Email marketing campaigns are only effective as long as your subscribers are actually opening and reading your emails. It’s the first big hurdle you have to overcome. Get the subscriber to open the email, and then you can really do your stuff with the content.
According to Mailchimp, the average open rate across all UK industries is 21.33%. This seems ok, until you look at the size of the list. If you’re emailing 10,000 people, it means that only around 2,100 people are actually seeing your brilliant marketing content. That seems like a bit of a waste.
If your email marketing campaigns don’t seem to be yielding results, take a look at your open rate stats. If they’re low, this could be because of one of a few things:
- Your subject line isn’t very engaging, relevant or interesting to the subscriber
- You’re sending too many emails, and subscribers are put off
- Your target audience is made of up of very broad demographics – and you can’t appeal to everyone.
If you want to boost your email open rates, it’s all about fine-tuning your subject line. Here are a few things to try:
Provide value
To get recipients to open your emails, you need to put yourself in their shoes. Why would you open an email, click on a link or read an article? It’s usually because you perceive there to be something in it for you. This could be a really obvious kind of value like a special offer or discount, but it could also just be relevant advice on how to solve a particular problem.
Test your subject lines
How do you know which subject lines are the most effective? The only way is to test them. Use A/B testing to send out two or three distinct variations on the same subject line. For example, one could be a question, one could have a call to action and another could frame the topic in a slightly different way.
Send out these variations to your audience and see which performs best in terms of getting your emails opened.
Personalise your subject lines
With the use of merge tags, you can personalise your subject lines to make them more relevant to each subscriber. For example, you can include their name or something relevant to their location. You can even combine with marketing automation to send them something special on their birthday. According to research by Campaign Monitor, recipients are 26% more likely to open emails which have personalised subject lines.
Offer a specific hook
Your email subject lines should be direct and descriptive. This lets recipients know exactly what to expect when they open the email (and then of course, you need to make sure the email content actually delivers on that expectation). Keep it short, snappy and limit punctuation where possible.
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Need an expert on the case? Get in touch with our email marketing specialists here at Future Marketing, for powerful end-to-end marketing solutions which deliver real results.
