Getting Low Email Open Rates? Then You Should Read This
Email marketing stands as one of the top ways to get in touch with any kind of audience and it is one of the highest traffic sources for many websites like amazon, irrespective of their niche. But email marketing isn’t easy if you don’t do it right in the first place. So we are going to discuss the affecting factors and a blueprint that can give you an overview of building successful email marketing campaigns.
Most of the people who do email marketing fail, because they fail in making their audience open their emails in the first place. If the audience is not opening their emails at all, then how would they get any conversions (like website visits, sales, brand awareness, etc).
Even I’m not an expert or I’m not getting a 100% email open ratio, actually nobody does even when they have 100’s of email contacts who are targeted audience. There are a lot of factors that affect the email open rates which we’ll be discussing as you read.
For now, refer to the image below of Google SERP.
According to CampaignMonitor.com’s, the average email open rate is between 15%-25%. And even the popular email service provider MailChimp and the popular CRM service provider HubSpot are saying that the email open rate is less than 25%. So it is normal to get low email rates even if you have low email contacts like 1000, but the real question is “Can we increase it even a little bit?”.
“Yes, you can”, but with safe and good methods we can increase it to only a certain limit and you can get better open rates in the long run (even a 100% might be possible).
Before getting to the actual methods, let me show you my email open rate ratios which have been good in 2020. (Refer to the image below)
Knowing your audience:-
I’ve promoted some affiliate products to a semi-targeted audience of 970 people through the SendGrid email marketing provider and initially, I used to get email open rates between 5%-10%. And within a month I was able to get email open rates in between 15%-18% (due to decreasing low audience), but still, people used to unsubscribe as I was trying to sell them affiliate products.
I used to get depressed about losing almost 10% of my audience each time, I stopped sending emails to them for a moment and I figure out that they weren’t interested in the tools/services which I was promoting as they are the only semi targeted not the fully targeted audience.
So the first thing you need to think about before writing any email is “Are my audience looking for this or is this email useful for them?”. As a marketer, you should know your audience in the first place and if you don’t, then try to find them in your niche.
“Marketing is all about providing the Right Information to the Right Person at the Right Time”.
If you get the above sentence right, then you can get better results in a short time. Anyway, let me get into this more deeply.
Case 1:- If one of your audience is looking for the latest version of the iPhone mobile and you are promoting the oldest version of the iPhone, then the chances of getting the most out of your marketing budget are less. Here the information and the person you are promoting are not right.
Case 2:- If you are promoting the oldest version of the iPhone to the person who has already bought it recently and searching for its accessories, then you are targeting the wrong person or you are too late to make him/her convince.
I hope those examples are making sense to you now.
Even I found it at the end of November-2020, I stopped doing sales talk with my audience and started sharing the information on the products they might like and got a massive open rate. (Refer to the image below)
As you can see, I’ve got a nearly 56% email open rate as I found my audience’s interests. But it was heart robbing for me as my niche is different from theirs and I had to exclude them for it. (Sad reality ☹)
So find people who are looking for your niche first. Let’s get on to the next one.
Taking a good sending email address:
What? A good sending email address? What does it even mean?.
Yeah I know, I’ve heard these questions before.
But I mean it when I said take a good sending email address, I get emails from a lot of email addresses which doesn’t make any sense at all (like greengreen12345@gmail.com) and I’m sure you too have plenty of them in your inbox. So make sure you get a good email address either a professional one like yourname@yourdomain.com or free and popular ones like yourname12@gmail.com.
But make sure that you don’t add numbers more than 3 at the ending of the email address, this will look suspicious or spam oftentimes. If you have a website of your own, then make a custom email address with your domain name. For example, my website is BestinBuying.com and if I were you then I probably go with an email address like munnask12@bestinbuying.com.
This would increase the brand awareness of your website.
You got my point, right?.
So use an email address that doesn’t look suspicious and spammy at all.
And also choose a good email marketing service provider. I’ve written an article on free email marketing services providers, if you are interested check it out here.
Writing a Catchy Subject Line for your Emails:
The next thing on our list is the email subject line, the first thing anyone sees when they get your email is the subject line. So if you can’t convince them to open your emails with the subject lines then you should change it. But don’t make it clickbait too as overtime the audiences of every niche are growing smarter and most of them don’t open emails that they found as clickbait more often.
Using clickbait subject lines might get you good results in a short time but when your audiences find it spam, they are less likely to open your emails. So make your email subject lines look good by using safe methods.
If you are not sure of how good the email subject lines are, then there are tools that can analyze your email subject lines and gives you an overview of how your email might perform. Some of the tools are
1. CapitalzeMyTitle.com’s Email Subject Line Tester — Link
2. IsitWP.com’s Email Subject Line Analyzer — Link
These both tools recommend using an email subject line that consists of 4–6 words, using numbers and emojis, words that can increase the open rates, and also the words that can decrease the open rates. So it’s better to recheck the email subject lines with these tools before you send it to your audience.
Giving a One Line Overview in the Email Preheader:
Email preheader is the text which shows beside the email subject line, preheader text is limited to a short length. So provide a simple and short sentence that gives an overview of what your email actually is.
Make it exciting to sound.
Providing valuable information to your readers:
If you want your audience to open and read your emails every time you send them, then you should provide valuable information and build trust with them so that they help you in return by buying something when you offer it to them.
“Sales is not about selling anymore, but about building trust and educating.” — Siva Devaki
Building trust with your audience takes a long time but it is the best way to get better engagements in long run. Still, confused? Or thinking of this?. Then I suggest you open your email inbox and check the emails you receive every day, I bet that most emails that you received are trying to sell something, but would you read every single of them?.
No, right?.
You might read some of them because you already know the senders or you feel like you know them. There is a blueprint called CATT Funnel that I learned from DigitalDeepak while I was an intern in his own Digital Marketing Internship DDIP. (See my experience in DDIP here).
CATT is a step-by-step process that works in long term, DigitalDeepak made his business successful by using the same blueprint and most of his followers also got better results when they started using this blueprint.
So let’s dive into the CATT funnel,
CATT means Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction. It becomes powerful and easy when it is combined with a particular niche.
CATT funnel is simply providing constant content to your audience that grabs the audience's attention for a long time which gains their trust over time and they will be ready to pay you for what you offer them.
And as I said, it would become more powerful and effective when it is connected with a niche. For example think of 2 persons, Person1 and Person2. Person1 speaks about a lot of things each time which are of different broad niches and Person2 comes up with things that are associated with one particular micro-niche. Whom would you like to listen to if they are talking about the same topic at the same time, Person1 or Person2?.
Well, I’ll surely go with Person2, as he talks about only one particular micro-niche. This is because I would think that he’ll be an expert or at least he knows better than me on that niche.
So start with a niche, make it narrow, collect leads of that micro-niche and start nurturing them with valuable content. Grab their attention, build trust with them and recommend them something that might help them in solving a problem.
Note: Don’t send too many emails often, as this would reduce your email reputation score which leads to getting your emails dropped in the spam folder rather than the inbox folder of your audience.
Conclusion:-
Build your audience in your niche and know their interests so that you can provide the information they are already interested in. Pick a good email sending address that looks natural and write a catchy email subject line, don’t make it clickbait.
Give a short & simple email preheader and provide valuable information in the email so that when you send a follow-up email, your reader should want to open it by seeing your name in his/her inbox.
Build trust with your audience over time so that they make a conversion in the future. Remember CATT funnel, Content-Attention-Trust-Transaction.
So this is what I found while I was trying to do email marketing better. I hope you find this article better, if YES, give it a like and if you are interested to know the free email marketing tools then visit https://bestinbuying.com/best-free-email-marketing-tools/.
