5 Real Tips to Get Your Emails Opened
You know people usually take 1-2 seconds to decide either they will read the email or delete it. So, in this tiny gap of time you need to convince the recipient that your email is worth his attention.
You may spend hours for creating the most valuable and greatest content, but all your efforts will be in vain if no one opens your message. So, below are 5 tips you can use to make your subscribers read your message:
1. Work at your Subject line, From field and snippet text.
From and Subject are two lines that fall within eyesight of the recipients when they look through the emails in their Inboxes. And moreover, From and Subject are two factors that determine whether the email will be opened or deleted. That’s why your goal is to compose your Subject and From fields in the way the reader can’t miss them.
Ideally, the From field must immediately identify the sender so that the recipient doesn’t make guesses who the email is from. So, make sure your From field shows your company name or your name that is known by the recipient. At least, you can use an email address that is associated with your company in the From field.
A great way to create recognition at once is personalize the Subject line. You can merge either your name, your organization name, or the name of the mailing list the customer is subscribed to into the Subject line. Here you can learn more about the Subject line personalization.
In general, the Subject line should hint the recipient at what is in the email for him but not tell it straightforward. The recipient should feel compelled to open the email to find out more.
The snippet text is the first sentence in the email that is displayed after the Subject line. Typically, the snippet text is the first line of an HTML message, or the first sentence of a text message. In Outlook the snippet is a short line of the text in autopreview. Gmail users see a shaded text after a truncated subject line. Yahoo displays a pop-up with a snippet text when you put the cursor on the subject line in the inbox preview on your Yahoo home page.
With the snippet text you have more space to build brand recognition and relevancy beyond the subject line alone. A correctly worded snippet adds a value to the message, arouses interest and excitement and helps your reader decide whether to save the message or to read it immediately.
The urgency and timeliness factor works great. You’ll want to make your subscribers feel that if they don’t open your message now they will miss something important forever. But no all caps or exclamation marks, please! These are signs of pure spam and your email will most likely be filtered.
2. Think about your email frequency.
It’s important that you send emails with the right frequency, i.e. don’t send too much and don’t send too little. Simply follow your promises on the subscribe page. If you tell you will be emailing 1-2 times per month, don’t shower your subscribers with messages every other day. At best, after a few weeks they’ll become fed up with your mailings and start ignoring them. At worse, you’ll start seeing many unsubscribe requests or spam reports.
Rare mailings are not good either. Especially do not make them wait for too long for your first message after subscription. They may forget they subscribed to your list, or lose interest in what you have to offer them.
3. Think about what you send.
Look at your emails content and think if you send the information that your subscribers expect from you. As with the frequency, respect the subscriber’s preferences and don’t send them what they did not request. If they chose to get news and tips from you, don’t send them promotions. Or, at least make casual mention of your offers somewhere in the middle of the email, or at the end, or in P.S while writing the whole email in an informational tone.
4. Change your sending time.
One of the reasons why people don’t open your emails may be the wrong sending time. You can test your sending time by splitting your list in half. Send the email to one half at your regular time/day and to the second half – at a different time/day. Then watch your open rate report to find out what time works best for you.
Also, you can try to find the best sending time simply by looking at the email addresses on your list. People who provided you with their personal email addresses, for example from Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, are more likely to read email in the evening when the work day is over. If you have business or corporate emails on the list, so the best time to send to those people is probably during the work day.
Again, you can separate personal and business emails into two groups and send to each group at different times.
5. Segment your list and test your email before sending.
Think about the possibility to segment your list into smaller groups and send more relevant emails to each group. If you have any additional information about your subscribers except their emails and names, you can segment the list by their interests, hobbies, gender, name of the product or service they purchased from you and so on.
If such segmentation is not possible with your list, consider the idea of testing different versions of your email on a part of the list and then send the winner email version which gets more opens to the rest of the list. This capability is called A/B Split testing and easily handled by G-Lock EasyMail and G-Lock Analytics. You simply prepare two or more slightly different versions of the email (you may alter the Subject line, for instance) and send them to say 20% of your list. You define yourself the time period to determine the winner version, for example, 3 hours. During this time G-Lock Analytics will count opens for each email version. When the time period is over, the best performing version will be sent to the rest of the list.
So, if you are not using G-Lock EasyMail yet, download it now and start improving your open rate by testing the emails before you send them to the list.
And if you don’t have an account on G-Lock Analytics yet, create it free here.
Well, probably some of the above tips are not new to you but I thought it was reasonable to repeat them. Anyway, you lose nothing if you revise your email sending program one more time and maybe make some adjustments. Even a small change can bring you additional opens and show you that you are on the right way.
Now I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts. What did you try? What worked best? What failed? Leave me a comment below and let’s discuss.
Tags: email address, improve open rate, open rate, personalization, split test, subject line, subscribers, test your email
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Filed under: Email Tracking