Healthy inbound marketing simply indicates sending emails to those people who are interested in your services and getting a response from them. Otherwise, you are out of the race!
Falling Click-Through Rates…
But the sad part is that a wide number of businesses miss this and complaint about falling customer’s interest. Once you send an email, it generally hits the user inbox, gets lost into it, or in worse cases, it might land up in his spam folder. In fact, as of March 2019, the global spam email rate accounted for 56 percent which was only 55 percent back in 2018. And in case someone even opens that email, there are very few chances that he will click through. But need not worry, you are not the only one facing the trouble! This issue has become a common pain point of all business segments nowadays as competitors are multiplying in every industry. However, we have got your back. Introduction of various smart tools and techniques like automated email marketing campaigns, bulk emailing, Designmodo newsletter template builder, and various other tools have taken email marketing to the next level while automating the whole marketing lifecycle.
How you can Boost Open and Clickthrough Rates?
As per a report, in 2018, the email marketing clickthrough rate in the UK was recorded as 4.27 percent. Well, if you plan to set an average Clickthrough rate (CTR) to begin with, it might be a tricky task for you because email marketing benchmarks vary widely. If users don’t open your email right away, believe me, they are never going to do that in the future. So, the way you frame your email, the timing you are sending the email, choosing the subject line, the sender’s name, all matters a lot while you are planning out your email marketing campaign. Otherwise, you’ll be no different from the ones whose emails are left unnoticed by thousands of users.
A Few Tips For Improving Open and Clickthrough Rates
Here I am sharing some proven tips that can help an any-sized enterprise to improve their email’s open, clickthrough rates, and even lead generation potential. Let’s get started!
1. Does your Opt-in Process Comply with GDPR?
Announced in May 2018, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was enacted in Europe for safeguarding internet user’s protection data. In short, you must ensure all your email marketing campaigns comply with GDPR, especially in case your target audience is of Europe. Otherwise, you’ll surely get into trouble someday.
2. Stop Purchasing Email Addresses
I understand that during the startup stage of a business, you must have tried every possible method to get maximum eyeballs on your business. And one thing out of this would have been- buying email lists. But the truth is- this method works no more and has zero benefits for you. Not only this, but this method is also a part of violating GDPR. Stop relying on this method, I have listed below other things can actually help you in grabbing customer’s attention, so focus on them.
3. Connect with New Subscribers within 24 Hours
It is the perfect time to leave an impact on a customer when your business is in his mind. Make sure that whenever a new user subscribes to your newsletter or anything, you must reach out to him right away, else you’ll be forgotten forever. Once you send an email to a user within 24 hours, you’ll yourself notice the engagement, and the customer’s interest will definitely grow. You can share anything with the user- it could be your offers, new services, deals, or some surprising facts as well in order to draw customer’s attention. This will be a win-win idea for your business as you’ll be able to engage customers regularly while showcasing your brand name and presenting new services and solutions you are offering to the customers.
4. CAN-SPAM Rules
CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) Act gives users the right to have a business stop emailing them. It even clearly outlines the penalties that are violating the law. For an email marketing campaign to be CAN-SPAM compliant, you must focus and include a few highlights:
Every email must include a physical postal address. You must not use deceptive subject lines in your email. You must give a way to opt-out from receiving emails in the future. Don’t use ‘no-reply’ sender name. You must not sell or transfer email addresses to another list.
Moreover, you can check detailed information on the official website of FTC that has declared all these highlights and guidelines.
5. Address as a Real Person, Not as a Company
As per studies and reports, emails sent from a real person have a higher open rate than an email sent from a company’s name. Customers trust personalized sender’s email rather than opening an email sent from a company. Moreover, people hesitate to open random emails with unfamiliar sender names due to the growing fear of spam emails. TIP: Instead of using the sender name as ‘Marketing Team’, you can use a person’s name like ‘Joe Smith’. You’ll definitely receive more engagement than before!
6. Go for Clear and Clickable Subject Lines
Your subject line holds the full potential to either make or break a customer’s attention- if you frame it the right way, the client is yours; otherwise, you’ll lose him forever. So, you must invest a good time and focus while working on the subject lines.
Make sure your subject lines are: Compelling Clear and easy to understand Cut off the words up to 50 as lengthy subject lines fail to grab the user’s attention. Go for words that your customers are familiar with and are searching for. Build excitement. Avoid spam triggers.
7. Concise Emails
In today’s time, nobody has spare time to read hundreds of emails in their inbox. And if you are writing long emails, believe me, nobody is going to read it. Stop writing lengthy paragraphs, keep your content concise, short, and to the point that conveys the message right away and saves the user’s time as well.
8. Compelling Call to Action
You can’t expect customer engagement if your email is missing a call to action (CTA). Wondering why? Well, using a compelling call to action will enable users to quickly give an idea of where to go next instead of getting lost in the long email. This will help in improving conversion rates and popularizing your brand name as more and more people will land on your business. Remember that you need to choose a suitable position for the call to action where it is easily visible for the customers. Once you have finalized the position, you must now create a button to get started. You can add a CTA asking users to download a free e-book and learn new marketing strategies to strengthen business online presence. This will definitely force the users to download it and stick to your business for a longer period.
9. Add Alt Text to CTA Images
Some of the email clients have blocked images, which might include your CTA buttons as well. In this case, your CTA will not be displayed properly and fully optimized on the customer’s screen, rather they’ll see some broken links. You must set alt text so that at least the user knows what action they need to take now, rather than seeing the poorly optimized images. To do this, you can go for any of the ways- edit the alt text in the email tool’s text editor, or enter the text manually in HTML editor. So, if the user is unable to view your snazzy GIF of some latest deals, he can get an idea from the alt text about what to do next.
10. Hyperlink the Images
The final goal is to convince users to click through your web page. Isn’t it? The simplest and smartest way to do that is to add hyperlinks to the images used in the email to the web page that is relevant to the content.
11. Add Some Actionable and Clickable Elements
If you have clickable items like buttons, CTA’s, text links, or clickable images, this will be an effective way to reach the target audience easily. And this will be useful especially in case of mobile users because on a mobile screen, the users will not keep on scrolling till the end, and they will eventually leave the page if they don’t find anything relevant. But if you are able to add some clickable actions at the beginning of the email, the mobile user won’t have to scroll down, and he’ll directly click on the given link and proceed with your services.
12. Time to Say Goodbye to Background Images
If your target audience is using Outlook, you need to stop using background images right away because Microsoft Outlook doesn’t detect and recognized background images. In fact, as of 2018 reports, there were more than 400 million users who relied on Outlook. This simply means you can’t compromise on such a huge share of people by using images that aren’t even displaying on the user’s screen. So, using background images is not at all a good idea. Rather, you can use a background color and add images in some other ways in your emails.
13. Social Sharing Buttons are a Must
Extending the life of your emails is in your own hands-framing a common email will fade away soon while a compelling one will stay for a longer period, or maybe beyond. You can make your email more engaging by adding social sharing buttons. In fact, there are many tools and templates like Designmodo email templates available that come with built-in social sharing buttons and other functionalities to streamline your email marketing lifecycle. It further helps you in taking your business to the next level with its wide set of unique functionalities to manage the email marketing campaigns like a pro.
14. Email Forwarding Option
A great way to extend email clicks is to encourage your audience to forward the offer to other people in their network. You can include ‘forward-to-a-friend’ option, you can ask the subscribers to share that email with their friends and gain maximum customer engagement.
15. You Need to Clean the Plain-text Version
Not every user will see the beautiful, rich-text version of your email, some users might choose to only check the messages in plain text. When the plain-text version of an email is not well optimized, it will look like a garbled mess that nobody wishes to read. You need to remove the extra text, make shorter tracking URLs and keep the body portion simple. So, if you are investing time while optimizing the email’s plain-text version, this will help you reach a wider target audience. Moreover, don’t alter the actual copy at all as it might into spam.
16. Deliver a Seamless Mobile Experience
With the growing adoption of smartphones, the majority of people open emails on their mobile. As more and more people are switching to smartphones, it becomes very important for marketers to frame their emails perfectly for mobile users. And in case your emails are missing the mobile view and customers have to continuously zoom in, scroll and pinch in, no customer will show interest in your email and they might reach your competitors. Focus on these ways to optimize the emails for mobile devices- you need to reduce the image’s file sizes, make sure that all the CTA links and buttons are larger than 45-57 pixels, and you must invest in some responsive email templates because creating your own might not be possible due to various reasons like-lack of experience, shortage of time and resources, etc.
17. Preview the Email Before Hitting ‘SEND’
Whenever you are up with an email to send it to the audience, ensure it that you double-check it before sending it. Check it thoroughly if it displays perfectly over all kinds of devices or not. Also, send a test email before sending it to the actual audience. If everything is as expected, go ahead; otherwise, take more time and revise the changes wherever required.
18. Clean up Your Contact List From Time to Time
It’s very difficult to keep the customers engaged with your business and grab wide subscribers. And no one can think of kicking a user out unless the user himself opts out from your email newsletter. But don’t hesitate to remove those users from the email list who are inactive for a long time or doesn’t seem interested because this will directly kill your email’s open and clickthrough rates. You must clean up your email list from time to time to make sure that you are sending emails to only those people who are interested in your business. This will help in reflecting the email’s open and clickthrough rates only from the interested customers.
19. Regularly Monitor Your Email Campaigns
You might be working on an email campaign that is perfect in today’s date, but the same strategy might not work in the future as well because the customer demands vary and grow from time to time. You must regularly keep track of your open and clickthrough rates to get an idea where you can make improvements and get better results. For example, you send ten emails, and two emails received maximum engagement out of all, you must analyze these emails thoroughly. Study that which field did the customers liked the most- was it the subject line, images, CTA, or what that impressed the customers. This will help in getting a better idea about what customers are expecting from you on today’s date.
20. Segment Your Audience
Do you think sending one email to all your users will show any response? Actually not. Because every customer has a unique requirement, and you can’t expect beneficial results by sending an email to all of them. As choices and demands vary from customer to customer, you need to send emails as per their interest area. For this, you need to segment your audience depending on various parameters like- their demographic location, their budget, and so on. This will help you in sending a relevant email to the person which will resemble the services and solutions the user has been looking for.
21. Resend Campaigns
It might be possible that when you sent an email, the customer didn’t open the email because he was busy, or might be you sent the email at the wrong time. In this case, we can think of resending campaigns and get customer’s attention without much effort. You can slightly alter or change the subject line to give a new look and send it to the users. This can definitely help you in getting more open and clickthrough rates.
22. Avoid Spam Filters
Spam filters have gained the spotlight in recent time but still, they are not the ideal platform to rely upon. Even your most-effective emails can get stuck and land in the user’s spam folder. So, if you want to maximize your customer reach while staying out of the spam fear, you need to keep a few things in your mind- ensure that all users have opted-in to receive your emails, send emails from a good and unique IP address, send the email from a verified domain, personalize your emails, avoid using deceptive subject lines, include your location, and give a clear method for users to opt-out from your emails at any time.
Bonus Tips to Attain Better Results
By now, you would have got a clear idea about how you can attain better email open and clickthrough rates. After that, you would be even interested in knowing how you can deliver more accurate results to your target audience. Of course, delivering better user experience will result in more web traffic, more customer engagement, more leads, and better leads and conversion rates. So, here are a few things you must consider for getting more clicks.
Setting a Goal: Whenever you send an email, make sure you have a clear goal behind it. Do you want to drive traffic out of it? Or are you encouraging people to fill a survey? You need to communicate with a determined purpose so that you can convey the message to your audience clearly and effectively. Reflect Your Goal: While framing out your email, make sure that the email layout, design, and content goes well with the goal you are trying to achieve. Don’t elaborate things, keep them concise and to the point, prioritize information according to the message you are conveying. Give necessary links so that if the user isn’t scrolling down the whole page, he can at least click on the link. Customer’s Ease for Taking Necessary Action: As we already discussed that most of the users are going to open your email on their phones. While others are going to access from tablets, laptops, desktop, or other devices. So, make sure that the content, images, links, buttons, and other parameters display perfectly on all kinds of devices to offer mobile-friendly user experience. Follow-up Regularly: In order to convince and remind users to take action on an email, you must follow up with your subscribers regularly. Once a user purchases anything from you, you can follow up with a thank you email and offer them some discount coupons for future purchases.
Wrap Up
These tips will definitely assist you with better customer engagement and take you towards the success of email marketing campaigns. But don’t get discouraged if you don’t see the results because things take time to show the results. Have patience and wait for the results. Email marketing is an ongoing process that demands continuous monitoring, analysis, and improvements as per the growing customer demands and market trends.
