How to Get Customers to Read Your Email

If you are less than impressed with your email marketing communication’s open rate and click-through rate, sometimes running successful email marketing campaigns just requires a little guidance and some tips to get the needle moving in the right direction. Check out the following post for email marketing tips on how to get people to open, read and take action from your emails.

First Step: Get Your Subscribers to Open Your Email

Create an eye-catching and concise subject line. A recent study showed that 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone (source: Convinceandconvert.com). Your subject line should compel your reader to open the email to discover more of what’s inside.

Personalize the subject line. If you can, in any way, do it. Statistics show that personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened (source: Salesforce).

Length of subject line. There’s really not a hard and fast rule about the length of the subject line, however shorter tends to be better, as long as the message makes sense in short form. In some instances, very short subject lines can perform quite well. According to a recent statistic by Adestra, subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%.

Many people feel that B2B email marketing is more challenging. If you’re in the B2B industry, here’s a stat that may help you out: For B2B companies, subject lines that contained “money,” “revenue,” and “profit” performed the best (source: Salesforce).

Related: 101: Succesful Email Marketing Campaign Best Practices

Next Step: Get Them To Read Your Email

Ok, now that we’ve covered how to get people to open your email, it’s time to focus on how to get them to actually read your email communication.

Create compelling content. It all comes down to compelling content (yes, I did repeat this). Your email needs to speak to a direct interest or need. Your headline should draw your reader into the main newsletter copy. The copy should be creative and to the point. Make sure to include relevant interesting imagery too. There are several stock photo sites out there like foter.com, sxc.hu and fotolia.com.

Review visual layout across all devices. Once you have your content down, you need to look at your overall visual layout of the email. Have you tested how it’s going to look in all ISP’s and web browsers? What about mobile? Did you know that 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices (source: TopRankBlog)? If you don’t have the in-house resources to make sure your email newsletter looks good on mobile, it’s a really good idea to find a digital marketing firm than can help you ensure your email marketing is mobile-friendly.

Related: Sending a Successful Email Marketing Campaign: Closing the Gap Between Desktop and Mobile

Last But Not Least, Don’t Forget Your Call to Action

Seems like a no brainer, right? However, part of creating compelling content is leaving a little mystery in the message so you can measure it. “It” being the click, the user action. Include something as simple as a “read more” or “download this XYZ” or “view the video.” Send them somewhere, like your blog or landing page, so you know that they indeed read your email and then took action. It’s best to have one call to action “above the fold” and then at least one more at the bottom of your email.

Social Media Sharing. The world of email marketing has changed drastically in the past five years, and the biggest game-changer has been social media. That being said, an essential ingredient to running a successful email marketing campaign is social sharing buttons. Include these within your message so that your readers can easily share your newsletter content. Additionally, you should include buttons to all of your social profiles so people can connect with you across all the relevant social sites. If your email service provided allows for formatting and customizing of the messages, do it, without question.

Cat photo is our sample of compelling visual content. Photo credit: _Xti_ / Foter / CC BY-NC









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