We all get a mountain of emails in our inbox every day and if you are like me, you skim through them very fast and delete without giving much thought.
Well, this is great when I have my consumer hat on but not so great when I change into my email marketer costume (you don't have one??).
So as a consumer what are the most important things that make you open emails?
For me, when I am in consumer mode, it comes down to two things.
First is the subject line and second is the sender.
Subject line
When you are sending email marketing campaigns, the subject line of your email must give people a reason to open the email. Your subject line must tell the recipient what is in it for them and why they should open your email in no time at all. If your subject line is dry and dull you are not going to get many clicks.
The next thing you should think about in your subject line is personalization, hence, by using the recipients' name in your copy. The reason this works is that when a person sees their own name they pause for just long enough to see what it is all about. This is when that interesting subject can grab them and get them to open the email.
When using SimplyCast's email marketing solution, you can place a code in your subject line that will automatically populate with your subscriber's name.
To do this, enter the mailing list field into the Subject line on the Sending page.
To find out what mail merge tag you want to use, you can go to the Compose Body section of the message editor and choose the area of the message you want to edit.
In the message editor, place your cursor in the body of the message and select the field you would like to merge by going to the MailMerge dropdown box and selecting the desired field. The field is then inserted in to the message body.
Here are a few common examples:
%%FIRST_NAME%% %%LAST_NAME%%
%%FIRST_NAME%%
%%COMPANY_NAME%%
You can then copy the selected mail merge tag and place it in the subject line of your message. Make sure you type it exactly as shown to ensure proper merging of your data from your list.
Sender
Now that I have looked at the subject line of your emails lets take a look at the sender.
The sender is you of course and what you are concerned about is the "From:" field.
The first issue when looking at the sender is consistency. You must be consistent with your "From:" field, meaning do not switch who your emails are coming from each time you send out a broadcast.
Your subscriber list will begin to build trust in you and recognize who you are and if you change who is sending the emails it is easy for your list to click delete before they know what happened.
The second thing you need to concern yourself with when it comes to your "From: " field is whether your email is going to be coming from you or your company.
If your email is from you, the "From:" field will have your name in it. If it is from your company then your company name will appear.
For example, when we send out a promotion to our customers, it will show up as from SimplyCast and not my name.
The thing to remember here is if you use a company name it has to be recognizable. If I receive emails from a person or company I don't recognize I will click delete without much consideration.
So to wrap up, if you are looking to push your open rate to the next level, try looking at your email marketing campaigns as if you are a consumer and not an email marketer.
If it helps, you can even borrow my hat.
