Do you ever send an email to a subscriber and wonder if it’s been processed? You’d usually find out if you check your SPAM folder, right? Well, it’s different when you use a contact form from your website. These emails are tracked, so you know precisely when they’ve been opened and whether there were any clicks on a particular link or not.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business and connect with potential leads and customers. So, whether you’re brand new to email marketing or you’ve been doing it for a while, you can always improve your technique by knowing the right way to send email marketing triggers.
Personalized or Blended Emails?
You’ve probably heard the terms “personalized email” and “blended email” bandied about Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Essentially, these are emails that are tailored to a specific audience, which is usually defined by a previous action (like an email registration) or by the information the recipient entered (like a nickname or first name).
It used to be that businesses had one general email account that they would send out promotional and marketing emails from. But, with people having different tastes and preferences, it’s now common for businesses to have multiple email accounts, making personalized or blended emailing much more practical.
Why would you want to send personalized or blended emails? It’s not because you want to sell them a product or service, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s more about having one conversation with one lead or customer. You can get more personal by sending them a coupon code or discount that’s only good for them. Even when you’re sending a sales email, you can include a bit more personality by customizing it a little more.
5 Ways to Increase Open Rates and Revenue
The subject line of your email often determines whether your email will be opened or dismissed by your subscriber. So, to maximize your open rates and revenue, you need to experiment with different subject lines to discover which ones work best. Here are five tips to help you find the right subject lines for your email marketing campaigns:
1. Personalize it.
Your first instinct might be to write a generic email and then plug in their data little by little, as you go. But, that’s not the preferred method. The more you can do to personalize an email the more effective it is. Instead of using a template, write your email from scratch and incorporate details like their name. For example, if you’re sending an email to promote a product and you’ve obtained their email address through a lead generation form, you can write:
“Hello Andrew,
Thanks for signing up! I’ve got a product that can help you get started with photography. It’s called Camera Roll, and it’ll auto-populate with amazing stock photos that you can use to capture the memories you want to keep. You can learn more about it here:
bit.ly/2A89UX7“.
Not only does this email provide an accurate and personalized experience, but it also drives a little bit of personality into the email. The personalization doesn’t stop there, though. You can also incorporate their name into the subject line, as well as their location and any other data you have.
The benefits of personalization don’t stop there. If your email is personalized, it’ll likely be read and opened by the recipient. In one experiment, we tested sending personalized emails versus standard ones and discovered that the open rates were 15% higher for personalized emails.
2. Be relevant.
When you write an email, you need to make sure that the information is relevant to the person reading it. If you can’t think of anything relevant, it’s probably best to scrap the email and try again with something more exciting. But, if you did want to write about something that’s quite pertinent, you can use details like their name to make it more relevant. For example, if you’d like to send an email to a potential customer to promote a product, but you don’t know much about photography, you can write:
“Hello Michelle,
Thanks for signing up! I’ve got a product that can help you get started with photography. It’s called Camera Roll, and it’ll auto-populate with amazing stock photos that you can use to capture the memories you want to keep. You can learn more about it here:
bit.ly/2A89UX7“.
The benefits of being relevant don’t stop there, either. If you’re writing to someone who is quite pertinent to your message, you can be sure that they’ll see your email. In one experiment, we tested sending relevant emails versus non-relevant ones and discovered that the open rates were 17% higher for relevant emails. So, the next time you feel stuck for ideas, consider writing an email that’s relevant to the person you’re sending it to.
3. Keep it short.
The length of your email has a dramatic effect on whether or not it’ll be opened. In general, the shorter the better. According to studies, sentences get truncated and emails are often less than 200 words, so anything longer than that and you’re risking an auto-response that says, “Sorry, I didn’t understand.” If you have a lot of important information, you can always break it up into several shorter emails. Alternatively, you can shorten it even more by using tools that can remove the excess words – sometimes even a few entire sentences!
4. Test.
Testing is crucial when you’re finding the right subject lines for your email marketing campaigns. Because there’s a difference between what will get you a tingly feeling in the old parts of your brain and what will actually grow your business, you need to be sure about the results of your trials. To that end, you can use tools that will let you compare the open rates and engagement rates of various subject lines. For example, you can use the open rate report from HelloBar to compare the results of different subject lines for one of our marketing email templates. In one example, we tested the efficacy of different subject lines for this particular email and discovered that attaching a fun image raised the open rate by 8% and the clicks on the link by 23%.
5. Personal vs. Business
You’ll often hear businesses and brands described as “personal” or “professional.” While this can be a useful way to distinguish between the two, it can also be quite confusing. When it comes to email marketing, the line between personal and professional is quite blurry. That’s because when you’re marketing through email, the relationship you have with your customer doesn’t stop at the end of the transaction. This is why emails, whether they’re personal or business-related, are often referred to as “triggers.”
In our opinion, the best way to think about this is as a continuum. At one end you have quite obviously personal emails, like those you might send to friends, family, and other people you know and trust. At the other end of the spectrum, you have what we call “branded” emails. These are the type of emails that companies send to their customers, typically in order to market a product or service. So, essentially, you have one endpoint that’s extremely personal and the other that’s extremely business-like. To put it another way, whenever you’re sending out a marketing email, you’re always somewhere on the continuum. The closer you are to one end or the other, the more effective your marketing will be. Think about what would make each type of email more impactful. For example, if you want to get really personal, you could send them a diary that they can pour their feelings into. Or, if you want to go the other way, you could attach a funny meme or quote. Your choice, your approach, and in the end, your results.