Heads up, Outlook users, there are some major changes coming up to strengthen the email ecosystem and protect inboxes. They have recently released new requirements and best practices aimed at strengthening email authentication for domains that send more than 5,000 emails per day.
These new requirements will introduce stricter standards by mandating the use of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC settings. Outlook is looking to modify, promote and implement industry-wide best practices to reduce spoofing, phishing, and spam, while giving legitimate senders stronger brand protection and improved email deliverability.
What does this mean for email marketing Outlook users?
Here’s what you need to know about Outlook’s latest requirments for users who send over 5,000 emails
What’s new?
For domains sending over 5,000 emails per day, Outlook will soon require compliance with SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Non‐compliant messages will first be routed to Junk. If issues remain unresolved, they may eventually be rejected. Senders will soon start requiring compliance with the following requirements:
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
Must Pass for the sending domain.
Your domain’s DNS record should accurately list authorized IP addresses/hosts.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
Must Pass to validate email integrity and authenticity.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)
At least p=none and align with either SPF or DKIM (preferably both).
Yahoo and Google users are going to see some major changes in their email systems this upcoming year. This 2024, both tech companies have decided to strengthen their email security protocols. This is to be accomplished by requiring additional authentication requirements for email. Users can expect to see these changes in full swing by February 2024.
Email marketing has proven to be a crucial tool to businesses. Email marketing allows businesses to reach out to customers and potential clients. However, the rise in the number of emails being sent out also causes problems. More emails subsequently means an increase in concerns regarding SPAM and other unwanted emails. In response to these concerns, Google and Yahoo plan on putting up some stringent policies regarding email authentication. These are especially true for users who send out an upwards of 5,000 emails daily.
These requirements primarily aim to assure users that the emails they receive in the inboxes are authentic. More than that, they allow users to easily subscribe and unsubscribe from email lists. Finally, they ensure that inboxes are free from any SPAM or unwanted emails.
Moreover, they plan on implementing the recognized best practices of email deliverability by making users authenticate their emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Anyone who refuses to comply with these policies will see their emails sent to SPAM, or have their emails blocked or delayed by the system.
What does this mean for email marketing users?
Here’s what you need to know to get ahead of these upcoming Yahoo and Google email authentication changes.
Email Authentication
Once the new policies are in place, authentication will be key to ensure your emails don’t bounce or end up in the spam folder. However, it is not enough to configure your Email Sending Domain. You will need to verify that your ‘from addresses’ are using your connected domain.
Moreover, you need to make sure that your domain is authenticated with the industry standard email authentication protocols: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Setting these three up will allow users to be verified under Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). BIMI signifies that emails that are sent through these domains are genuine, indicated by the brand’s logo being displayed alongside the sender’s name when it appears in the inbox.
Mx Toolbox is a tool that allows you to type in your domain in a search box, and complete a Dmarc lookup. It is totally free and comes back with a report that tells you if your Dmarc, Dkim, and SPF are set up properly. If there are any issues, it will show up in the report, along with tools and explanations to help you fix it.
Make sure that everyone on your email lists is able to easily subscribe and unsubscribe from your emails. This has been part of the best practices of email marketing for a long time.
Easily Subscribe
Ensure that everyone on your email lists is able to easily subscribe and unsubscribe from your emails. This has been part of the best practices of email marketing for a long time.
Unsubscribe in 1 Click
Don’t make unsubscribing unnecessarily difficult. Users should not have to actively search for an obscure unsubscribe button or click through various pages if they no longer want to receive your emails. Make sure this is clearly accessible and easy to do to avoid complaints.
Respect your users’ preferences and enable easy subscription and unsubscription processes. Not only will you adhere to Yahoo and Google’s requirements, you will build trust with your audience and improve their user experience.
Send Only Wanted Emails
It is essential that you are sending your subscribers content that they actually want to receive. Not only does this allow you to comply with the new email authentication requirements, it helps improve email deliverability and helps you maintain a good reputation among your recipients.
Here’s how to send out desirable emails that have a lower chance of getting marked as spam:
Provide Quality Content
Make sure you are sending your recipients relevant and engaging quality content. By all means relate it to your product, service or business, but make sure you are sharing things that your audience can directly relate to. Sending information that is deemed valuable is expected to get better reception and more clicks.
Track Your Emails
Be aware of how your emails are doing. You can monitor the engagement of your recipients by looking at open and click-through rates. In the same way, have a look as well at your spam complaints. Google users can use Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) for this. This tool allows users track how many people have marked their emails as spam. With this, users should target maintaining a 0.1% spam complaint level. Anything above a 0.3% spam complaint level is expected to be met with delays, as well as bounces, and other performance issues.
Clean Your Lists
Update and clean up your email lists regularly. Do this by removing duplicate and inactive subscribers. It is important to note that sending out emails to a smaller, more engaged list of recipients has proven to be more effective. This is compared to sending to larger lists of unresponsive recipients.
With all the changes to technology nowadays it can seem pretty daunting to keep up with email authentication policies. However, if you want your emails to successfully land in the inboxes of your audience, it’s best to get ahead and prepare for the chances to come. Ultimately, these new email authentication protocols are brought up with the security of users in mind. Of course it intends to protect users from spam and malicious emails. More than that, it executes what has been long known in email marketing as best practices.
What are the advantages of strategically using email in marketing your business?
In this podcast, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein continues the conversation with MarTech Podcast host Benjamin Shapiro about the advantages of email marketing. Here they delve into the different ways businesses can integrate email in their marketing strategy. In particular, they look into how you can use email as your sandbox for marketing strategies.
How can an email marketing strategy influence the stuff you’re doing outside the inbox?
CK: We work with a lot of B2B sales teams. So that can be sometimes startups. But it sometimes can be longtime established businesses that are really sales-driven for a long time. But now they’re trying to move into the digital marketing world, and finding their footing there. I see them really spin their wheels for a while because just like anything there’s a lot to learn before you really get to be an expert. What we’ve found is that, for instance, you could go and your digital marketing guy might say, “We can start a pay-per-click campaign and we can spend $5,000 for a few months. We can gather quite a lot of data. Then, we’ll start to get things tuned in and figure out what works. Maybe in six months, we’ll really start to see some ROI on that investment.” That’s a reasonable strategy.
For a B2B company, there’s so much variability in what’s going to happen after that lead converts from a Google point of view. Now they’ve got to convert as a sale for the sales team, as a customer for the business. Trying to get those two things working right, that’s the hard part. So that’s where I see an email marketing strategy being so valuable. It’s such an easy and affordable sandbox for you to play around in.
What are the advantages of an email marketing strategy?
If you’re a long-established business, and you’ve got an email list of past customers, past sales leads, and existing customers. You can take all those lists and start testing some campaigns. And it might take you a few days to put together the campaigns and the emails and orchestrate all that. However, you’re going to get data immediately. First, you’re going to look at the opens and clicks and all that and see if the email performed. Then you’re going to watch what happens with the salespeople.
Do they close any of those deals?
Once you start to get that feedback, you can go back and make some changes to the campaign. And then do it again. There’s almost zero incremental thoughts other than a little bit of time. Whereas in an Ad Words campaign (or really any digital platform), you’re going to have to rerun those ads and spend the same amount of money you spent the first time.
BS: So the idea here is that, A – for email you’re not paying on a per-impression basis like you would for your advertising. B – with an email marketing strategy you’re going to be able to collect your data faster than you would in a performance marketing campaign?
CK: Right. And it’s more directly connected to your sales data as well. Especially on our platform, it’s all in one place. So that makes it easy. But it’s just easier to marry those two data sets.
What are the challenges of an email marketing strategy?
BS: There’s a challenge with an email marketing strategy, which is you actually have to do the email collection. Think of your performance marketing efforts. You’re going to be able to go reach out and discover and find net new sales leads. Or you can do things like retargeting people that have already shown an interest in your products or services. Retarget the people that are on your website. But you don’t have to go through the process of capturing PII, somebody’s email address.
When you think about testing and figuring out what marketing strategies work, it seems like you’re in the camp of saying you should be testing with email because you know who those people are. Moreover, an email marketing strategy doesn’t cost you anything. As opposed to testing on people that don’t know, that you have to pay for.
What determines the success of an email marketing campaign?
CK: Of course for different businesses the former is not really an option. Or at least it’s not the strategy that they’re really focused on. In other words, you may be trying to break into a new market or expand into new territories or something like that. And there you may not have a lot of existing email addresses. That’s an issue you’ve got to address. You can acquire lists and if you do it right, and you do it in a careful way, it can be a great way to test your messaging. You can also run digital campaigns for the Ad words for the express purpose of building an email list. And then do further testing. It depends on the business.
The other thing that I’ve seen work really well is, if you have a list that you think represents sort of your ideal customers, like your best customers. There are services that can do look-alikes on those lists for you. They’ll help you start identifying them so that you can reach out to them via email, phone, LinkedIn, whatever.
How powerful is an email marketing strategy?
BS: That’s one of the powers of an email marketing strategy. One of the ways where you can use an email to drive efficiencies and test with your marketing is by running marketing activities to people that you know look like your customers. Often we’re thinking about email as an opportunity to directly sell to somebody that has shown an interest in the products or services.
But really what you can do is take the email addresses of your customers, of your target profile. The people that you have a high degree of certainty are going to convert. Go use the power of artificial intelligence through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, every performance marketing platform. Then say, go discover more people that look like this, that follow this profile.
There are several different ways to do that. And it’s super valuable.
CK: In fact, just going through that exercise gives you insights into who your best customer really is. You might be sitting in conference rooms with your marketing team. Maybe you’re drawing that persona on the whiteboard and making some assumptions. And then you perform this look-alike analysis, and you realize there are common themes there that you had never picked up on that are more easily identified.
For instance, it’s great to say “I always want to talk to the VP of production at the customers that I deal with”. But the problem is people don’t always have the same kind of titles. They always have different ways of stating those titles. It might be easier to identify things that you would never have guessed. Like 50% of our customers have an advanced degree, a master’s degree, or something like that. We can use that now to better target and really get our message to the right people who are going to have the highest ROI.
How else can you use an email marketing strategy to support your business?
BS: I think that there’s one last way that you can think about using email to support your marketing efforts and understand what’s working. We talked about how an email marketing strategy is cheap and easy. You can reach out to the people that have shown an interest. You can create lookalike audiences based on your email list. And you’re talking about enriching your data and figuring out what are some of the common threads amongst your most high-profile customers. Email is an easy channel to use to gather that data.
And you know what the trick to doing it is? You take the email address of your 10 best customers. Next, you compose unique emails and you schedule a meeting with those people. You ask them questions about the products or services that they’re interested in. Email is not only a form for marketing. You can also do your qualitative customer research by just reaching out to your customers.
This is not rocket science. Email is powerful because it gives you access to communicate, to talk about things outside of selling. You can actually ask your customers questions and they will give you the answers to what is important to them. You aggregate that data. Now you have a picture of who your customers are and what their interests are and how you can help solve their problems. Email’s a great way to actually reach your customers and ask them for their feedback.
At the end of the day, an email marketing strategy sort of sits in a unique place between marketing and selling.
CK: It’s more of a relationship tool than a lot of other marketing media. An email marketing strategy is also just so much more affordable in the long run that you’re crazy not to use it to experiment and learn.
BS: I absolutely agree with you. It’s one of the things that we’re focused on this year at the MarTech Podcast. We’re blowing out our website. We’re focusing more on building and relaunching our newsletters. And part of the reason is so we can capture some emails and better understand who our customers are. We want to better understand what their needs are and also have the ability to reach them. And that’s why email is such a powerful tool. Not only for direct communications, but for all of your marketing efforts.
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The MarTech Podcast tells the stories of world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success.
Creating a successful email campaign can be an overwhelming challenge. Especially when you’re learning a new tool or targeting new audiences. That’s why we created the Email Template Creation guide to help you with the process.
At SalesNexus, we’ve helped thousands of businesses succeed with email marketing. Over the past 16 years, we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Here are some of the tips and tricks to crafting effective email campaigns.
Mistakes to Avoid in Creating Email Campaigns
There are a few things that most newbies to sales email marketing tend to get wrong initially. Let’s make sure you don’t have to learn these things the hard way
Test early and often, then adjust
One of the great strengths of email marketing is that it’s very easy and affordable to try. It also provides instantaneous feedback about results.
So, you can send out an email today and see what happens… then make adjustments and do it again tomorrow.
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of performance. Too many first time email marketers spend WAY too much time trying to create the perfect email before they ever send anything.
Let Data be the Guide to Success
Use measurements of opens and clicks to tell you how to improve your email results. What customers will respond to is often very counterintuitive. Plan to use the open and click rates as a part of your strategy.
Keep it Simple
SalesNexus as an automated CRM can automate on-going sequences of emails. You can automatically switch each individual customer to the right sequence at the right time, based on their specific situation.
However, trying to figure out the specific sequences for every scenario in your business can be extremely overwhelming.
Start small and build over time..
The data should guide you to success. Start by creating the emails intended for the broadest audiences. Then, start using them and using the results and data to tell you what to do next.
Understand the Reader’s Process
The most common mistake made by newbies to email marketing is making the emails too long.
Understanding the environment of the reader helps to focus our emails on leading the reader forward step by step.
As you check your email today, think about your own thought process.
Do you love checking email?
Do you allocate lots of time reading long emails, responding, or taking next steps? Probably not.
Here’s a more typical process:
Busy executive has 5 minutes between meetings to look through the inbox which has 20+ new emails in it that have arrived since the last time they looked at their inbox earlier in the day.
Their goal is to quickly identify the important emails from customers, team members, and friends/family and then get rid of the rest.
They just don’t have time available to digest all the emails they get. They look at the From Address to find important people they recognize and start with those emails (that’s probably NOT your email!).
For the emails whose From Address they don’t recognize, they glance quickly at the Subject Line to see if it seems important or interesting.
Emails for which the From Address is not familiar and the Subject Line is not interesting are DELETED. That means they never look at your email. (not opened)
The emails that have an interesting Subject Line get opened, but are only glanced at for 1 or 2 seconds. A quick decision is made… Is the email engaging, clear and related to the Subject Line?
If so, the reader will invest a few more seconds reading the email.
If not, the email is deleted within 3 or 4 seconds of opening it.
Now you have their attention, it’s important to get to the point before they run out of time or interest. The reader at this point is saying “OK, I’m interested, how can you help me?”
If they see something to click on that seems like it can help, they will.
If they have to read 4 paragraphs to figure out what’s in it for them, they’ll either delete the email or leave it in their inbox, thinking they’ll return to it later… but, never will because they’ll be 100 other emails on top of it.
The point here is that we’ve got to keep it short and be clear about how we can help the reader or we’ll lose their attention before we ever get our point across.
Download the Email Campaign Creation Guide for more information on how to create effective email campaigns!
John Armstrong of Premium Medical Solutions and customer of SalesNexus.
Meeting the Covid-19 challenges has changed his business and caused John Armstrong to have to move from consulting and selling medical devices to target those people who are willing to buy medical devices because that is where his market is at the moment.
With SalesNexus, John Armstrong was able to focus on 1 product. He was then able to customize the marketing messages that would grab doctors’ attention and cause them to respond and click through the emails he sent out.
With SalesNexus, John Armstrong was able to create a email campaign with a video that really brought everything together – the entire process of customizing the database, understanding how to record, discovering those interested, and qualifying the leads. They received a good response rate and it allowed him to unleash the full potential of the database.
Timeline: 1 week and a half – you don’t have to wait months to see results!
Quick demo: How to turn contact data into sales leads
Take those contacts you’ve just loaded into the system and put them on a campaign.
Automate your campaign so that you can schedule multiple emails sent out over a specified period of time. You can set it and forget about it, assured that it will go out automatically.
Click on any of your customers in the system and you should have all the data you need when you make a warm call.
Make that call relatively quickly (while they are showing interest, reading your articles, opening your emails, watching your videos and engaging with your brand).
RampedUp empowers marketers, business owners, and sellers with actionable sales and marketing intelligence. The best information that you have is already in your database. They have a look at what you have internally and optimize that. They will add the titles, phone numbers, physical addresses and emails of people that you might not have.
Personal to Professional.
Often individuals register for events with their personal email address. RampedUp finds the professional information associated with the personal email address. They can also find a personal email address from a given profession email address.
Recover Old Customers.
Find customers that you have already invested in, or have previously invested in your business. They keep historical email addresses in their system. If you have an old email address of a customer you would like to market to again, they can help you find those customers and update your data.
Add New Contacts.
Once you have cleaned up your database, analyze it and figure out who is buying your stuff. Look at the commonalities of all of your customers and create look-alikes to those customers.
Sometimes all you have is a list of emails. You can send that information to RampedUp and they will validate those emails and fill in the data for the customers that you may not have, such as company names, contact information, LinkedIn urls, titles, and more.
The more information you have on a database, the more you can micro-campaign. You can take this data and tailor a very specific piece of content geared towards a particular audience.
Email Regulation.
Some people are hesitant to send emails because they do not know if it is legal to send an email to someone who hasn’t opted-in. An opt-in is basically saying, “I have email information, but I need to have the consent of the recipient.” You have to be mindful of that, because that may be part of a company policy.
It is important to be cognizant of the laws surrounding SPAM and emails:
USA: The CAN-SPAM law states you have to send thoughtful emails to individuals, provided that the information is germane. You have the address at the bottom, and the ability to opt-out.
Canada: With CASL (Canadian Anti-SPAM Legislation), to be able to email someone in Canada, you need their permission because it is opted-in.
Europe: GDPR (General Protection Data Regulation) may not be as restrictive as CASL because of legitimate business interest, but you need to have a legitimate reason to be emailing these people and have them opted-in.
USA (California): CCPA (California Consumer Protection Act) states that you have the right to be forgotten if you have personal consumer information. You have the right to know what that information is, and to be opted out of the database. It acts as transparency for consumers.
Multi-Media Strategies.
The Multi-media multi-touch strategy: some people may not necessarily be receptive to getting an email, especially if it goes against their company policy or if they haven’t opted-in. Call these folks, especially under this new reality with Covid-19. Calling them on their cell phone is going to be better than trying to get hold of them on their landline. Find both the professional and personal email addresses. The personal email address can be used for the very targeted display advertising, once you’ve figured out what you’re doing with that information.
Social Profiles.
Getting the social media information such as LinkedIn URLs (when it’s genuine and not generic) is an effective way to reach out and start a conversation with someone new. Personalize all your communication to make it more effective.
Email campaigns can be a great way for you to introduce your company and promote products or services. When you’re getting ready to send your first email campaign, especially if you have had no prior contact with the mailing list, you need to be sure you focus on optimization. It will allow you to get the most desirable rates so that those on your mailing list are likely to engage as opposed to unsubscribe.
Establish Relevance
Whether you purchase a list, take over the list of a previous company, sales team member, or anyone else, you need to establish relevance. You don’t want people unsubscribing from the email before you have had a chance to make a pitch.
Establish why you’re relevant to the people you’re sending the email campaign out to. Let them know who you are and why they should continue to read the email in its entirety. Maybe provide a teaser as to why they should make it to the bottom of the link (a coupon, a free trial, etc.).
Organize the Content
There are a lot of great templates out there to help you lay out the content you want to share with your email lists. However, it’s also very easy to get carried away and put too much information into the first newsletter. Just because you can add videos, photos, lists, side by side articles, and more doesn’t mean that you should.
Censorship is critical, which is why you need to take the time to organize the content. Make the first email more educational and introductory. Once you have made that initial contact, you can always send more information to them over the next several weeks. You may also want to consider setting up automated campaigns so that other emails send after a certain amount of time or based on the actions that are taken inside of the email.
Understand the Analytics
Your email campaign will contain a lot of analytics once you have sent it. Knowing how to read the analytics will help you to understand the success and make adjustments so that you’re able to have even greater success with the next email that you sent.
Bounce rate:
This refers to the percentage of recipients who didn’t receive your message because the recipient mail server rejected it. This is often as a result of using an invalid email address. However, it might also be as a result of using a “from” email address that is associated with spam, such as Gmail or Yahoo.
Opt-out rate:
This is essentially the number of people who are unsubscribing from your emails. They have chosen to opt-out, which means you lose them as a potential lead because you can no longer send them emails. This is common when relevance isn’t established or you send out too many emails in too short of a time period.
Open rate:
The open rate refers to the number of people who are opening the email. Most emails are opened within the first 48 hours. The “standard” open rate will vary based on demographics as well as industry. The open rate is linked with the subject line. The more enticing the subject line is, the more likely people will be to open the email.
Click rate:
This rate identifies how many people have clicked on a link within the email, such as to find out more information, enter a contest, or buy a product. Advanced analytics will also tell you which links were the most successful. If you have a call to action, your click rate will be higher than if you simply embed a link into the email campaigns content.
Knowing what to look for is critical. Focus more on the open rate and click rate than any other statistic on a first email. Particularly when you buy a list for the first time, the bounce rate will be higher. Test subject lines and call to actions so that you can learn how to be more successful with each campaign that you run.
You can have a lot of success with your first email campaign if you take the time to plan. When you want some assistance to ensure you have thought of everything, contact us at Sales Nexus.
Are you searching for a simple lead generation process that fits your budget? Lead Generation starts with building your list. When it comes to purchasing a lead list, there are two general options:
Purchase lead generation lists from specific industry groups that are very focused on markets you target. These tend to be the best, most up to date and accurate lists but, these groups are also often not willing to provide email addresses and lack other information that may be critical to your marketing and sales process.
Purchase lead generation lists from general data vendors like InfoUSA, Zoominfo or others. These tend to be less targeted, more broad and the cost of including email addresses can be extreme.
As a result, often companies leave it up to sales people to identify companies and then research the proper contact info themselves, one company at a time. Of course, this is slow and not the best use of your sales team’s time.
Here’s an alternative approach to building Lead Generation lists affordably and “at scale”!
Find a List of Target Companies
Industry trade associations often publish lists of members on their website, without the contact info. Another source is partner pages on related vendor sites. Trade shows often publish lists of attendees, speakers and exhibitors. Any list that’s very targeted to your products and services that includes the company name and location is sufficient.
Search for Names
Typically, each business will know the title of the person they would like to speak to within a targeted company. A free account on LeadFerret.com allows searching by company to see a list of employees with titles and more. Or, search LinkedIn for the company and click the “See All Employees” link. This will list all employees at this company, even if you’re not connected to them. And of course, you can visit the company’s website and look at their About Us page for executive names.
Find their Email Addresses
Add the contact names to your SalesNexus CRM with company and website URL. Then click the GetEmail button in SalesNexus and their email address instantly appears!
See how here:
Add them to a Lead Generation Campaign
Now add your targeted leads to an on-going email and calling campaign in SalesNexus.
To see how to create effective Lead Generation email campaigns, watch our Starter Kit video here:
In today’s market, online advertising is an integral part of your business plan. You need a user-friendly website for your customer to find you, and an email marketing strategy to promote yourself directly to your customer. Included in that strategy is coming up with a compelling subject line that would get your customers to actually open your emails.
A recently published study of email marketing subject lines points out the importance of using email analytics like open and click rates to optimize emails. The study illuminates some very counter-intuitive email marketing tips. Without analysis of email analytics, there’s no way most people could pick up on these tactics, except possibly by blind luck.
Why Subject Lines Matter in Email Marketing
Before we highlight some of these tactics, it’s important to know why the subject line is such an important factor in your email campaign success. After all, most spend far more time agonizing over the actual copy (text) in the emails and their design. The subject line is often treated as an afterthought. That’s a mistake.
Email marketing can be tricky. Think of your own inbox. How many emails are there? 80? 600? More? Many of them are even unopened. Junk emails flood your inbox every day, so you are selective about which messages deserve your attention. You depend on the subject line to filter out what information you decide to take in.
Your consumer is also selective
Many marketing emails go ignored, so you need a super subject line to reel in your reader.
The next time you check your email, pay attention to how you decide which emails to read. Most people scan the “From” column in their email inbox to find emails from people they know. Those emails are read first. Then secondly, most of us will scan the subject lines. Emails from people we do not recognize with subjects that sound like a sales pitch or just don’t sound interesting get deleted, often before we even open them and look at what’s inside.
So, a poor subject line can doom your entire campaign. The subject of your email correlates to the open rate. If your email is opened a lot, you’ve got a subject line that is doing its job. The Click Rate of your email campaign tells you how compelling the copy and call to action are, within the actual email.
Quick Tip: It’s natural to focus on the click rate because ultimately, it’s how many people responded to the call to action that matters to your business. You may see a low click rate and decide that your email copy, design, or call to action didn’t work. But, if your open rate was also low, then very few people ever even saw the email itself. Compute the click rate as a percentage of those that opened the email to more accurately assess the success of the actual email.
Set Email Marketing Expectations
Always set subscribers’ expectations about what kind of emails they will be receiving when they opt-in to your email marketing. If they sign-up for a monthly newsletter, don’t send them promotions. If they sign-up for special discounts and incentives, don’t send them a newsletter. Managing expectations will help your emails get opened!
Counter-Intuitive Email Subject Line Tips
Use Immediacy: “Today’s Call” performed much better vs “This Week’s Call”. Make your subject line immediate. Compel action NOW.
Don’t say Chat: The phrase “Check-in” performed 50% better than “Chat”
Similarly “Catch Up” performed 40% better than “Trying to Connect” – what is the result of the conversation, talk about the prospect, not you. “Next Steps” also increased open rates by 40%
Oddly, “Follow-up” performed 18% better than “Following up” or “Follow up”
Brevity: Subject lines with more than 5 words begin to have rapidly deteriorating open rates. 2 or 3 words are ideal.
Clearly, any human could easily get some of these subject line decisions wrong. This is why using your email marketing analytics to analyze the open rate is crucial.
One important tactic that the research shows is the power of speaking from the customer’s point of view rather than your own. “Trying to Connect” is what the salesperson is trying to do. The prospect doesn’t care. “Catch Up” or “Next Steps” are more about what will be accomplished during the call. That’s a crucial difference when you’re trying to get a business executive’s time. Of course, salespeople that do a good job of identifying the specific challenge the customer is dealing with can leverage that in all their subsequent emails and conversations. “Next Steps: Reducing <Company>’s Shipping Costs” conveys what will be accomplished in the meeting and why it’s important. It’s also slightly long… There is no perfect subject line!
Testing Your Email Marketing Subject Lines
Of course, one of the most crucial types of emails is a sales follow-up email. When a salesperson is following up after a presentation to a potential client or trying to reconnect with the prospect after some time has passed, using the wrong phrase in the subject line can doom the effort and the sale.
Depending on your email marketing services and system, you may have easy access to the open rates of emails. If most emails are sent one at a time by salespeople, open rates may be more difficult to measure. Most CRM software solutions offer email template sending capabilities. Ensure that the most frequent and most important emails are sent through a system that allows you to pull a list of subject lines, open rates, and click rates.
Test Your Subject Lines
A/B Testing is the simplest way to continually optimize your subject lines and your email marketing campaigns overall. Measure the open rate for the subject line you’ve been using, then create a new subject line and use the new one to send 25 or 50% of the time going forward, while continuing to use the old subject line for the remaining sends. This allows you to compare your new subject line against a baseline.
Even subject lines that seem to perform well can be improved with A/B testing. Trying changing punctuation, capitalization, and removing prepositions and other non-essential words. This type of testing can uncover breakthrough changes that point the way to entirely new campaigns.
The more you know about the specific things that your customers respond to, the more you can get their attention and compel their action.
Most emails are opened within the first 48 hours. The “standard” open rate will vary based on demographics as well as industry. The open rate is linked with the subject line. The more enticing the subject line is, the more likely people will be to open the email.
contact info. Another source is partner pages on related vendor sites. Trade shows often publish lists of attendees, speakers and exhibitors. Any list that’s very targeted to your products and services that includes the company name and location is sufficient.
