The Net-Tech Report with Chris Kauza
If you do any kind of email marketing as part of your networking efforts, then you undoubtedly have wondered, “How can I increase the open rate of my emails???” You have every intention of sharing good, quality information with your subscribers, but you can feel frustrated that not enough people are even reading your emails in the first place!
While this is a useful metric to use for monitoring some of your email marketing, it should not be the metric you use to judge its effectiveness. The outcome of effective email marketing is to maintain “top of mind awareness” with your subscriber base. The best metric for email marketing performance is “Return On Investment” (ROI) – how much money does your email marketing bring to your top line growth.
Regardless, what is an email open rate? In the simplest of terms, it is the percentage of sent emails that get opened by your email recipients. So if you sent 100 emails and only 50 get opened, then you have an email open rate of 50%.
The effectiveness of email marketing as a sole channel for your marketing messages has decreased somewhat, due to the fact that people receive so many emails these days. In fact, here's what went down in 2010 as far as emails are concerned, according to The Royal Pingdom:
- 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
- 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 480 million – New email users since the year before.
- 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
- 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
- 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
- 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
1) Headline: this is the single most important factor when it comes to any kind of direct response marketing – and email is no exception. The only purpose for your headline is to get the recipient to open the email. That’s it.
2) Your opening sentence: many people and small businesses use free email systems like Google’s Gmail service or Hotmail. These and other email programs often “preview” the first sentence of the email – helping the recipient to determine whether or not they should take the time to open & read your email. You need to make sure you are piquing the reader’s curiosity & interest right from the beginning.
3) TEST: most people make the mistake of “one and done”, meaning, they will send out an email – or even a series of 3 – 5 during a campaign – and wonder why they are not being effective? You need to get in the habit of testing your headlines, your opening sentences, your body copy, your offers and the landing pages that you take your readers too. All of these can play an important part in future email campaign open rates.
4) Consistent, Quality Content: ultimate, one of the biggest factors that will help your current & future open rates increase is to provide good, quality content to your targeted audience. They will come to know & trust what you send them, and if it’s germane to what they are interested in – and not always filled with “buy my stuff” sales pitch – you will see your open rates increase The consistency will keep them aware of you and what you are trying to do; the quality of your content will keep them interested in reading more
All of this will serve to build a relationship with your subscribers. You need to encourage them to email you back and interact with you. Drive them to your blog posts. Connect with them on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. All of these things will help you to increase your open rate as your subscribers get to know, like and trust you even more.
For more information, please visit Chris's TNNWC Bio.
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