So you’ve got a great business model and you’ve incorporated email marketing as part of your efforts to grow your business? Now it’s time to take things to the next level. As with so many other aspects of life and business, there’s always room for improvement.
If you’re ready to boost the response rate to your email marketing efforts, follow these steps.
1. Encourage people to reply
This one seems intuitive, but a lot of mass email marketers forget to include it. Basically, you should include a call to action in your email efforts. This principle follows the old adage that if you want people to do something, you should ask them.
Of course, this advice won’t work if you’re sending your marketing newsletters from a “no-reply” address. Many marketers make that mistake, too. Email is a two-way street. Encourage people to reply to your email, and enable them to reply by giving them an actual email address in the “from” field.
Once you start to ask for replies, you’ll find that something not too surprising happens: people actually write back. This is where you want to make sure of one thing: that you reply to some, if not necessarily all, of the reply messages you receive. When you do that, you’re encouraging dialogue with regard to your brand. That’s a very good thing.
2. Draft emails in an actual email client
Avoid the temptation to use a mass mailer to draft your emails. Instead, use an actual email client, just as you would if you were sending that email to a single person.
Why should you do this? Because it will put you in the frame of mind that you are actually speaking to an individual as opposed to writing an email to the arbitrary “masses”. With such a mindset in place, it’s more likely that you’ll craft a marketing message that is more personal and less canned.
3. Put your name/company in the “from” field
As mentioned previously, you don’t want a “no-reply” address in the “from” field of your email. Take that advice to another level and make it as personal as you can. Place your name and company in the “from” field.
Follow this tip and you’ll accomplish two things: 1) your recipients will immediately know who the email is coming from and 2) they’ll know that the email is coming from a person, not an email bot. Both are likely to encourage the recipient to open and read the message instead of sending it to trash unopened.
4. Check that your emails are not ending up in spam folders
The last thing you want is for your marketing emails to end up in the spam folders of your recipients. You need to make sure that is not happening.
Here’s how you do that: make your own personal email address a recipient of your email marketing efforts. If you have multiple email accounts, directed to different sets of email clients, then make sure all of them are represented.
After you have sent out a marketing email, check your own inbox(es) to be sure that the email got to the recipients instead of going to their spam folder.
5. Use a checklist
Before sending out any email, make up a checklist that will ensure that everything is as it should be. Then use it for every mailing. Checklists are great, because when you use them, you don’t have to rely on your memory.
Some things you might want to include in your checklist: spell-checking, functioning links, grammatical errors, and properly functioning .
Whatever you put in your checklist, the most important thing is that you use it consistently. Exercise the self-discipline to go through it before every email goes out; otherwise, Murphy’s Law will guarantee that something slips through the cracks.
