How to Navigate Your Email to Your Audience’s Inbox

Are you a marketer struggling to craft the perfect emails that your target audience would want to open and read? Whether you like it or not the success of your email marketing campaign depends on the open rates you get. You cannot generate business opportunities through a potential customer if there's no one to read your emails. More than 20% of your marketing emails never make it to the audience's inbox, so you must proceed with careful planning, patience, quality content, a landing page with relevant information, and a well-vetted list of recipients.

While an email marketing service is still one of the most effective channels to reach and convert clients, it only works if your subscriber actually opens and reads your direct mail.

Before you go ahead and work on your next email campaign, ensure to:

• Find out how many people currently read your emails and what your current open rate is. This will help you determine where you stand, what goals you need to set, what is the count of your email subscriber, how popular are you on social media, and also find possible loopholes.
• Make your messages tangible and valuable and resonate with the subscriber at the exact moment they see your personalized email.
• Ask yourself, "What's in it for the audience?", "What value are they getting out of your marketing automation effort?" and "Does this address their pain points?"

The trick here is to figure out how your marketing emails end up getting opened and not in junk, spam, or other useless folders. With these following strategies, your emails won't just end up in your target audience's inbox and but also act as triggered emails and can also catch their attention.

A Fresh List Is a Well-vetted List

To keep your email subscriber list active, consistently email them and periodically remove those inactive subscribers that have not engaged with you for the past 6 months or more. But do try to engage with them as a last email marketing automation effort before you get rid of them for good. Take a look at this example of a last-ditch-effort email by HubSpot.

Having a clean list is crucial to success for an email service provider. Of course, you won't recapture all of your prospects but this will let you focus on the ones that care. That way you know it's not a wasted effort.

If You’re Not Testing Those Subject Lines, Well Then What Are You Doing?

To determine the impact of your subject lines, you should always A/B test. But how do you develop the right subject line for A/B test that aligns with your objectives? How do you indicate your email marketing tool to let the right queries?

In your A/B test structure, choose a factor that you think might strengthen your email marketing strategy in terms of open rates and conversions, and start there. Make sure to test the length of your subject lines in your email marketing software, compare the deliverability of targeted emails, email newsletter, welcome email, and how your audience responds to each of them.

Regardless of the product or the digital marketing campaign, remember to stay away from shooting yourself in the promotional foot - do not lead with a subject line that's full of spammy trigger words and appears like a transactional email. Every worn-out promotional promise in your message will cause another tick to the spam category which you don't want. Even moderately suspicious content has a high chance of being relegated to the spam folder before anyone can ever see it.

When writing new subject lines, make sure to keep them short and to the point. Your subject lines should be relevant to the message of your email marketing campaign. If you ever want your subscribers to open your emails again, your email template must always deliver the promise in your subject lines. Whether your email content is short and sweet or personalized and specific, you must find out what your subscribers like best. This is one of the email marketing best practices to follow. 

Get Smart with Email Segmentation

Before they decide to open your email, your subscribers always see whether it’s relevant to them or not. To tackle this, start by segmenting your email list. According to Lyris, 39% of marketers who segmented their list experienced higher open rates, 28% of them experienced lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% of them experienced better deliverability and greater value.

Based on the purchase behavior, you can start adding tags to your subscribers so you can divide them into smaller groups or segments and then target them for your brand awareness activities. Once they convert into paying customers you can send them different types of automated email as per the relevancy. The other great thing about this tactic is you can also segment your list based on demographics, locations, or interests, existing customer lists, if any, and find out how they ended up your email list in the first place.

Once you've got these segments done, it will be much easier for you to align your subject lines and messages that can entice your target audience and potential email client to notice and engage with your email marketing campaigns.

When Is the Right Time to Email?

The time you choose to send out your emails is crucial as it has a bigger impact on whether or not your subscribers will open them. As mentioned earlier, from the A/B tests you perform you can figure out the right time that works for the people on your mailing list. Perform these tests to determine which timeframe works perfect and explore those in your future campaigns. This email marketing tip is underrated but highly important. 

According to Mailchimp, the best time to send your emails are on weekdays. Mailchimp also discovered that, as per the time zones, 10 AM is the optimal time of day.

But, while diving deeper into it, they found that the kind of dynamic content they sent through their email automation service also had a significant impact on the location, age, and occupation of the recipient just as much as it did on time.

This example by Optinmonster sums it up pretty well - imagine a day in the life of your particular audience. What are they doing in the morning, afternoon, and evening? What does their workday look like? How late do they stay up at night? How early do they rise in the morning?

All of these factors are crucial before you use this strategy in your email marketing plan. 

You Must Follow the Best Opt-in Practices

Coined by Seth Godin, "permission marketing" means that you market and advertise = goods and services only after your audience gives their consent. The result of that is higher engagement and open rates while also showing positive results in the customer journey.

After the GDPR went into effect, email marketers need to ensure that their programs are compliant. As an email marketer under the GDPR you need to collect freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent. Unless you've got the positive opt-ins from your target audience, you just have to assume they are just not that into you even if your email deliverability rate is high.

What You Should Do

Email list open rates are the 'top funnel' of email metrics as they have a domino effect on the rest of your program. Make sure to constantly experiment with your campaigns even on a mobile device to determine what works best, given that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Along with your own solutions, incorporate these strategies to get better results and growth for your business.