If you run email marketing campaigns, you’re on a constant quest to improve your open rates. There are plenty of tactics out there that you can employ to potentially increase them, and an infographic from Sikich (via MarketingProfs) gives you ten of them:
Earlier this year, we looked at what it takes to improve email open rates as those in North America were on the rise thanks to mobile usage. Among points discussed were triggered messages, best practices, and re-sends. Read up on all of that here.
On the topic of re-sends, Miranda Paquet at Business 2 Community wrote last week, “You shouldn’t expect that everyone on your list — even your most engaged readers — will read every message you send out. Which brings up a big question: should you resend an email to subscribers who didn’t open their email the first time? While this could get your emails opened by more people, you have to make sure you’re resending effectively to avoid bombarding people with the same message.n Keep in mind that if some of your contacts have disabled their images and don’t click on any links within your message, that contact will not show up as an open in your reports. Sending these people an identical email might increase the chance that they start to tune your business out.”
Richard Santoro reminds you in a LinkedIn post not to resort to shadiness to get opens: “In the never ending quest to increase open rates and get more conversions, many email marketers resort to techniques like starting their emails with ‘Re’ or ‘FW’…At first this tactic may sound clever because it implies a personal relationship with the recipient. The idea is that once the recipient receives the email they are more likely to open it, believing that it is relevant to them and once it’s open, it’s more likely they will click through and convert.
He continues, “This all sounds good in theory but what happens once your recipient opens the email and realises that they have been duped? Although there is no doubt that compelling subject lines can lead to higher open rates, if you have tricked your recipients into opening an email by using ‘Re’ or ‘FW’ as a prefix, chances are they won’t be impressed, and they may retaliate by hitting the delete button or worse, marking your future emails as spam.”
This week, we looked at a study from Return Path, which suggests that the frequency that generates maximum response without excessive complaints differs among brands as well as based on account type. It maintains that marketers can send more messages without suppressing response, but not necessarily to users’ primary accounts.