Any professional website would seem incomplete without an online newsletter subscription feature. This has come to be one of the most cost-effective ways to build a large customer database and maintain regular contact with them. Email communication can market your new products and announce special offers, discounts and other promotional news while adding strength to your search engine optimization efforts. However, for this online marketing strategy to show the desired results, there are some etiquettes to be followed. It is how effectively you observe these simple rules that decide whether your email ends up as spam or not. Here are a few tips to increase the open rates of your emails.
- The most vital fact is that the email should reach the right audience. Otherwise, it will just end up as trash. An understanding of your receivers’ age group, interests etc will definitely help in maintaining a targeted customer database.
- Another important factor is the subject line and the “From” address of the mail. People tend to delete mails from unknown senders fearing spam and virus. Entering a short but catchy subject line and signing off with your company name will lend credibility to the email.
- Keep it simple. A highly formatted newsletter design with various styles, color codes and custom templates may take longer to open up; thereby increasing the possibility of being dumped during the loading stage itself.
- Once the email is open, the next step is to pin the recipient’s attention onto it. Of course, content plays a major role here. Be brief and precise to create a positive impact. Among the many mails in an inbox, your E-newsletter may get at the most a few seconds of your receiver’s attention. Capitalize on these few seconds with short texts that link to the relevant pages on your website.
- For opt-in emails, there must be an easy and efficient opt-out facility too. When people sign-up for newsletters, they expect to be able to unsubscribe at any point in time. A hassle-free, one-step procedure to unsubscribe would be ideal. If the process is complicated, users tend to brand your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing from the list. This will eventually lead to one or more of the ISPs blocking you.
So while E-newsletters help create a closer bond between the recipient and your company, the downside is that even small problems in usability will reflect sharply on customer relationship. Hence utmost care should be maintained in running email campaigns. Tracking the emails, analyzing their open rates and finding out how often the messages lead the recipients onto your website further steps-up the success rate of these campaigns.
