In an inbox filled with personal, work, promotional and junk email – it can be challenging to find the best way to rise through the clutter and get the open rates and engagement needed to drive revenue. While email remains one of the top means to reach your audience, it is more cluttered than ever and has resulted in many fighting for the same attention. Try some of these email tips from the Omeda team on your next promotional email:
1. Send to the Right People
One of the key principals at Omeda is to know your audience. Naturally, sending your emails to the right people should be among the very top of all email marketers’ lists. Are you truly targeting the right audience? Have you been segmenting and scrubbing your lists? How intimate are you with your database? Unless you are sending to the right audience (who wants your content and engages with your brand) at the right time and in the right place, you are going to miss out on desired open rates. As soon as you begin examining your list and cleaning out those who haven’t been engaging with the brand, you should see better open rates. If the audience is one that comes to your website and to your events, ask them in a form how frequently they would like for you to engage with them. Better yet, ask them which type of content they want to see. Allowing them to manage their preferences, makes them feel valued and will increase likeliness of stronger engagement.
2. Optimize the Subject Line
Did you know that 47% of people decide on whether to open an email based on subject line alone. Another 69% (according to the B2C community research) will report the email as spam simply based off of subject line. Best practices include keeping the subject line short and to the point. Going over the 21-25 character threshold should be avoided whenever possible.
3. Test the Send Time
We don’t have a magic answer to when the best send time is, as we have seen this vary by audience and by the type of content they are reviewing. We do know it’s pertinent to look for patterns within your audience’s habits and to keep testing in order to reach your audience at the right time.We still love the example presented at our last data summit about how CEO’s and those at C-level are more likely to open on the weekends. Click here to review the data from our case study on send times for CEO’s.
4. Choose the Right ‘From’ Name
Some experts debate whether this is even more important than the subject line. If it’s not, it’s a close second! People check the “from names” and regard them about as highly as the subject lines themselves. At Omeda, we decided to change the from name for our events emails to distinguish the difference between events, newsletters and other communications. In this way, the from name indicates the subject matter that is covered in the email.
5. Quality Over Quantity
Quality over quantity should be standard in most marketing mediums, but it is especially true when it comes to deploying email campaigns. The audience you have invested in, that has built trust in your brand, doesn’t wish to be bombarded by emails that don’t relate to their preferences. Rather, they want to open quality content that will spark new ideas, generate revenue or provide some value to them as the consumer. If the quantity of emails is incremental over other brands and the quality of content isn’t there, your trusted audience is certain to begin disengaging.
With the right combination of knowing your audience, sending your deployments at valued times, and providing quality content, you’ll be able to revamp your email promotional strategy and the performance will follow.
