5 Email Marketing Strategies to Increase Open and Click-Through Rates

Author: Mike Connolly

So you may have just acquired a big list or spent years growing it organically?

That is just the first step to a successful email marketing campaign.

After all, what is the point in having an email list if people are not reading your emails, clicking your links and buying your product/service? In this post we will review 5 strategies that, if used correctly, can skyrocket your open and click-through rates and ultimately lead to more sales.

1. The Blind Subject Line/Link

A blind subject line or link does not tell your customer what lies behind the link. This typically increases click-through or open rates whilst decreasing the conversion of the next action. For example, if you use a blind subject line such as:

“You will never guess what happened…”

You will typically experience an increase in open rate but a lower click rate on your links in the email.

And if you used a blind subject line such as:

“You have to check this out.”

You will typically experience an increase in click-through rate but a lower conversion on the next action e.g. sale conversion rate if you link to a sales page.

2. The Direct Subject Line/Link

A direct subject line or link directly communicates the benefit of taking the action to the customer. This typically leads to lower open/click-through rates but a higher conversion rate on the next action. If you were sending this post by email, an example of a subject line could be:

”5 Simple Strategies To Skyrocket Email Open And Click-through Rates”

This would typically produce a lower open rate than a blind subject line but you would experience an increase in click-through rates on the links in the mail.

If you were selling an eBook containing the “50 Best Email Subject Lines” in an email and used a direct link such as:

“50 Best Email Subject Lines: Get Your Copy For Just $7 Here”

You would experience a lower click-through rate compared to a blind link but would typically experience a higher conversion rate on your sales page.

3. The P.S. Link

Read this list below quickly:

• Hello
• Bar
• Sky
• Run
• Television
• Garden
• Banana
• Cup

Now close your eyes and tell me which of those words you remember? I guarantee that out of those that you did remember, “Hello” and “Cup” feature. As humans, we tend to have a greater propensity to remember the first and last items of a list. And it is for this reason that the P.S. of an email is so important, we pay attention to it AND remember it.

Thus, if you are not placing either a direct or blind link in your P.S. you are leaving clicks on the table.

This is a without a doubt, the simplest way to increase click-through rates for minimal effort.

4. The Fake Survey

This undercover method for increasing click-through rates is sneaky…Yet very simple…

All that is required is to mention the word “Survey” in the subject line and then include a question with a number of linked responses, for example:

“What is you biggest problem with your current email marketing campaign?”

Subject Lines

Link Text

Body Copy

Design

Each of the links can then either direct to a relevant piece of content whilst simultaneously segmenting your list into areas of interest (any auto responder software should be able to do this) or directly to sales pages selling a relevant product. Trust me, if you use this, you will see a massive increase in click-through rates.

5. The Repeat Mail

We have seen a 10% increase in open and click-through rates by using this simple trick…Whenever scheduling or sending an email, do it twice, but with different subject lines and link texts.

Many people think that they will be annoying people by doing this, trust me, you won’t. The majority of people on your list are busy…They are not sitting around waiting for your emails, unless you have an average open rate of 100%. (A simple solution is just to measure unsubscribe rates and if you see a significant increase with this technique that overrides the increase in open/click-through rate, then you can stop)

So there we have it, 5 simple strategies that you can implement this week that will skyrocket your open and click-through rates, inevitably leading to an increase in sales.

But wait… there’s more…

Bonus!

Each of the 5 strategies above is exactly that: strategies. They are not exact and no one will ever know if they can be applied effectively to your audience, which is why the point important part of this post is this:

Track and measure EVERYTHING in a spreadsheet.

And then, in just a couple of months you will have a goldmine of data on subject lines and link text that you can analyze to optimize your open and click-through rates in the future.

So what are you waiting for?

Start using the strategies above and implement a successful email marketing campaign…

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About the Author: Tom Hunt is the Founder of Virtual Valley, a platform that connects Entrepreneurs and Rockstar Virtual Assistants with the mission of giving Entrepreneurs back 10 million hours of their time by 2020. Tom writes about how to grow your remote business on the Virtual Valley Blog, you can follow him on Twitter @tomhuntio.