Showing posts with label eMail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eMail. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

5 Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates

Email marketing is a proven way to register better business growth. However, you only achieve actual conversions rates when you opt for the right ways of marketing, which ensure that the email recipients do open your emails.

5 Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates

While getting funding for business might be easy, running one successfully requires continuous efforts and monitoring. Email marketing is a boon for both small and large businesses, as it offers ample gains with low amounts of investment.

But you only achieve better ROI (Return on Investment) when the email recipient (or your prospective customer) actually opens your email and reads its content. Below are some strategies that will ensure that your customers open the majority of your emails.

Make Impressive Headlines

Not all emails are able to grab the attention of the recipients because they do not all have impressive and attractive subject lines. The concept of impressive headlines applies to other media as well.

You will find that in newspapers and magazines only impressive headlines can get the right/adequate attention, and such headlines also register more sales. In order to have the best and most appealing subject lines for your emails, see that your headlines have the following qualities:

  • Capable of evoking humor
  • Concise and clear
  • Have the least number of characters
  • Personalized and delivers the content in a specific way
  • Have numbers and/or lists
  • Amazing, attractive, or even mysterious

Ensure That Your Emails Can Be Scanned Easily

Users like those emails that they can easily scan. Scanning helps repel viruses and other dangers involved in email. Here are some traits that make an email easy to scan:

  • Keep the content precise and short
  • Use the subheads
  • Include links
  • Present all content in bold and make it colorful
  • Use bullets or numbers
  • Adopt a conversational tone

Never Forget to Include the CTA

CTA or Call-to-Action is a great way to motivate your customer to buy your offering. The calls should be logical, compelling, and should be in contrast to the other text (in colors and/or fonts) so that your readers can easily know where to get your product/service.

Note: Do not include more than one CTA, as your message should not seem overly desperate and needy. Including more than one will also confuse customers as to which action you want them to take.

Carry Forward Your Brand’s Image

The recipients of emails are suspicious of emails that come from unknown sources because there is the chance of a virus, among other threats. See to it that your email has your brand logo, as well as fonts or color schemes that inspire trust in the internet users. While genuine emails speak for themselves, it is better that you take this consideration seriously.

Keep Resending Emails Until You Get the Response You Desire

In order to boost email open rates, keep sending your emails again and again. Know which of your emails have been opened, and persevere in order to get the desired results through the other emails. The more times you send an email to a web user, the more likely it is that he or she will open the email and then opt for your service/product.

Of course, don’t just send the emails again with the same subject line. Change the headline and see which one works best. This way you’ll not only improve open rates for your emails but you’ll also know what gets your customers to respond.

One consideration you should make is the number of emails you actually send each day. For example, what if someone is on lots of mailing lists and everyone decides to send emails on a Thursday? Over a period of time, the open rates for Thursday will drop as people’s attention spans drop because they are receiving too many emails.

17.7% of emails were sent on a Tuesday, with only 8.8% on both Saturday and Sunday. We want our emails to stand out, and they simply will not on days that someone’s email inbox is clogged up!

Therefore, I would recommend testing a variety of different times and days to make sure you find the optimum time for your mailing list. Also remember that the optimum time might eventually change.

There are some other steps you can take that will further boost your open rates, including asking people to add your email address to their address books. If they do so, your email delivery rates will definitely improve.

Conclusion

Boosting email open rates is a skill you can master through time and testing. You can certainly learn all kinds of tactics, but each email list “owner” has different customers who respond to different copy. Follow the best practices, test a little, and you’ll be on your way to increasing your open rates soon enough.

The post 5 Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates appeared first on Growmap.

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5 Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Eliminate eMail Spam and Free Up Your Time with SpamPhobia

For the past several months, I’ve been helping Gail manage her email. The majority of the time I’ve spent doing so has simply been deleting spam messages. There are a ton of them, and that’s not counting the ones she deletes herself.

How Gail @GrowMap FINALLY Got Email Spam Under Control

As comedian and TED speaker James Veitch observes, “The internet gave us access to everything. But it also gave everything access to us.”

I have to say, I wish I could deal with email scammers in the same tongue-in-cheek way that Veitch did. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time. Instead, I have been testing out a third-party app called SpamPhobia, which blocks unwanted emails and guards against malware.

A few days after Gail signed up for SpamPhobia, I logged into her email—and there were hardly any messages! I hardly knew what to do.Click To Tweet

The same thing happened the next day. It was glorious.

Why You Would Need Something like SpamPhobia

You might wonder why anyone would need a third-party spam blocker. While major companies, such as Gmail and Outlook, have decent spam filters, the email accounts of many smaller internet providers (ISPs) offer little to no protection from spam.

And if you’ve ever had an experience like that of James Veitch, you understand why sometimes you need to take extra measures. At one point, Veitch received an email from a supermarket chain about a new store opening. He had never subscribed to that store’s list. And even though he tried to unsubscribe from that list multiple times, he continued receiving emails from that company.

In fact, clicking unsubscribe in scam emails can apparently result in you getting more spam. The reason why is that doing so tells the scammers you have a valid email address.

My favorite example of the futility in unsubscribing is when an email has the word “unsubscribe” at the bottom of it with no link. I have seen emails like that in Gail’s inbox many times.

And of course, this is all not to mention the actual threats that can come to you through email, such as the danger of clicking on a bad link and getting a virus on your computer.

Free and Pro Plans

Believe it or not, you can get the essential features, including support, of SpamPhobia when you sign up for the Free Plan. All you have to do is create an account and give the software permission to access your email.SpamPhobia PricingUnder the Free Plan, you get basic protection, and SpamPhobia scans for spam once every hour. What’s more, when you first sign up for SpamPhobia, you get a 14-day free trial at the Pro level before your account reverts to the standard Free Plan.

Your other option is the Pro Plan, which costs only $ 4.90/month. With it, SpamPhobia will scan for unwanted emails once every minute and provide you with advanced spam protection.

Do you need spam gone continuously? SpamPhobia Pro removes it EVERY MINUTE all day long. Click To Tweet

The advanced protection means the software will manage your subscriptions to commercial lists, as well as detect viruses and other types of malware. I personally have found the Pro Plan to be very advantageous since the bulk of my unwanted emails come from commercial lists.

Getting Started with SpamPhobia

In addition to Gail’s email, I decided to test SpamPhobia on one of my Gmail addresses. Granted, Gmail does have one of the best spam filters out there. But I’ve accumulated thousands of emails at that particular address (many from commercial lists, as I mentioned).

To get started, I created a SpamPhobia password for that email address and gave the software access to my email account. I can revoke this access at any point.

Once inside, SpamPhobia took me to a dashboard and started sorting my inbox. It categorized all of my messages as spam, threats, subscriptions to lists, or emails that I wanted to keep.

Jessica added SpamPhobia to gmail and used that to quickly clean up her subscriptions.Click To Tweet

After I signed up, a SpamPhobia folder appeared in my Gmail inbox (which of course is separate from my SpamPhobia account). In Gmail, I could view emails the spam blocker had identified as either being from a list or having a virus.

SpamPhobia Dashboard

The SpamPhobia dashboard is simple and clean looking, and you can take a quick tour of it at any point. At the top, SpamPhobia shows the percentage of wanted and unwanted emails in a pie chart, in addition to listing the number of each type of email.

Use SpamPhobia to filter out emails containing viruses before you can accidentally click on them. Surprising how many there are!Click To Tweet

As you can see below from the screenshot of Gail’s dashboard, SpamPhobia has identified 147 emails as spam and 34 as outright threats. 325 of them are lists she is on, whether willingly or unwillingly. So SpamPhobia has been protecting her from a high number of viruses since she started using it a couple weeks ago.

Gail's SpamPhobia dashboard

Below is a picture of my Gmail dashboard. While SpamPhobia didn’t catch any malware in my inbox, it did find over 6000 list emails, the overwhelming majority of which I know I’m not interested in reading.

Jessica's SpamPhobia dashboard

Blocking and Allowing

In the middle of the dashboard are a Blocked List and an Allowed List. During the inbox cleaning process, SpamPhobia automatically put email addresses in my Blocked List or left them alone. I could move email addresses over to my Allowed List (and back again) by clicking the thumbs up or down under the respective “Action” sections of each list.

Eliminate eMail Spam and Free Up Your Time with SpamPhobia