A Guide to Phenomenal Marketing

Email Marketing Tips - Get Them To Open Your Emails

1) What You Need To Know About Email Deliverability

2) 5 Tips For Crafting Compelling Subject Lines

3) Email Frequency - When Should You Mail

4) Keep Them Waiting For More - Using Foreshadowing to Create Anticipation

5) Give Them What They Want - And How To Find Out What That Is

What You Need To Know About Email Deliverability

You’re spending a lot of time each week crafting emails to your subscribers, but none of that will do you any good if you don’t have a decent delivery rate. If those emails land in your potential customers’ spam folders, you don’t have much of a chance of making a sale or building a relationship with them. Here are three tips that will help insure that your emails make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.

Use A Reputable Auto Responder Service

Using a reputable auto responder service is the single best thing you can do to improve your chances of avoiding spam folders. Companies like Aweber, Mail Chimp and Get Response work hard at making sure they are white listed with the big Internet Service Providers and email providers like Gmail.

Most auto responder companies will list their delivery stats. In addition the good ones will make sure your emails are compliant and keep you out of hot water.

Set Expectations and Keep Them

Your chances of staying in the main inbox are high when your subscribers regularly open your email. The best way to insure that – outside of providing great content that your subscribers are looking for – is to set expectations from the beginning. Let your subscribers know early on when and how often they can expect an email from you.

You can even use “foreshadowing” in your messages. For example, toward the end of your current broadcast email, mention that they can look for another email from you next Tuesday.

Once you’ve set those expectations do what you can to meet them. Yes, things happen every once in a while. In general though, do your best to keep your promise and email when your readers expect it.

Doing this regularly will improve your open rates and thus your overall deliverability.

Clean Up Your List Regularly

Another good habit is to clean up your list regularly. If subscribers haven’t been opening your emails for the past six month, chances are good they are no longer interested in what you have to offer.

Check your auto responder services manual or help files to see how you can go about deleting anyone that hasn’t opened an email from you in the past six months. If that freaks you out, or you have a seasonal business, start by deleting anyone that hasn’t looked at your emails in the past year.

Following these tips and keeping an eye on email deliverability in general will make sure your emails are being read by your subscribers and that’s the point of email marketing, isn’t it?

5 Tips For Crafting Compelling Subject Lines

The first thing you need to get right when it comes to email marketing is the subject line. If you can’t get your subscribers to open your emails, it really doesn’t matter how good the actual email is.

It’s easy to spend a lot of time crafting a great message and then just slap a subject line on it at the end. Spend some time writing them and see what type of headline gets you good open rates. Here are five tips to get you started.

Keep It Short

You want your readers to see the entire subject line before they click it. You also want to make it easy for people to scan through their emails. Try to get your point across in 50 characters or less. Pay attention to how your subject lines look on your own devices.

Another great idea is to keep a swipe file of subject lines that grabbed your attention. Even if the emails are on a very different topic, you can adapt them for your own needs.

Avoid “Spammy” Words

Stay away from using any words we all associate with spam emails. Words like “sale”, “discount”, “coupon”, “free”, “limited time offer” and even “reminder” are over used and even if they don’t trigger a spam filter and actually make it to your reader’s inbox, chances are high they’ll get ignored.

Instead, start by using the emails you’re saving in your swipe file and then go back and see what subject lines got the best open rates. Try to analyze why they worked well for your market. Not everything will work well in every niche. Find the types of subject lines that get your readers to open your emails and tweak from there.

Personalize It

While personalizing emails with someone’s first name has been overused in some markets, it still works well for many of us. Give it try and see if it works for you. Don’t overdo it, but use it when you really need them to open the email.

Depending on what data you collect when your readers sign up, you can personalize other things like their location for example. Seeing the name of your state or even city in an email subject line is sure to get your attention.

Pique Their Curiosity

We are all nosy and it’s hard to ignore subject lines that sound intriguing or only tell part of the story. Using “…” at the end of your subject line will also work.

The idea here is simple. You want them to click and open the email to find out what the heck you’re talking about or how the story ends.

Frankly the best tip when it comes to crafting compelling subject lines is to keep a swipe file of examples that got you to open the email.