Are Your Business Emails Getting Opened?
You’ve spent precious time setting up an autoresponder for your business connections and writing thoughtful emails. However when you take a look at the numbers you’re not seeing conversions – or more commonly called, a good open rate.
Wikipedia defines the term email open rate as a measure primarily used by marketers as an indication of how many people “view” or “open” the commercial electronic mail they send out. It is most commonly expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the number of email messages opened by the total number of email messages sent (excluding those that bounced.)
Some Email Service Providers (ESP) also track unique email opens. Similar to an email open, unique email opens eliminate all duplicate opens that occur.
If your open rate is low, what is the missing element?
There are several important steps to keep in mind in order to encourage people to open and respond to your news and offers.
Whether your business utilizes a service like Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Infusionsoft there are three places to start in making your emails stand out. These include the open rate, bounces, and click-thru measurement. Most of these services offer details about this information when a list is generated.
Open rates also vary based on industry. According to a study by Mailchimp a small business had an average open rate of 22.1 percent, while a large company measured at 23.4 percent. Several top determining factors they reported were:
1. Boring subject lines – Headlines can be easily looked over if they appear just like any other email and don’t grab the attention of the reader.
2. Spam – When creating an email a filter is usually shown (depending on your service), which reveals whether your text will end up in a junk email folder.
3. Expired Email addresses – Sometimes people will allow their email address to expire, or may be temporarily unavailable due to circumstances such as a job loss, vacation, illness, etc.
In order for your business emails to be opened and then converted into sales it’s good to keep these statistics in mind and adjust accordingly. For example, you might want to create an email with a humorous or casual tone, and put your readers at ease with subject lines like these:
“Your Boss Will Love You If…”
“How was your Thanksgiving holiday?”
“Learn From Our Silly Mistake…”
The human approach always draws an audience as they can relate to your business from a more personalized way. And if you are reaching out to a specific target market or geographic region your business emails will be much more likely to be opened when including this information in the subject line such as, “For Florida Residents Only.”
Do you have something newsworthy or a shocking statistic to share?
Another great way to generate a response from your subscribers is to make a big announcement, include a shocking fact or statistic, and utilize a strong call to action in the body of your email. Phrases such as “read this,” creates a natural curiosity especially when it includes an offer that could benefit them.
When crafting an email campaign many businesses miss out on taking advantage of placing a limited time offer or creating a certain number of subscribers in their emails. A sense of urgency will prompt more opens and clicks on links. Additionally breaking information down into an exact number or list and on occasion using punctuation symbols like exclamation points and question marks will garner more attention.
While a winning email marketing strategy can help bring more sales for your business it will also increase your retention rate of current customers. And it is more important than ever to grab the attention of your subscribers with approximately 91 percent of consumers checking their emails each day according to ExactTarget.
Timing is everything when it comes to reaching out to the most prospects possible, and when your business creates a variety of eye-catching emails that grab the reader’s attention the opens and click-through rates are much higher. Most autoresponder services offer analytics and email previews to help you create a winning strategy. Take note of when your market is responding, which depends on your niche, and what headlines grab their attention the most for best results. With this information in you hand, you’ll create your very own rinse and repeat system for success.
Susan Gilbert
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