Increase opens, increase clicks

Many companies complain of not obtaining the results they were hoping for from their email campaigns. It’s a tricky business, knowing what people want from an email – especially with an average of over 205 billion emails being sent and received each day. How can you keep up and get you message noticed?

Short, succinct content; with clear CTA’s

Try to keep your content short and relevant; it should entice leads to click through and make them want to view further information. The goal for most emails is to get the users away from your email and drive the traffic to your website where purchases, sign ups or data capture can take place.

Emails must have at least one clear call to action (CTA). The whole point of the content is to guide contacts toward taking action. Three CTA’s is an ideal amount for any email: one at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom. Be careful if you have too many hyperlinks or buttons, though, as it can discourage people from clicking at all. CTA’s should be clearly marked and obvious to recipients.

Images

Try to keep your emails as image-free as possible. Whilst a few pictures can help to make your email more visual, you won’t get any interest from clients if your email takes too long to load. In the business world, nobody has time to waste waiting around for some pictures to work, so make sure it looks okay without them.

Instead, use eye-catching headers and sub headers to get people’s attention, and even language that will entice them to read further on your website.

Subject lines

Subject lines should be less than fifty characters and should describe, rather than sell, the content included in the email. The use of popular industry trends, key upcoming events and current news will also result in better open rates.

Your subject line needs to be relevant, though. Using a misleading subject line will only result in a lack of trust from your leads, and this may mean they avoid you in the future, unsubscribe, or even spread negative reviews of your company.

Personalisation

Nobody likes receiving batch emails that lack and relation to their interests. They are often greeted with a groan of boredom and quick execution via the recipient’s spam or deleted folder. If that’s not what you aspire toward with your email campaigns, personalise your emails.

Segmenting your contact data into relevant groups will make it easier to send less general emails and instead get people engaged with your content. Use your CRM to sort people based on similar interests, making sure that your campaigns suit each contact more individually.

Using articles

If the goal for most emails is to get the users away from your email and directed to your website instead, as we established earlier, then the way to do it is with articles. Start a blog on your website, or publish other forms of content, and then link to them in your email campaigns.

Choose relevant links, for example only linking to lead generation if that’s all your contact has shown a need for. Keep descriptions short, or, even better, make the title of each piece as descriptive as possible so that a need for further explanation isn’t necessary.