HTML Email Design & Deployment - Part 2

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Improving Email open and click-through rates

Speaking of measurable results, let’s look at a few ways to improve those open and click-through rates. Let’s face it: all marketing emails have some sort of call to action. In other words, when you send an email to a customer or potential customer, you want them to do something. Often the end goal is a sale or purchase, while other times you’re simply prompting the user to visit your website. Either way, here are a few tips to increase the chances your readers will be decide to act.

Email Content that works

Targeting your content is the number one way to improve open and click-through rates. Quite frankly, if the content is appropriate to the recipients – what they want or need – they’ll be more likely to read it. Check out this article about how to build email relevance to learn more:
http://www.lyris.com/blog/758-8-Building-Blocks-of-Email-Relevance

Subject lines that work

With subject lines, shorter is better. Be creative enough to incite readers to want to learn more. And of course, avoid those nasty spam words and phrases we talked about earlier. Here’s a great article on The 6-Step Secret Sauce Recipe for Awesome Email Subject Lines:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29591/The-6-Step-Secret-Sauce-for-Awesome-Email-Subject-Lines.aspx

Focusing your calls to action

Many designers are tempted to include in their marketing emails all the links from the company’s website. We think this dilutes the message and distracts the reader from the primary focus of the email. For those reasons,
we suggest removing extraneous content like navigation bars and multiple blog posts. Focus on the one thing you want your reader to do, with all the content supporting that one goal.

Credible senders

Readers are less likely to consider a message spam if it has a legitimate sender name and address. This means it’s smart to use your actual business name, or an actual employee of your company.

For example, if the message is being sent from the office of the principal at a school, the sender line might read: ‘Principal Matt Smith, Brown High School’. The sender address should also match the sender. In this case, it should be a legitimate email address such as principal@brownschool.edu. (It is reasonable to expect the principal might have a personal address, such as msmith@brownschool.edu, but the more general principal@ address would be used for general public communication.)

Make it mobile friendly

Many of us check our email from mobile phones these days. Be sure therefore to test your emails in mobile email readers, and to offer customized mobile-friendly content whenever possible. Check out this article with 7 Tips for More Effective Mobile Emails :
http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/mobile-email-marketing/mobile-marketing-advantage/

Read Next - HTML Email Design & Deployment - Part 3