A few simple ways to increase your email open rates

Not getting the open rates you desire? Read on for a few tips on how to address this problem.

There’s a reason why nothing has overtaken email marketing yet – it’s because it works. Even if you have the best relationship with your customer however, you are still fighting for precious inbox space. It will only take a few seconds to decide whether to open your email or delete it, so you need to capture their attention quickly.

Here are a number of tips to increase your open rate.

1. Switch your sender name

Switching your ‘from’ name in your email can make a massive difference. According to research conducted by Hubspot, emails sent from a company name have a lower click-through rate (CTR) than emails that are sent from an individual.

2. Personalisation

An investigation from Marketing Sherpa concluded that personalising emails does actually work. The marketing company tested a number of different email campaigns with two differing subject lines. The results showed the personalised emails had a 17% average increased CTR.

3. Know your limits

Emails are viewed in a number of different formats, and on different devices. So try to keep the subject line to 50 characters or less. One issue is that many mobile devices cut off subject lines at 25 characters, so beware!

4. Avoid spammy words

The email marketing spam dictionary includes words like free, per cent off, reminder and help. These tend to trigger most email spam filters. Instead of reaching your customers inbox, your emails might fall in their junk folders.

5. Being negative can work

Tabloid newspapers do so well because they are the experts at creating controversy. So don’t be scared to start with a negative subject line to draw your readers in. Here are two subject lines for the same email, and the negative got a higher CTR.

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Read and comment on the original Entrepreneur article.