It’s no secret that businesses of every size and scope struggle to keep their audience engaged. After all, we live in the era of short attention spans, which means keeping your target market interested requires a specific strategy. With so many brands sending out emails on a regular basis, it’s important that yours stand out from the crowd.
If you’ve been struggling to boost your email open rates or Inbox placement, it might be time to take a step back and reassess your strategies. If you follow some simple best practices, you can begin seeing positive results almost immediately.
In this blog post, we’ll be going over some excellent tips we’ve learn from increasing the inbox placement for some of the world’s most influential companies we work with.
Strategies to Increase Inbox Placement
Send welcome emails
One of the best practices you can employ is sending welcome emails to your new subscribers. That way, you can build a long-lasting relationship with them from the get-go. You can thank them for signing up for your newsletter, introduce yourself, and provide a small incentive for staying subscribed to your emails.
Welcome emails are also a great opportunity to offer a freebie to your subscribers. You can use this freebie to provide value to your subscribers and show them that they made a great decision by signing up to your emails.
Make your audience feel special
Another email marketing best practice is making your audience feel special. To do this, you can segment your email lists based on the types of products or services they are interested in. Send emails that are tailored to each segment, making sure to emphasize their needs and interests.
You can do this by utilizing tools like lead magnets, drip campaigns, and email sequences. You can also use email retargeting to remind your audience about products and/or services they’ve previously looked at or added to their carts but didn’t end up purchasing. Send emails that are customized to each of your audience’s needs.
Always test your emails
Running A/B tests can help you identify which email marketing strategies are working best. You can use different subject lines, send times, and content to see which combination works best for your audience.
If a certain combination isn’t producing the desired results, you can discard it and test out a new approach. This way you can create emails that your audience will actually want to engage with and will allow you to see which emails are most popular among your audience and which ones aren’t receiving much attention.
Deep research your clients and target audience
The information you can get from your clients’ needs and interests, can always be applied to your email marketing strategies. You can perform simple online searches to learn more about the type of audience you’re working with.
For example, you can search terms like “pain points of small business owners” or “common problems with ” to uncover valuable insights. But you can also go a bit deeper and conduct in-person interviews with potential clients and/or survey your current audience.
Don’t overwhelm your clients with too many emails
You don’t want your audience to feel as though you’re spamming them. This will create a negative relationship with your subscribers and will significantly affect your Inbox placement. You should make sure to space out your emails. You don’t want to send out emails more than once per day, especially if they are long emails.
Lure your subscribers to the CTA
You can do this by creating strong CTAs in your emails. If you’re running a sale or promotion, you can create an email that includes the discount or the expiration date for the promotion.
You can also include social proof in your emails. This can be a simple statement like “ percent of customers who purchased this product also purchased ” or “ people were interested in this product today.” This can help to compel your audience members to click through and visit your website.
Plan your emails
You can improve your email marketing strategy by correctly planning your emails. This is the best way to ensure that your emails are consistent and on-brand. You can create a spreadsheet with dates, topics, and titles for each of your emails. Then, you can plug in the details of each email, like the content, images, and CTAs. You can also try scheduling your emails. This will allow you to create a calendar for your emails and know when your next email is due to go out.
Add a mysterious sense to your subject lines
This will compel your audience members to click through and engage with your email content. For example, you can use a subject line like “4 ways to optimize your business for the new year” or “7 reasons to ”. This will pique your audience members’ interests and compel them to click through and read your email.
Coherent content and design between your emails and website
If your emails and website are completely different from one another, your audience members might get confused. This will make them less likely to stay engaged with your content and will negatively affect your Inbox placement. If your emails and website match, your audience members will understand that they come from the same place and will give you more credibility.
Don’t buy lists
While we understand that there are many benefits to having a large contact list, we don’t recommend it for your email marketing strategy. The reason for this is simple: you don’t know who your audience is; if you have no idea who is receiving your emails, it’s almost impossible to build a connection with them and won’t see the results you’re hoping for.
We recommend that you focus on creating an organic list. While this might take a little while, it’s worth the effort.
Sync your client’s interests with yours
Successful email marketing campaigns are all about connecting with your audience on a personal level. When you learn more about your target audience, you will be able to send them the exact content they want to receive and this will result in higher open rates.
In fact, one study found that email campaigns that are more personalized yield a 139% higher click-through rate! However, you can only tailor your content to your audience if you fully understand who they are.
Mobile optimization
The majority of email is opened on mobile devices, so if your campaigns aren’t optimized you might end up losing clicks.
To ensure that your emails are optimized for mobile devices, make sure that you keep things short and to the point. You don’t want a mobile user to have to scroll endlessly to get to the end of your message. It’s also wise to include a “skimming tip” at the top of your message.
This way, readers can quickly identify the most important details of your email and decide whether or not they want to continue reading.
There are many email marketing best practices that will help you boost your Inbox placement. But if you want to see results, you need to be willing to put in the work. Do experiments and make adjustments where necessary to make sure that you’re addressing your audience’s needs.
Remember that mail marketing is a long-term strategy that requires consistency and lots of attention to details. When email marketing is done correctly, you can see a significant increase in positive rates and ROI.
