Have you ever received an email from a business that you simply ignored or deleted without even opening it? Well, that’s a common problem that many small businesses face when it comes to email marketing.
While email marketing is a powerful tool to engage with your subscribers, the success of your email marketing efforts relies heavily on the engagement rate of the emails you send out.
A low engagement rate can negatively impact the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and ultimately lead to a decrease in sales.
In this blog post, you’ll find some of the best tips on boosting your email open and click rates to ensure maximum engagement with your audience.
How to Increase Your Email Open Rates and Click Rates
1. Craft a Compelling Subject Line
Start with the subject line—and its natural extension—the preview text. The subject line is the first thing your subscribers will see when they receive your email.
If you want to increase your email open rates, practice writing attention-grabbing subject lines that encourage them to open the email.
A great subject line is short enough so that it’s not cut off on mobile and also concise and to the point. Not to mention relevant to the content of the email. Don’t use click baits.
Learn more about how to write subject lines that stand out and get your emails opened.
Adding subject lines in Flodesk
Once you finished editing your email campaign in Flodesk, click next until you arrive at this screen, where you can type your subject line and preview text.
If you’re working with a workflow email, click on the email step and then scroll down on the right sidebar to see the subject line and preview text boxes.
2. Personalize Your Emails
Personalization is a powerful tool in email marketing. Personalizing your emails can make your subscribers feel valued and important.
You can use their name in the email or even tailor the content of the email to their interests. Personalized emails have been shown to have a higher open and click-through rate than generic emails.
“Personalized promotional mailings have 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates than non-personalized mailings.” [Source]
Personalizing emails in Flodesk
You can use personalization tokens in so-called text blocks in Flodesk. You can add a text block by hovering over an existing element in your Flodesk template, clicking the plus (+) sign and selecting the text block option.
Next, click where you want to add the personalization and start typing the @-symbol. It will bring up the available options based on data you’ve collected at the backend. Make sure to add a fallback value as well and click insert.
3. Segment Your Email List
Segmenting your email list is another effective way to boost engagement rates. By segmenting your email list, you can send targeted emails to specific groups of subscribers.
For example, you can send emails to subscribers who have recently purchased a product or to subscribers who have shown interest in a particular topic.
Learn about seven practical ways to segment your subscribers here.
Segmenting subscribers via Flodesk opt-in form preferences
A simple way to segment subscribers right from the start is using preference options on your Flodesk opt-in forms. You can let them select their preferred topics or email frequency depending on your needs.
Segmenting subscribers via the subscriber preferences page in Flodesk
Once you have them on your email list, you can also let your subscribers opt-in (or opt out) of topics by customizing and enabling the subscriber preferences page.
4. Use Clear and Concise Language
When writing your emails, use clear and concise language. Your subscribers should be able to understand the content of the email quickly. Avoid using technical jargon or complex language that might confuse your subscribers. Keep the content of the email simple and straightforward.
Want to keep your Black Friday momentum going through Small Business Saturday? Learn how to write the perfect Small Business Saturday email here.
5. Include a Clear Call to Action
The simplest way to boost your click rates is to give your readers only one call to action.
What does it mean?
Make the email’s content and design single-focused on getting them to click on your CTA and over to wherever you want to send them. Whether to make a purchase or read your blog post, the call to action should be clear and easy to understand.
While you should use only one call-to-action, you can connect that CTA to various parts of your Flodesk email, like an image block, layout block, button or text hyperlink. Just ensure all these CTAs lead your reader to the same place (URL).
6. Optimize Your Emails for Mobile Devices
More and more people are accessing their emails on mobile devices. It is essential to optimize your emails for mobile devices to ensure that they are easy to read and navigate. Use a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes, and make sure that your email is easy to read on a small screen.
If you’re using Flodesk, it’s all done for you. Flodesk’s gorgeous, highly customizable email templates make your brand shine across all devices.
As a best practice, though, use the built-in test send feature (well, hello, little paper plane) and check your email campaign on your mobile phone before sending it to your email list.
7. Test and Refine Your Emails
Testing and refining your emails is an essential part of email marketing. Analyze your subject lines, email content, and calls to action to see what works best for your subscribers. If your email marketing platform has it, use A/B testing to compare different versions of your emails and refine your email marketing strategy based on the results.
While Flodesk doesn’t yet have native A/B testing capabilities, its robust account-level email and workflow analytics give you vital information to understand your campaigns’ and sales sequences’ engagement and performance.
Find your best-performing email campaigns by looking at the “Performance by email“ table on the Email analytics dashboard.
Conclusion
As a small business owner, you can greatly benefit from email marketing to connect and engage with your audience. And by following these best tips on boosting your email open rates and click rates, you can increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and ultimately drive more sales.
Remember to craft compelling subject lines, personalize your emails, segment your email list, use clear and concise language, include a clear call to action, optimize your emails for mobile devices, and test and refine your emails to improve your email marketing strategy.
