Your Emails Opened

Email Marketing requires two main elements.

1 A technical system to send out your emails; and
2. Sound strategies to ensure you engage the intended recipient.

In this article I am going to focus on providing you with 3 fundamental tips to ensure your emails are opened.

Firstly, you need to ensure your 'From' tag is a name people recognise and respect. This is very important in email marketing. Do not use pseudonyms which will not garnish respect. A point to remember here is in sales - "people buy from friends", therefore it is necessary that your 'From' address in your email is from a trusted and reliable source. For instance if you receive an email from me, it will read - "From Kurt Johansen". Why? Because that is my name. People know me. I do not use my company name. Why? People do not buy from companies they buy from the people inside the company (if they like them.)

I could use "Email Marketing Guru" or any other flash terminology etc. but these titles will not resonate with my recipients as coming from a friend. When they see Kurt Johansen in their inbox, they immediately know who it is from and what generally to expect.

Secondly, you should add a salutation and personalise all your "Subject" lines. By this I mean saying something like, "Hi Bob......." It's very important to understand the psychology here. When a person meets a friend in the street they immediately say words like, 'Hello', 'Hi' etc. When a person receives an email it is also a nice thing to say. Don't underestimate the power of the salutation. By using it you can increase your open percentage rates by more than 600%.

Thirdly, and probably the most important aspect of getting your emails opened is the subject line. If you have been fortunate enough to get people to accept who you are and they read the salutation the next move for them will be to read the Subject of the email.

Do not use trick or misleading subject lines. The subject line should be a tease of what the reader should expect inside the email content. Many email marketing people get the subject line wrong. It should enlist curiosity, it should sparkle anticipation inside the reader and it should create a sense of urgency. The subject line should only contain 5-7 words and should not be any longer than 50 characters in length. I also like to add "..." quotation marks around the subject line and start each word with a capital letter. i.e. "7 Foods Your Kids Should Not Eat"

Ok, let's put all three of these together:
From Kurt Johansen Hi Bob "7 Foods Your Kids Should Not Eat"

How about:
From Kurt Johansen Hi Bob "Don't Feed Your Kids These Foods."

When sending out your email marketing messages spend a lot of time on the subject lines and make sure you are:

• sending from a respected 'From';
• using a personal greeting; and
• arousing their interest with a great subject line.

By doing just these three things you will find you will increase your email marketing open rates.