13 Email Marketing Hacks to Help Improve Your Holiday Conversion Rates With the holiday season right around the corner, now is a great time to get your A-game email marketing ready.
By Jonathan Long •
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With the holiday season right around the corner, now is a great time to get your A-game email marketing ready. According to technology market research firm The Radicati Group, there will be 196,300,000,000 worldwide emails sent and received every day in 2014. Yes, that is nearly 200 billion emails sent out and received every single day.
In reality, most business email marketing is ineffective. It doesn't grab the recipient's attention or the emails get deleted without being opened. Use these 13 email marketing hacks to create emails that capture your customers' attention, receive a high open-rate and produce conversions for your business.
1. Have a plan.
Blindly throwing together an email message and sending it out without a plan in place is completely unproductive. What is your goal? If every single person on your email list opened the message what would you want him or her to do? Visit a particular page on your website to read additional information? Click through and land on a product page to complete a purchase? Identify the goal before you do anything else.
Related: 5 Secrets to Smarter Email Marketing
2. Use short and sweet subject lines.
According to salesforce, subject lines fewer than 10 characters long have an open rate of 58 percent, which is significantly higher than the industry standards as reported by Constant Contact.
3. Pique curiosity.
Your subject line needs to pique the recipient's curiosity -- its job is to get the email opened. Avoid too many details. You want your recipient to think, "I need to know more!" as soon as they glance at the subject line.
4. Use capitalization in your subject line.
Does "Get 13 email marketing hacks now" or "Get 13 Email Marketing Hacks Now" grab your attention better? The use of capitalization throughout your subject line sparks more engagement.
5. Personalize your emails.
Your recipients are more likely to open a personalized email that is addressed to their first name. First and last name is a bit too much, and no personalization reeks of a mass-spam message.
6. Send tests to multiple devices.
Prior to deploying an email message, make sure that you test it on several devices. HubSpot has discovered that 80.8 percent of users report reading email on mobile devices. We live in a mobile world so be sure that your messages are flawless on mobile devices.
7. Craft your message to satisfy your subject line.
A great subject line gets your email open, but that is just half the battle. Your message must satisfy the curiosity that triggered its opening. If you insinuate something in your subject line make sure your email message delivers.
For example, if your subject line mentions email-marketing hacks, be sure your message delivers email-marketing hacks rather than something unrelated. Many companies will craft a clever subject to get the open but fail to deliver what is implied -- that results in loss of interest from the consumer and more than likely an unsubscribe.
Related: The Top 10 Ways to Re-Engage Dead Email Subscribers
8. Invite your recipients to reply.
Imagine if a potential customer is reading an email and has a question when they reach the end. They typically see the standard can-spam required sender information -- company name, address, contact info and an unsubscribe link. Place a very simple "If you have any questions at all just reply to this email -- we read every message sent to us and respond within 24 hours" at the end of your emails and welcome replies.
9. Ask questions right before your calls to action.
Asking a question peaks interest, so doing so right before you present a call to action is a great way to increase its conversion rate. A simple "Want amazing email marketing hacks that will help boost your conversion rates?" right above a button with simple "Access Email Hacks" text will perform better than one without the question.
10. Use buttons for your calls to action.
Instead of linked-text calls to action such as "click here," use bright buttons. Large buttons draw attention and if your subject line and email body do their job, the reader is going to be eager to click a big bright orange or red button.
11. Proofread your emails before hitting the send button.
Always have a couple different people read your emails before you send them. Catching simple grammar mistakes before sending it to thousands of potential customers can really save face.
12. Resend your email to those that didn't open it.
Just because someone doesn't open your email it doesn't necessarily mean that they are not interested in your offer -- after all, they haven't seen it. Don't be afraid to resend your emails to those recipients that didn't open it the first time.
13. Split-test everything.
At Market Domination Media we split test every part of our email newsletter. We send out multiple variations every time, split-testing templates, subject lines, message length, time sent and calls to action. We keep track of all the data and use it weekly to improve our email performance.
Do you have any email marketing hacks to add to this list? If you do, leave them in the comments section below!
Related: 8 Ingredients of an Off-the-Charts Email Marketing Campaign
