Ways To Get Your Emails Opened
The art of direct mail marketing (snail mail) is decades old. There are tried and true practices if you want to see success. Response rates can vary wildly depending on many variables. That being the case, you would invest your time and money on a direct mail campaign without consulting with or hiring someone who knew how to make sure you made money from it.
What Time To Send It
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it….you know the rest. The same applies to emails. If they arrive in inboxes and do not get opened, you just wasted time and money. The best time to get higher open rates varies between industries but in general it follows the behavioral patterns of normal humans, people just like you. So when lots of people are stuck in traffic going home, that is not the best time to send your email blasts. In general, the best open rates are found in the early to mid afternoon of weekdays. This is after lunch and before quitting time. Monday is a good day for open rates, but not good for other reasons we’ll discuss in a moment.
What Day To Send it
The day of the week is very critical for email marketing success. It turns out that Mondays have a great open rate but lower engagement once the email is open. In other words, people are opening all their emails from the weekend, which makes them too busy to click anything and follow through with action. So the best days to get both opens and click through is typically Tuesday to Thursday in early to mid-afternoon.
Headlines Are Everything (same as subject line for email)
OK, you have chosen the best time and day to give your email the best chance at getting opened, read and responded to. Now the real work begins. Picking the day and time was kid’s stuff compared to writing the subject line for the email. This is most critical part of advertising and will truly make or break your email marketing. entire shelves of libraries are are filled with books about the art of writing advertising copy and entire chapters in each book are devoted to writing headlines, which is precisely the same as the email subject line.
1-Be straight forward and not gimmicky
2-Address needs (stress benefits not features)
3-Imply a need for urgency
4- Test all subject lines with a small component of your list