4 Ways To Increase Your Email Open Rate

There are a lot of hurdles you have to jump in an email marketing campaign just to get an email into the inbox of someone who might open it. First, you have to make sure that you have a valid email address. Then you need to find out if the person actually uses that email address, or if they use a different address. Once you have conquered all of the challenges involved with putting your email in front of the right target audience, then you have to start experimenting with your open rate to get the best possible results.

The open rate of an email campaign is the percentage of people who actually open the email when it is sent. If your target audience does not open your email, then all of the great content inside is pretty useless. There are some tactics you can use that will help you to increase your open rate, and drive more revenue with your email marketing campaign.

Try Sending Unopened Emails Again

Spam filters and lost connections can sometimes prevent your marketing emails from getting through when you start a new campaign. One way to help increase your open rate is to resend unopened emails and hope they get through the second time. Be sure to track your open rate with resent emails to see if resending unopened emails is a tactic you want to try on a regular basis.

Run Tests To Develop Better Delivery Times

You or your Internet marketing partner has software that can tell exactly when your marketing emails get opened, right down to the hour and minute. You should use that information to develop a database of the best times to send out your emails, and then use that database to increase your open rate. If you put your emails in front of your customers at times when those customers traditionally open emails, then you significantly increase your success rate.

Develop A Theme

As you send out marketing emails. keep track of the elements that appear to increase your open rate. If humor increases your open rate, then start to lean on humor more in your other email marketing campaigns. Keep track of everything from background colors to the way you present your message. Over time, you will start to see themes and trends that work in making sure that you have the highest possible open rates.

Avoid Spam Language

You already know that phrases such as “buy now” and “great free offer” trigger most spam filters and negatively affect your open rate. You need to keep track of the spam language that is getting your emails caught in spam filters and be sure to avoid that language in any of your email marketing pieces.

Email marketing is a science that needs to be constantly studied and altered to be successful. Each campaign is another chance to collect data that can make a huge difference on how successful future campaigns will be. The open rate of your marketing emails is an incredibly important number to monitor, and it is also important to find ways to positively affect your open rate as well. By watching your email marketing results, you can find ways to increase your open rate and get more engagement with your emails.

Why Should You Use Email Marketing On Existing Customers

You spend a lot of time and money on capturing and developing your customers. Once you have a repeat customer, your goal is to keep that customer for a very long time and grow their business with you. But as any Internet marketing expert knows, contacting existing customers can be tricky. If you do not contact customers enough, they feel like you do not care and they start looking for other vendors. If you contact customers too much, then they consider you a pest and move on to someone else.

When Internet experts talk about email marketing, they are always careful to include existing customers in their email efforts. While the approach towards marketing to existing customers is different, the end result of generating more revenue is the same as if you were talking about a new customer. Your email marketing efforts to your existing customers can often be the difference between retaining clients, and constantly replacing lost revenue.

Know Your Customers

Email marketing with existing customers is more effective when it is customized to the needs of each customer. Your sales and marketing groups spend a lot of time collecting information about each client and trying to develop effective ways for maintaining contact. The best way to stay in touch with a client is to keep them updated on the things that interest them, and that means using your marketing information to create effective emails.

This tactic includes emails dealing with updates to products your customers have already purchased, and information about products your customers have expressed an interest in. The constant contact your sales group has with your clients supplies the ongoing information your marketing group needs to create emails that matter to your existing clients.

Make Them Personal

A good Internet marketing company knows how to draw information from your clients that can be used to maintain contact with your clients on a regular basis. Your website should be filled with fun pages and effective ways to inspire your clients to give you information such as their birthdays, the kinds of vacations they want to go on, and anything else that pertains to their lives. You can use this information to send out personalized emails that let your customers know that you care about their business, and that you pay attention to what they have to say.

Company Updates

Customers have a certain level of concern for the companies they do business with. When you have a customer that invests in buying your products, that customer wants to be sure that your company is strong and will be around to support those products for a long time. That is why company updates make excellent emails to send out to existing customers.

You can keep your customers updated on recent successes your company has experienced, and you can strengthen the loyalty of your customer base by pointing out the ways in which your company is an industry leader.

Email marketing is a tool that your company can use constantly to engage existing customers, and grow your revenue. An email is easy for customers to read, and it can be extremely effective when it contains the kind of information clients want to see. As you grow your customer base, be sure that your Internet marketing partner is doing everything possible to maximize the power of email marketing.

Google Feeling The Squeeze In 2016

If there is one thing that can be said about Microsoft, it is that the software giant never goes into any new venture without plenty of preparation. When Microsoft and Yahoo! parted ways, there were rampant rumors about Microsoft possibly buying Yahoo!. The truth is that Microsoft was setting up its own search engine, Bing, to become a player in the search engine industry. With Yahoo! able to focus on its own endeavors now and Bing prepared to open up new advertising territory, it looks like Google is going to start feeling the squeeze in 2016.

The Search Armies Are Massing

The gap between the number of monthly users on Google and the next four search engines combined is still substantial, so Google is not ready to go running for the hills just yet. But the gap is closing, and the other search engines are making moves that will start to put even more pressure on Google.

Major search engines such as Bing and Yahoo! are starting to promote their own supply of Internet images to try and become an image resource for online marketing companies. Microsoft announced in November 2015 that it will be launching a new advertising initiative for Bing that is designed to make the search engine a focus for the online search industry. Even such ancient search engines as AOL are starting to re-assert themselves in this new environment.

Niche Search Engines Are Also Becoming Popular

Niche search engines such as Giphy and TinEye are also gaining in popularity, and image search engines such as Creative Commons are also becoming large resources for images on the Internet. These search engines focus on providing results that are custom-made for certain audiences, and people looking for more specific search results are finding these niche engines to be extremely helpful.

What Does This Mean For Website Owners?

It is entirely possible that the same people who use Bing and Giphy are also using Google at the same time. In other words, the growing audiences for these alternative search engines are not really putting much of a dent in Google’s daily traffic. But as the numbers continue to grow for these other search engines, they can no longer be ignored.

Website owners will have to start discussing marketing tactics for these other search engines when they talk to their Internet marketing partners. To ignore these other search engines is ignoring millions of potential customers every day. The search engine methods for all marketing companies are going to have to shift to start offering more focus on these other search engines, and stop focusing only on Google.

How Will Website Marketing Approaches Change?

Each search engine has its own rules for generating more traffic, and Internet marketing companies are going to have to start incorporating some of the rules from these other search engines into their approaches for increasing client web traffic. A good search engine optimization plan is one that mingles the requirements of Bing and Yahoo! in with the needs of Google. The website owners who start focusing on these other search engines now will be that much further ahead of the game a few years down the road.

Microsoft has a history of putting companies out of business to advance its own profits. While it is hard to imagine Bing replacing Google as the default Internet search engine any time soon, it is important that marketing companies start making Bing happy as a proactive approach to preparing for future changes in the search engine world.