What’s your open rate for your email marketing campaigns? It goes without saying that the more people who open your emails, the higher your campaign effectiveness. But if your open rates are hovering in the single-digit percentages, it may be time to rethink your strategy.
Creating content that says “open me!”
Quick, what’s the most important section of your marketing emails? If you said the subject line, you’re on the right track. It’s the first thing recipients see, and if it doesn’t catch their attention, your message will be trashed unread.
The next essential part of your email is the copy. You can write the most compelling and relevant subject line ever created, but if your copy doesn’t live up to the promise, your click-through rate will drop.
For both subject and copy, the old standby AIDA marketing principle still applies. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Your subject line gets the Attention of your prospect, and your copy should follow through by generating Interest in what you have to say, Desire for what you have to offer, and Action that the recipient can take.
Sending the right message to the right people
Once you have your fantastically crafted marketing emails, there’s another step to increasing your open rate—building a strong mailing list. Many companies rely on a scattergun approach, creating lists of every email address they can gather from any available source, and then sending the same message to everyone. This results in low open rates, because not everyone on the list is looking for the same thing.
The best marketing lists are created using hot leads, those addresses collected from people who have shown actual interest in your company’s products or services. For even better performance, hot leads can be grouped into lists according to level of interest, area of interest, or target demographics.
When you send each of these groups a separate, targeted, and relevant marketing message that’s been created with strong copy and the AIDA principle, you can sit back and watch your open rates soar.