Maximize Your Email Campaign with Positive Open Rates

With spam at a record high, the daily chore of checking email has become very frustrating for some recipients.  This often leads to a roadblock for the ambitious marketer who wants to reach out to their audience via the electronic mail system. In order for your email campaign to be effective, recipients need to open those messages and actually read them.  Unfortunately, making sure this happens is much more difficult than it sounds. 

Open rates have been on the steady decline due to the ongoing onslaught of spam and the filters designed to stop it.  The impact this has on the marketer is that many filters are configured to treat even legitimate permission-based mail as spam. The open rate is so important because it lends critical insight into the performance of your campaign.  For example, if your email campaign successfully reaches 100 subscribers and 25 of them opened the mail, your open rate for that particular launch would be 25%.  So how do you get around the spam issue and improve this number?  There are a few methods, and each is simple to employ. 

If you want to grab readers, you need to compose short and snappy subject lines.  Some people literally receive hundreds of emails per day, bogged down with mail from their newsletters, social networks and family members.  This means that your email campaign has a lot of competition and its all occurring within the subscriber’s inbox. While you want your subject lines to draw attention, stay away from common spam techniques and avoid words such as “Free”, “Buy” or “Win”.  Going this route is a surefire way to get your mail in the trash folder.  Use something short and catchy that subscribers can associate with you.  This could be the title of an article you wrote or breaking news about your services.  Because this is one of the only things the recipient can see when scrolling through their webmail, subject lines are the key to improving open rates.  

When it comes to your email campaign, the “From” section is just as important as your subject lines.  Potential readers will not open your mail if they do not recognize or trust you.  If your name is familiar or they view you as genuine, they are more likely to read the message, and thus improve your open rate.  For the best results, use the name of your business as it gives you more professionalism and credibility.  To maximum your open rates, you can ask subscribers to filter your mail based on your email address, subject line, or from field.  This can turn out be an easy way to make sure both parties are content.

Increasing the open rates of an email campaign is all about learning and applying.  Observe what other marketers and even some of the spammers are doing, and apply a few of those approaches to your own program.  Learn from their successes and take special note of their failures.  Most importantly, maintain consistency with your email campaign and relevancy with your subscribers.