At the end of the day, there are only four things any email marketer wants to happen with an email they send. They want recipients to see it, open it, read it, and respond favorably to it. It’s not rocket science, but there are some tips and tricks to make these things more likely, starting with why you’re sending the email in the first place.

Know Your Why

Nothing will frustrate a customer or prospect more than getting spammy emails. And nothing will make them hit “unsubscribe” faster than receiving multiple spammy emails. Here’s the kicker: for some folks, spam is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, before you hit “send,” ask yourself how the reader will benefit from receiving this email. What’s the tangible takeaway?

For example, announcement emails are great, but announcing that Joe from accounting got a promotion does nothing for the reader. They don’t care about that. Joe does, but your reader doesn’t. If, however, to celebrate Joe’s promotion, you’re offering 15% off their next order, well, that’s a different story. Now everybody loves Joe because, whether his promotion is merited or not, he saves them money.

Some good reasons to send email:

• Thank you emails to confirm an order or registration
• Welcome emails for new subscribers
• Invitations to a relevant event
• Product releases
• Sales and promotions
• Order updates
• Re-engagement emails to folks who have previously shown interest (e.g. Items left in cart)
• Nurture emails that help new customers/subscribers get to know your company (Pro tip: use with caution. This is not a historical account about how your warehouse used to be 200 square feet and now it’s 20,000 square feet unless that retelling holds a tangible benefit for the reader and not just an ego boost for a founder.)

Not good enough reasons to send email:

• Because “we send an email every week, regardless.” No! This leads to fluff and redundancy. Your recipients haven’t marked their calendar to know when an email “should” be arriving.
• To bash a competitor’s misfortune (self-inflicted or not). Play nice.
• Ranting about a current event that in no way impacts your readers.
• Ranting about a current event that directly impacts your readers. Educate, inform, and advise, but don’t rant. People’s attention spans aren’t that long.

Okay. Now that we’ve addressed the awkward stuff, we can move on to what we promised in the introduction.

Make Sure Your Emails Are Seen

It seems like a no-brainer, like an insult to your intelligence to say that you want your emails to be seen. Duh! That is the goal… But do you know for certain that every email you send lands in the recipient’s inbox and not their spam folder? That’s the difference between it being seen and it being lost forever in the landfill of cyberspace.

The good news is that, if you follow best practices, the odds are in your favor. According to Hubspot, 99% of email users check their email every day, and some check it multiple times a day. It’s not like the mailbox at home that grows moss and collects cobwebs between opens. People are looking and looking significantly increases the chances of seeing.

Best practices start with having a clean email list. That means everyone on your email list agreed at some point to receive emails from you, that the email addresses are valid and current, and that you’ve removed anyone who requested to be unsubscribed. Inevitably, this leads to discussions about bounce rates. Emails bounce for any number of reasons, classified as hard or soft bounces. A hard bounce occurs when the email address is invalid. Emails sent to that address will always bounce. Soft bounces occur when the email address is valid but, for some reason, the email could not be delivered when it was sent. Soft bounces might occur when the owner of the inbox sets up an autoreply letting senders know they’re out of office, when the inbox is full, when there is a problem with the server or domain, or any number of other technicalities that could prevent delivery. Soft bounces often mean email can be sent to that email address in future. Delete any email addresses that indicate hard bounces. If you’re unsure whether it’s a hard bounce or a soft bounce, you can delete the address after three bounces to buy some time. Keep in mind that the more bounces your emails cause, the less likely they will get past spam filters in the future.

That leads to a discussion about compliance. Legislation like GDPR and CAN-SPAM exists to protect consumers from spammers. Essentially, these acts remind companies to use their manners when communicating via email. In other words, follow the rules or find your emails in a cyber abyss. (To learn more specifics about compliance, click the words GDPR or CAN-SPAM earlier in this paragraph.)

Assuming your list is clean and you’re compliant, there are a couple of additional tips to ensuring your email is seen. Send them at the right time. Think about when you check your email. You’re unlikely to read the less timely emails when you’re bogged down with work. Most people are less likely to read a marketing email on a Friday, because they’re already in weekend mode. The best day of the week to send an email is Tuesday for the highest performance. Sundays are the worst, likely because they are viewed through the lens of Sunday scaries. The best time of day is right before or right after lunch.

The cynics among you are asking, “What difference does it make when I send it? They can read it whenever they want to.” This seemingly logical argument is faulty. The highest open rates happen shortly after an email is sent. In fact, 21.2% of all email opens happen within the first hour. In other words, people tend to open emails once they see them, provided they’re interested in what they think they contain.

Ensure Recipients Open Your Emails

You have a good reason for sending an email. You’ve done what’s necessary to ensure recipients see it in their inbox. The next step is getting them to open said email. That responsibility lies with the 70-character subject line. Why just 70 characters? The open rates are better, likely because the full subject line can be seen on mobile devices. Subject lines and preview texts should let readers know what to expect without giving away the secret sauce. You want the subject line to be enticing, not deceptive. You’re building trust with your readers.

That brings us to the second tip for getting folks to open your emails. Offer consistent value. This goes back to knowing your why and having valid reasons for sending emails in the first place. As you build trust, recipients will know that your emails are worth their time. 

Finally, audience segmentation makes it more likely that the right message will be opened by the right person at the right time. Segmentation allows you to deliver targeted messages that are most relevant to a particular audience. Ninety-percent of email marketing professionals report that segmentation boosts email performance.

While email performance begins with an open, it doesn’t end there.

Encourage Recipients to Read the Email

Imagine a recipient seeing your email, being enticed by the subject line, and opening it only to see a formatting nightmare that doesn’t fit the screen of the device they’re using. How likely do you think they’ll be to troubleshoot just so they can read it? Right. Not very.

Your marketing emails should be responsive so they can be read on any device from a smart phone to a tablet to a giant desktop monitor.

Secondly, personalize the email whenever possible. That starts with addressing the recipient by name. People like seeing their name, even though they know it’s not being done manually, it feels special. Hint: if you use a merging system to send bulk emails, please be sure that you have names in all the name fields so nobody ends up opening an email addressed to “[first name]”.

Leave plenty of white space and include images to break up large chunks of text. No matter how great the writing, people feel overwhelmed by too many words and will just skip the chunks looking for the closer.

Most importantly, assume nothing. Don’t assume the reader has pored over all your other emails, knows your brand well, or understands the event you’re promoting. Think about things from the reader’s perspective and tell them a story they can relate to and see themselves in. All these things make it more likely they will respond to your email favorably.

Direct Readers to Respond to Your Email Favorably

Everything has been leading up to this. The compliance, the subject line, the reason for sending an email is all in pursuit of the favorable response. “Favorable” will be defined by the “why” of the email. For example, if you send an email promoting an upcoming event, the first favorable response would be clicking the link to learn more followed by an even more favorable response of registering for the event. The problem, though, is making sure readers know exactly what you want them to do next. You must point them to the favorable response. This most often happens with a clear call to action (CTA). Surprisingly, the wording of a CTA can impact its performance. That’s why professional email marketers use A/B testing to determine which message does the trick. In the previous example, would it be, “Register Now” or “Learn More?” You’d have to do the testing to know how your audience feels about it.

Don’t be afraid to ask readers to buy something, either. Consumers spend 128% more when shopping from emails than when using other methods. Those odds are definitively favorable, assuming you followed all the steps leading up to this point.

Is Email Marketing Worth It?

It takes some effort and some practice, but you can do this. Is it worth it? Absolutely. According to Statista, 52% of email marketing professionals reported that their email campaign ROI doubled between 2022 and 2023. Doubled! That’s 100% improvement. Worth it.

A Brief Postscript

Only 9% of marketers say their email marketing platform is well integrated with other online systems. That complicates matters. Fortunately, SAGE users have all the integrations built in: CRM, AI assistance, segmentation, analytics, and more. Want to learn more about how SAGE incorporates email marketing into SAGE platforms? Contact an advisor today.

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