This infographic from Sikich, an accounting services firm, offers “10 easy ways to improve email open rates,” and we were pleased to find that these suggestions echoed many of the ones we have previously made on this blog. For example:
The first suggestion is to use a clean list of targeted opt-in recipients. In The Heart of Email Marketing: Reputation and Deliverability, we noted that clean lists built with a double opt-in process is key for improving inbox placement rates.
The second suggestion in the infographic is relates the importance of thinking about what sender name to use in your marketing emails. In our recent blog post, Three Ways to Get the Most Value From Email Marketing, we suggested that “the sender name should be recognizable and establish familiarity with your company.”
The third suggestion has to do with strengthening subject lines. Similarly, Improving Email Subject Lines With Glyphs concluded with the observation that, “A strong subject line that follows best practices is the key to getting your emails opened.”
The fourth and fifth suggestions relate to setting reader expectation. In Are You Compliant With Email Laws? we discovered that there is a legal requirement to indicate to customers whether or not the email contains a commercial message, i.e., the sender is trying to sell something to the reader.
Number six recommends placing the call-to-action (CTA) early in the body, making the CTA visible to the reader prior to their opening up the email. This is a great suggestion that dovetails nicely with the advice in Three Ways to Get the Most Value From Email Marketing where we identify the CTA as the most important part of any email.
Seven is to make the email mobile friendly, and in Moving The Needle On Email Marketing KPIs, we said that in order to increase email marketing KPIs like open rates, it is necessary to design your emails for consumption on the smaller screen sizes found on smartphones and tablets.
Number eight is, “Don’t forget to personalize!” In Three Ways to Ensure Email Marketing Success we said that the ability to dynamically pull content from your database into the content of your email is an efficient way to personalize emails in terms of who the email is addressing and the kind of content that is being offered.
The ninth suggestion is about letting recipients taking control of their subscription. This is something we know to be essential when we asked, Are You Compliant With Email Laws? In fact, companies can get into serious trouble if they don’t provide recipients the ability to opt-out of an email subscription.
The tenth and final suggestion is one we make time and again: Test, monitor and analyze. Referring again to our Three Ways to Get the Most Value From Email Marketing post, the importance of testing the various elements of your email marketing campaign cannot be overstated. Elements to be tested should include send times, frequency, subject lines, formatting and the layout of your CTAs.
Check out our entire archive of email marketing posts here.
