Tips for Increasing Reply Rates in Email Marketing
Just Like link building, email marketing is a lot of effort. Imagine spending hours designing and drafting an email, building a huge email recipient list and then sending emails to all them on the list just to see handful replies of which a few could be even negative would really be very annoying.
The success rate of emails is not just a count of open rate and click rate. The main factor here is – how many positive replies are received for your emails. The reply rate determines the success of your campaign. Here are a few tricks to boost up the reply rates of Emails.
Subject Line – The first thing that catches the eyes of an email is its subject line. This is the portion of the email that is displayed first. So, making the subject catchy and try to earn a fair amount of trust by the words used in the subject line. Go ahead and give a personal touch to the subject line by using the name of the recipient. Do not mislead the reader by giving good subject but disappointing the reader by having a total disconnect content in the email. So, carefully draft your subject line, to pack the greater message of the email content in a few words. You have crossed the first step if you have a subject line that makes the reader open the email with an intent to read further.
Email Body – once the reader has opened the email, the first look at the email should not annoy him. If you have only a big content to read without and highlights then the reader for sure will move on to his next email. To keep his interest continuing, you will need to have some images, call to action buttons and size of the email should be moderate. The first few lines of the mail are very important. It should be appealing and engaging. Keep the first few lines dedicated to the reader so that he knows that there is something in it for him.
Next step should be to give your message, as to what you want for the customer. Keep the message direct and let him know about your objective of sending the email in a few words. Once your message is out and clear, quickly end the email with a good closing note. Be courteous and show appreciation to the reader for his time.
End on a high note – use closing words that a pleasant and include your signature and other useful details to the reader.
Segment your subscription list
After spending a good amount of effort creating a great email… just sending bulk emails to hundreds of subscribers is of no much use. Spend some time segmenting customers based on few criteria like – age, interest, gender etc.. And then send emails that are in relevance to these segments. For eg – an email marketing for a current trend of fashion to readers whose age is >60 is of no use.
So, if you have segmented your reader’s list based on age, you can target your email marketing campaign for the appropriate age group. This increases your response rate as you are trying to calculate the response rate against a relevant reader list. Now, instead of sending 1 email to 100 users you probably will create 3 or 4 emails to target each segmented list with content that is relevant to the segment.
You may probably not hit 100% response rate. But you could achieve a good amount of success by following a format that suits you the best. Having a crisp and clear content, giving a personal touch and showing benefits of the customers in the email should better your response rates.
