8 Simple Email Marketing Tips to Improve Your Open and Click Through Rates From growing your email list to boosting engagement, these simple tricks will take your email marketing up a notch.
By Liviu Tanase Edited by Maria Bailey
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
More than 4.3 billion people around the world have an email address, Statista shows. For businesses, email is the predominant transactional channel — it's where we get our invoices, receipts and notifications. Aside from that, email is one of the most lucrative marketing channels, with an average ROI of $43 for every $1 spent.
Is your ROI not quite there yet? To identify the issue, start with the fundamentals:
- Make sure you use a reputable email provider. You need a trustworthy way to send emails to ensure their deliverability.
- Verify your email list, especially if you haven't checked it in more than six months. Invalid and dormant contacts will prevent you from reaching people.
- Reassess the relevance of your content. It's difficult to convert prospects who don't resonate with what you send.
Once you ensure you're in good technical shape and your content is useful to people, the simple tricks below will help you get more out of the emails you send.
1. Include a subscription link in all your templates
Just as all your email templates have an Unsubscribe button, they should also have a link people can click to subscribe. Your emails are going out to prospects who've already subscribed, but if they decide to forward one of your emails to a friend, make it easy for that person to get on your list. To grow your database, you need to share that subscription link in as many places as you can.
Related: 8 Tricks to Make Your Emails More Successful
2. Simplify your template
Putting a lot of effort into your emails is admirable, but sometimes, marketers can overdo it — and that usually shows in overcrowded templates. A busy template, with too many elements and colors, can discourage people from reading your content and clicking your links. You can include different sections, but make sure they all come together in a cohesive, easy-to-follow style.
3. Tease your next email on social media
This tactic is especially effective if your emails contain exclusive content. Before every email you send, post a few teasers on social media to get people to subscribe. Let them know that the content is available only to your email list, and use this incentive long-term to boost your subscriptions.
4. Link your images
Are you adding links to every image you include in your emails? If you aren't, consider changing that. Images stand out in your email and can boost your clicks significantly. For instance, we noticed that an average of 12.50% of the clicks we get on our ZeroBounce newsletter come from images. In one recent campaign, 17.6% of the people who clicked chose to click on the image, not the call-to-action button. Clickable images create a better user experience and foster healthy engagement.
5. Segment your email data
Validating your email list is a must before you send another email. But is that email relevant to your entire audience? It's a question worth asking, as segmentation can boost your open rates by 14.31% Moreover, clicks are 100.95% higher for segmented campaigns, so it's worth reaching out to people with content made just for them. Use criteria such as gender, location, purchasing history and habits to delight your audience with better emails.
6. Target only the most active subscribers
If you want to give your email engagement and sales a boost, consider further segmenting your audience based on activity. With the right tools, you can find out what segment of your email list spends the most time checking their inboxes. Then, you can apply additional segmentation criteria and fine-tune your email so that it speaks to those prospects.
Related: 8 Proven Strategies to Get People to Open and Read Your Emails
7. Encourage replies
It's easy to do and it benefits your email program in several ways. First, encouraging people to reply to your emails shows how much you care about what they think. It can spark conversations from which you can learn more about your subscribers, so you can always improve your content for them. What's more, replies support your email deliverability, which means that more of your emails will go to the inbox instead of spam.
8. Make every email count
Did you know that Americans spend around five hours every day checking email? However, they open only 53% of the emails they get and deem only 31% of them "useful."
So, how can you make every email you send useful to your audience? The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, can help you stay on the right path. To keep engagement high, make 80 percent of your emails educational and only 20 percent self-promotional. In time, your prospects will come to see you as a source of helpful information, which will keep them opening your emails.
Want to make your promotions more compelling? Focus on the benefits instead of the product itself, and your clicks and ROI are likely to increase.
