10 Email Marketing Tips – Think Like Your Recipient

Send Them An Email They Will Open.

 Regardless of the shnazzy graphics, marketing copy and calls to action you bake into your one time or ongoing email marketing campaigns, your time and effort could all be for not if you are not willing to think like your recipient prior to deployment. Send an email you might open yourself (if you were your audience).

1. Open rates are low. You want them to be higher. Edit yourself. Be interesting, relevant and brief in the subject line. This is not a spot for repeating the name of your company (it’s in the from field anyway), but rather to make the reader curious and expecting more than an advertisement.

2. Time of day you deploy is important. If you send after 4 p.m. many inboxes will not be reopened until the next day and the user will be in “clean it out” mode. Try Tues-Thurs well before 3 p.m.

3. Participation. Run contests that inspire the user to hit reply. It will get you more ongoing readership.

4. If your budget and time allows, parse your lists to allow for more targeted and timely communications. 3rd party database marketing companies like Ryan Solutions can help you make the most of this. It can be daunting to manage alone.

5. If you are using a 3rd party database company and have access to users birthdates, send them an automated but funny birthday wish a day before their birthday. The next day is too late and noisy thanks to Facebook.

6. Do your best to keep email content and subject lines out of the hands of brand management who might be focused on topics other than readership/open rates but rather keeping email a carbon copy of other ads, rather than a long term relationship with your brand. Some companies have this figured out, some have not and to some who rely on lots of automated emails, it’s less important.

7. Integrate social media (share buttons) and highlight why those channels are useful.

8. Test send to yourself to both an Outlook and web based inbox.

9. Make sure that recipeints who hit “reply” have their message go to an inbox that can offer a useful response to their inquiry (not a black hole). You want your recipients to engage.

10. Adjust your strategy based on the data you see from previous deployments. What content had the highest CTR? What subject lines and send times had the highest open rates? What sells the most widgets? Refine.

As usual there’s no one silver bullet other than testing, adjusting and learning from your efforts. Good luck and may your open rates always be climbing. If you are in Vermont and want to learn more – take me out to lunch and we’ll talk marketing specific to your business.

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