot of the criteria that I use for opening email also.