How to Get Recipients to Open your Email?

Email marketing has forever been changed with the arrival of spam emails. Spam emails somehow lessened the effectiveness of email marketing. Even the legitimate emails are now being filtered or worse it gets deleted without being opened by fed-up recipients.

But do not let this get you down because according to research email is still the number one activity (online) of Americans. The advent of smart phones made email marketing even better because customers are able to get emails right away. The opportunities for creative email marketing are only continuing to expand.

The return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is still higher as compared to other channels of online marketing. So to speak spam emails did not dampen your chances of being successful in email marketing.

As what I have mentioned earlier there are times that your email gets deleted by recipients without opening it at all. So here are a few tips that you can follow to make sure that your email marketing strategy works and to get your recipients to open the email you send.

But before let me tell you that it is the third article in the email marketing series, you can find the others here…

Email Marketing Design – 7 Tips to Better Email Marketing Design

Effective Newsletter – 7 Tips to Make Newsletters Effective

Okay, here are the tips:

Get Recipients to Open your Email Tip #1: Make sure that your “subscribe” and “unsubscribe” list is well managed

If you want to harness the profitability of email marketing you need to constantly clean-up your “subscribe” and “unsubscribe” list. This will keep everything in order not to mention it will lessen your headache. This is advisable especially for those people involved in email marketing but do not have an automated system for managing subscriptions to their opt-in list.

If there are unsubscribe requests then be sure that you honor those requests in a timely manner. If you fail to remove people who requested to unsubscribe then you might find yourself in trouble because these people might feel that you are spamming their email. Problems will arise if you still send email to them after they have requested to unsubscribe.

Your “subscribe” list is just as important as your “unsubscribe” list. It is important that people under the “subscribe” list are subscribed right away because for all you know one of your subscribers might end up as being one of the best customer you will ever have.

So how will this get your email opened? If your “subscribe” and “unsubscribe” requests are not managed automatically, then you need to take care of that yourself BEFORE you send out any email. By managing your list then you are assured that it is current and it also means that you do not have to deal with this chore on a daily basis.

Get Recipients to Open your Email Tip #2: Remove Duplicate Addresses

Another helpful tip that you can do to get recipients to open your email is by making sure that you do not send it to them twice (or even more in some cases). Before you send out your emails make sure that there are no duplicate emails in your list.

There would be always some people who will opt-in your list then come back (in case they forgot) and sign-up again. So, now they have two sign-ups with you.

Of course these people are more than happy to receive an email from you that is why they subscribed however getting an email from you twice is not a good thing. You will not get recipients to open your email if they feel that you are spamming them. Aside from not being able to get recipients to open your email is that they might report you as a spammer and unsubscribe from your list.

So instead of people complaining, check your list and remove duplicates and in doing so you will get your recipients to open your email.

Get Recipients to Open your Email Tip #3: Check your bounce-backs (bounces)

It is important that you check your bounce-backs because it will help you to clean your list. You need to decide what needs to be removed and which ones should be sent again.

If you are wondering what are bounce-backs or simply bounced, these are messages that were not delivered successfully due to some reason. It is common sense that if you want recipients to open your email then first thing you need to make sure is that they receive it, right?

There are two types of bounces that soft and the hard. You need to take note of the hard bounces because these are messages that will NEVER be delivered.

Since hard bounces are messages that cannot be delivered ever, then there is no point in keeping it there so you might as well delete those. Also, sending email messages to a dead address might result to problems in the future.

Take note that dead addresses is a tool used to trap spammers and if you send repeated messages then for sure problems will arise.

Get Recipients to Open your Email Tip #4: Keep subject lines short

What you can do is look at the subject line from your inbox. Does it stand out from the others? Does the subject line spur any interest? It would be to your advantage if you keep it short because the shorter the subject line the more interest it creates.

According to research and other email marketers as well that to get recipients to open your email you have to keep the characters less than 41. Having less than or exactly 41 characters in the subject line have bigger chances of being opened. So my advice, keep it short and sweet.

You do not have to explain everything in the subject line to get recipients to open your email; you just need to give enough information to make people want to open the email to read more.

Get Recipients to Open your Email Tip #5: Capture readers’ attention with personalization

One of the best techniques in my opinion to get recipients to open your email is to use their name. No other single technique will increase the response rate of your emails as much as personalization.

By personalizing your subject lines, you also make your email come out more reliable and safer to open, because recipients will be more likely to view your email as coming from someone they trust.

Doing all this manually is a lot of work so, I suggest you use an autoresponder to make everything easier Click Here To Know How