If you opened your personal email right now, we bet you’d immediately be face-to-face with about a hundred newsletters. How many emails do you have from Starbucks? Target? DSW? Better yet, how many of those things have you actually opened? Probably, like, memo-rably few, right?
Inboxes can get so crowded with newsletters that some clients like Gmail just straight up sort them into a bin of their own. Want your inbox? Good. Here it is. Your newsletters? Go check in one of those other bins, the ones hidden in the Promotions tab.
Systems like that suck for marketing professionals. It means your audience needs to actively search for your newsletter, which, let’s face it, is hard to convince people to do.
So how to do you grab your audience’s attention when they’re constantly flooded with newsletters from other companies? Our team’s put together the top three suggestions to get those open rates up and those click through rates right where you want them to be.
1. Meet Them Where They Are
It’s 2019, so we’re all always on our phones. If your email doesn’t perform well on a mobile device, there’s no way your people will stick around. Test, test, and test that newsletter again before you send it to make sure it adjusts to the smaller screen.
While you’re at it, make sure that you’re prepared for slower download speeds. If your image doesn’t load, what does your audience see? Add alt text so that people can still under-stand what’s going on in your email, even if they can’t see it.
2. Give Them a Sneak Peek
Your audience is incredibly busy. They won’t take the time to open something if it doesn’t seem interesting.
Everyone knows how important subject lines are, but there’s another opportunity to get your message across. Most email platforms allow you to write preview text for your newsletter. Keep it between 40-70 characters and give them something that will cut through the noise while still giving a summary of what they’ll get from opening the letter.
Think like this: the subject line is your stick and the preview text is your carrot.
3. Make It Personal
Think about the last party you went to. We bet your friend called out your name, and you somehow heard them over the music, laughter, and heated discussions about Netflix shows. That’s because our names have the power to make us pay attention, even when things get hectic.
Apply the same idea to your email marketing. Does your subject line contain their name? What about the opener? Even better, do you have a special offer just for them based on past behavior or something else?
The more personal you get, the more engagement you’ll see. It’s targeted advertising at its finest.
It’s a hectic world, and it can be pretty hard to get your audience to pay attention to your messages. Feeling stuck? Contact us. We’d love to grab a drink, sit down, and figure out how to get your newsletters opened and your customers engaged.
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