Emails are one of the best sources of visitors and sales for your online business, but there might be an issue with your email marketing strategy.
You send emails and no one is reading them, opening them, or even getting them.
There’s also a chance that they could be going to people's spam box.
In this article, we are going to show you how to increase your email deliverability and open rate.
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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So, let’s get straight to the point.
1. Warm them up
The first thing you need to know is that when you start sending people emails, you need to warm them up.
If you have an email list of let's say 100,000 contacts, and we are going to the extreme, you wouldn't want to just fire off and shoot off 100,000 emails right away.
Every email provider out there, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, what they do is, if you send a ton of emails and people don't open them up, your emails will automatically start going to people's spam box.
Imagine this; how would that sound for you if you see someone who suddenly starts sending a massive number of emails that have a low open rate?
You probably might think two things:
- They are spammy emails sent massively by a bot,
- People somehow do not care about what’s in the emails.
Now, let’s think that each email provider has the goal of filtering emails showing users emails from very reliable sources that they are most likely to open.
All, of course, to provide the best user experience possible.
So, going back to the two possible thoughts, if the email providers think the same, and they do, what do you think are they going to do?
They are going to stop showing your emails to their users by sending them to the spam box.
You have to warm them up.
And, as you do it by starting sending only a few like 1,000, and then the next day, you start sending 3,000 or 4,000, and then from there, you send 10,000 then 15,000 then 20,000 then 40,000 then 60,000 and then maybe 100,000, what you'll find is that you'll be warming up these ISPs like the AOL's and the Gmail.
And as you do that, they'll be more comfortable with your emails, and they'll be putting them in the inbox.
2. Subject lines
The second part of this email marketing strategy that you need to know is that your email subject lines need to be casual. When you send people emails to your friends, you use a casual subject line.
You're not always capitalising on every single word. You're not that proper.
That's how it should be because when you send someone an email with a casual subject line, they're like "Oh, this could be a friend, let me just open it."
People receive lots of emails every day that want to sell them something or convince them about something.
And most of them have subject lines that are not friendly at all and go straight for the sale. You probably know what we are talking about, don’t you?
This overwhelms people who start getting like “Oh, another email like the others…I am not interested in it. And actually, I am not even going to open it.”
And this is not the effect that you want to generate.
Forget about the fact that capital letters drive more attention. It doesn’t work that much anymore.
Make it friendly and include a benefit of what they are going to get by opening the emails.
This way, you’ll stand out from the others and people will be more induced to open your emails.
And the higher your open rate is, the more authority your email gets – meaning that the providers will deliver your emails to the inbox and not to the spam.
Alright, now before we move on with the next email marketing strategy for higher open rates, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
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3. Clean your email list
The third part of this email marketing strategy that you have to do is to scrub your email list. If you keep sending people emails that aren’t opening it, eventually, these ISPs will be like "You're sending all these emails to AOL but most of the people you're sending emails to aren't opening it, so we're assuming that all your emails are spam and we're just going to put all your emails in the spam box."
You want to take your emails and only send them to people who are opening them.
In other words, scrub your list at least once a month, for all the people who don't open any of your emails, assuming you're sending out at least four or five emails a month.
If you're not sending out more than four or five emails, then you shouldn't scrub your list once a month, but wait to send four or five emails and then see who opened them and who didn’t.
You should scrub it after you send out four or five emails each and every single time.
If you send out more than that within a month, then just do it on a monthly basis.
4. Text-based emails
Last but not least, send text-based emails. When you send promotional emails, they tend to have images, and providers know this very well.
That's how you end up in the Gmail Promotions tab. This is something that you don’t want to get as true it isn’t the spam, but people are less likely to check the promotion box.
Plus, if you are in the promotion box, you have already a tag of someone who wants to promote users something.
And again, as people are getting more reluctant to be sold something, especially from brands that they don’t know very well, they are less likely to open your email even if they check the promotion box.
When you send text-based emails, Google or Gmail is like "Oh, cool, this could be a friendly personal email, so let me put this within the inbox."
Sure, your text-based email will have some HTML, but it won't have as much compared to promotional newsletters.
Keep it easy and clean.
Less is more.
If you need help with your email marketing strategy to grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
