7 Practices that Improve Your Email Response Rates as a Marketer 

Email marketing is one of the most marketing opportunities a business can pursue. With so many of us having an email, it’s a more guaranteed way of getting your message or intentions to your target audience over paid advertising through social media or online. Many businesses utilize email marketing to build relationships with customers and improve upon sales revenue. With 64% of small businesses using email marketing to reach customers, it’s certainly something your business should be doing. In this guide, we’ll look at the importance of email marketing and seven practices that can help improve your email response rates as a marketer. With the right methods in place, you help ensure every effort made within your email marketing strategies isn’t going to waste.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is sending a commercial message to a group via email. There are four types of email marketing: email newsletters, acquisition emails, retention emails, and promotional emails. Each type has a certain target that it’s trying to achieve, whether it’s to provide general information on the business or it’s attempting to sell something that’s new to the market. Every email sent is an opportunity to acquire a potential customer or to improve the relationship and commitment from an existing one.

How Is Email Marketing Beneficial for Business?

There’s a reason why 70% of professionals use email to share content related to the business or industry they’re in. Email marketing proves to be highly effective for many businesses, regardless of their size. It presents an equal opportunity for every company to reach its audience and hopefully provide more success for the company going forward.

Puts Your Marketing Budget to Better Use

With more effort into your email marketing, it’s going to put your marketing budget to the best use. The ROI you get is crucial for widening those profit margins as a business. A marketing budget can be limited for some businesses, meaning every dollar spent counts towards success.

Creates Stronger Relationships With Your Customers

With good email marketing, it helps contribute toward stronger relationships with customers. Your customers will only be loyal to your business if they have a reason to be. Sometimes, your products or services aren’t enough to maintain their commitment to your business.

Builds Credibility and Reputation

Regular email marketing scheduled and distributed can do wonders for your reputation as a business and build credibility where some customers might not have much knowledge and trust in your business. Reputation is crucial to building a business, especially when you’re a smaller organization that may only be establishing itself on the market.

7 Practices that Help Improve Email Response Rates

How do you best improve your email response rates? Depending on the source itself, according to Campaign Monitor, the average open rate ranges from 18% to 22.15%. As a fairly low average, everything you can do to improve it will be worthwhile. Here are several practices that may help you improve upon that average significantly.

Analyze Email Subscribers and Segment Them

Understanding your current email subscriber database is crucial because not every single email user will be at the same point in their buyer journey as others. Some may have subscribed but not yet purchased anything, while others are avid brand buyers.

Analyzing your email subscribers and segmenting them according to specific parameters you set will help ensure you’re targeting the right email marketing to the right individuals. That way, those customers, or potential customers, will get emails that are well-suited to them and not wholly irrelevant.

Many businesses will do email segmentation, despite whether they have 50 subscribers, 5,000 subscribers, or 500,000 subscribers. It’s helpful to build these segments from the early days of your business to maximize your email response rate success.

Get the Timing Right for Email Marketing Distribution

Timing is an important part of improving email response rates. Why? Well, not everyone spends every waking second staring at their inbox.

There will likely be certain times in the day when users are actively checking their inboxes, and it’s crucial to analyze this as a business every time you send an email. How long does it take for users to open their emails? Are some users only opening them at certain times of the day or week?

Some general rules of email timing are to avoid Mondays where possible and instead opt for mid-week email campaigns. Peak times are usually on the morning commute or during their lunch break. After they’ve finished work, emails might not get read immediately and, therefore, get lost in the volume of emails in the inbox.

Create an Eye-catching Subject Line

A lot of the influence that comes with improving your email response rates is how intriguing the emails are to the user. If they’ve got a less-than-impressive subject line, they’re likely to scroll past it and not open it. However, if it’s part of capital or there’s a sense of urgency or enticement offered, then there’s more likelihood of the user opening the email at least. Play on human curiosity where you can and use buzzwords that will raise interest.

There are online tools that you can use to help create more exciting subject lines like this one from Active Campaign. The more unique the subject line, the better!

Personalize Emails with GetResponse

When it comes to your emails, consider what degree of personalization you can provide to the user. Even just using their name can effectively encourage them to open the email to see what’s inside. Using the software is a great opportunity to tailor your emails through email marketing.

GetResponse is just one example of software that helps you with email marketing, as well as website building and marketing automation. There are also plenty of GetResponse alternatives out there that provide similar features.

Use Plenty of Visuals to Engage Your Recipients

It’s been found that humans love visuals like imagery, whether that’s in the form of a GIF, a meme, or a video. With 80% of people remembering what they see, compared to 20% of what they read, it’s proof that visuals work well for marketing of any kind.

Think about how you could engage your recipients more with the right imagery. Be sure not to oversaturate the email with too many images, as this could impact the loading time of the email itself. Make sure that the images themselves are related to whatever message or call-to-action you’re trying to get across. Avoid stuffing images in the email just for the sake of it.

Provide a Clear Value Proposition

Your value proposition is what you want to achieve with the email sent to the user. Referring to the four main types of emails, it’s essential to consider what it is you want your user to do. If it’s a promotional email, then it’s to buy whatever you’re selling. For general email newsletters, it might have a link to your website that you want them to click, or you may want them to fill in a feedback form you’ve attached.

Ensure your value proposition is clear to the user so they’re more likely to do what you’re asking rather than miss the point. Considering how each email needs to provide a different value proposition to the next is essential.

You don’t want to have several emails, one after the other, that are all promotional. That will bore the user or have them disengage with what you’ve sent.

Be Brief, and Don’t Forget to Proofread

When creating email marketing, you want to be precise and straight to the point regarding the content. Try not to add too much fluff or fill the email with so many words that the user gets bored with reading. Be brief with what you want to get across, and don’t forget to proofread your content before it gets distributed. The last thing you want is to have emails with grammar and spelling mistakes.

Improve Your Domain Reputation with Email Authentication

While striving for the success of your email marketing campaigns, it is essential to note that a phishing or spoofing attack using your domain name can drastically impact your email domain reputation and credibility. Subsequently, your email response rate will go down. To prevent this, resort to safer email practices with DMARC. It is an email authentication protocol that prevents domain impersonation and forgery by minimizing the unauthorized usage of email domains.

Improve Your Email Response Rates in 2022 with These Tips

Improving your email response rates takes time, but these practices can help enhance the quality of the emails you create on behalf of the business. Make full use of these tips to level up your email marketing game and hopefully provide much success for the business in 2022 and beyond!