How to improve the Click-through-rate and pass the spam filter in your Email Marketing campaign?

Email marketing is a money-driving marketing tool that every marketer should incorporate in their marketing strategy due to its cheap cost and high ROI.

There is always room for improvement. Here we will walk you through these 10 creative ways to improve the engagement and conversions (open rate, click-through rate), and prevent your email from losing in the crowded inbox or spam folder.

Read more about email marketing here:

• Is Email Marketing Dead?
• Email marketing: Step-by-step guide to send an email to the right target audience

Try segmentation

Segmentation refers to the action of categorizing your database into different email lists based on some specific criteria so that you can send the right content to the right audience. By breaking your email lists into smaller groups, the brand can be able to send personalized and relevant content to the target audiences. As a result, you can boost the Email open rate, improve the Click-through-rate as well as minimize the number of Unsubscribers.

There are many ways you can dice your email list into slices, such as:

• New subscribers: the welcome email will be sent to these people to introduce the brand personality and product offerings.
• Shopping Cart Abandoned: This list is really helpful with e-commerce stores when it will remind the subscribers who already put the products into their cart but haven’t finished the checkout yet.
• Location: notify the local subscribers about the local events. For example, the Melbourne government will send an email listing the local events in a month to people in Melbourne.
• Interest: subscribers who love animals and subscribers who love nature.
• Inactive: remind subscribers who haven’t had any interactions with the brand over a specific period of time about your brand name, and encourage them to take the further desired steps.

Personalise your email

Remember that there are people at the other end of the Email Marketing Campaign. In other words, email is just a tool to communicate with your customers. Instead of massively sending emails, you should build a genuine relationship with customers. Authenticity is what customers want from the business. Therefore, don’t let your recipients feel that they are receiving a massively sent email. Instead, you should talk to them with an empathetic tone, personalised message.

Add the name of the recipient in the subject line and greetings: a fire way to get more eyeballs on your email is to add the recipient’s name into the subject line. Statistics showed that there is an increase in the open rates by 16% when the names of receivers are stated in the email.

Use your email signature: let the subscribers know how to contact you via the email signature, from which they will know they are receiving the email from the “real people” behind the brand.

Avoid “no-reply” email address: If the subscribers receive the email from the domain “noreply@example.com”, they are likely to translate the email as “automatic email sent to everyone”, resulting in low credibility and open rate.

Develop a mobile-friendly version

The recent data from Statista revealed the truth for email campaigns: 43% of emails opens via mobile, and the desktop email clients’ open share had dropped to 18%. A report found that 68% to 79% of consumers would delete an email that cannot be loaded or read via mobile. Creating a mobile-responsive email marketing campaign can’t afford to be ignored.

Here are some tips to create a mobile-responsive email:

• Use the large font which is easy to read on mobile
• Double-check the image-loading speed on mobile and resize the image to increase the speed. Make sure that your media forms (image, video, gif) can be loaded on all devices (Android, iPhone, etc).
• Use a large call-to-action button, which is easy to tap
• Separate two links, don’t place them together. Subscribers can tap the link easily.

Make use of automation wisely

If you have a large pool of customer databases, trigger-based emails can save your money and time. Trigger emails are sent automatically based on user behavior. In fact, establishing an email flow makes your campaign more effective. Research showed that the open rates for trigger emails are 95% higher than that of traditional ones. Overall, the campaign including trigger-based email can generate 4 times greater revenue and 18 times more profits.

Some campaigns you can use trigger-based email can be:

• Activation campaign: when the new user creates an account, the activation will send an automated email informing about their login, and walking them through products and offerings.
• Surprise your customers: win the customers by showing that your company cares about them. You can create a campaign to send automated emails and reward the customers when it comes to their birthday week, or even month. Adidas, Cotton On, and other brands are doing well using an automated system.

Avoid spam-identity scheme so that your email will not land in the spam

Spam filters are always the pain point for Marketers. Once your email lands in the Junk or Spam folder, the customers are likely to miss the information/ flash deals at the moment, leading to the low conversion rate of the campaign. Phasing out all elements that can make your email looks like or trigger “spam” is the first thing every marketer should pay attention to. Some best practices you can apply to keep your emails from falling into your spam inbox:

• Allow opt-in confirmation: Give your customers the power to voluntarily receive email from your brand. By doing so, your email has a higher chance of being opened and avoids the likelihood of being dragged to Bin by the recipients in the future.
• Use a verified domain and good IP address: “Good” IP address means that it hasn’t been used to send spam in the past. Otherwise, the system will automatically categorize your email into spam as well.
• For each of the mailbox providers (Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc,…), every domain has its own reputation. The high sending reputation can keep your email from placing in the spam folder. Having a verified domain can definitely increase the reputation of your address.
• Use the merge tag to personalize the “To” field
• Keep your email template code clean
• Avoid aggressive use of “sales” languages, which are spam trigger words.
• Avoid clickbait by using deceptive subject lines: when the subscribers found no relevance between the subject line and the content in the email, they are likely to close the email in a fraction of a second. For the long-term effect, they will automatically drag the next emails into spam.
• Include your location
• Use custom authentication
• Show subscribers how to opt-out
• Avoid using shorten URL
• Don’t send from a free domain email address
• Don’t send emails with too many images: Too large/ too many images can lower the speed of email loading. Use these forms in a moderate way and don’t overuse them.

Provide benefits, not ‘overly sales-y’

What keeps your customers reading the email? That’s the question you should bear in mind when drafting the email. Although the ultimate purpose of email marketing is to achieve conversion and turn subscribers into customers, don’t forcefully prioritize the sales.

To increase the open rate, you need to give the subscribers something valuable, tangible, and resonate with them at the moment they receive the email.

Go through these 3 steps, and your email will be more beneficial to the customers.

Choose a subject line and preheader wisely

Here’s how your subscribers see in their inbox. The subject line can be the first thing your subscribers read when they receive the email. It will decide their next step: whether to open the email, ignore it, or drag it into the bin.

• Address the recipient’s name
• Arouse curiosity, but don’t turn it into clickbait. enough to open and click
• Include the number
• Keep the right length: the best practice suggests keeping your subject line 17-24 characters long to boost the open rate.

Here are some words you can incorporate/exclude into the subject lines to increase the open rate:

Following the subject line, the preheader provides a hint of the email content before they decide whether to click to read more. Provide the succinct keywords in the preheader, summarize the value proposition of the email, use emoji (but not overuse it), etc, to let the subscribers know what contains in the message, and encourage them enough to open.

Perfect your timing

After setting up everything about the email, the last step to kick off the campaign is choosing the right time to send it.

Although there is not a thing called “perfect time” for scheduling the email, it will vary depending on the recipient segmentation, time zone, devices, etc.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday have traditionally been favorite days to send email campaigns

The worst day for email marketing is Saturday.

Between 1-3 pm (9-11 am is recommended as well) is generally considered the best time to send the campaign (Wordstream 2021).

But the bottom line on email send time is the company has to keep testing and figuring out the right time for their own. It depends on their target audiences, behaviours. Every industry has different benchmarks for open rate, which can become the reference for your own campaign.

Source: hunter

Refresh your list on a regular basis

Your customers keep changing. Some may change their email accounts or are just no longer interested in your products/ services. Therefore, refresh your list on a regular basis so that your list doesn’t go stale. However, before removing inactive subscribers from the list, try sending one more email campaign to re-engage them, or double-check whether they would like to update their information and preferences.

Be concise with content and call-to-action

Less is more with copy

If you include too much information in your email, your subscribers will be lost without knowing the main point that the brand tries to communicate with them. Shorter emails are likely to help your customer encounter the offer before getting bored and deleting it. Especially these days, the majority of subscribers check email on their phones. When the email is too long, they won’t scroll through the tiny handheld screen.

Include a call to action.

What is the desired action you want the recipients to take? Don’t let them close the email without knowing what to do next. The CTA button is not always the purchasing button. Even in the “thank you email”, you can include the button to induce people to click for more information on brand personality.

A call-to-action doesn’t need to be aggressively presented. It can be the button, clickable text with the words “Start Here” or “Read the book”. To increase the click-to-open and conversion rate, CTA should create a sense of urgency and indicate clearly the purpose after following the request.

Email never dies. In contrast, if a brand knows how to gauge its Email Marketing Strategy, the Return on Investment will be amplified. Don’t hesitate to ask our experts to master this marketing tool in your business.