Email marketing is one of the best ways to grow your following and increase engagement. However, securing subscribers is only half the battle. As a business owner, you must learn how to keep consumers reading your email correspondence.
Today we are going to take a look at four tactics you can use to improve your email response rate. We are going to cover the first steps, checking email deliverability, and the importance of creating specialized content for your audience.
These tips are designed to help you retain and strengthen the bond with consumers on your email list. Let’s dive in!
Examine Your Current Statistics
Before you can improve your current email marketing response rate, you should look at your Google Analytics and email metrics to determine several vital factors about your audience and the success of your current campaign. There are several WordPress plugins currently available that can help you compile this data.
The most crucial detail you can pull from this information is your current open and response rate. If you don’t know your average open rate, it’s time to start examining your website analytics, so you have a baseline, which helps when setting goals.
You wouldn’t proclaim that you want a 25 percent open rate without knowing how many people are currently opening and responding to your emails.
There’s a simple formula that can help you figure out what percentage of consumers open your emails. Calculate your open rate by dividing the number of emails you sent out (minus emails that bounced, but more on that late) by the number of people who responded to your marketing message.
If you successfully sent out 1000 emails, and 200 people responded, your open rate is 20 percent.
Ensure Email Deliverability
It’s impossible to improve your email marketing figures if your messages are not reaching their intended target. Several common WordPress errors can complicate the process of sending an email to a consumer.
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Most WordPress sites send out emails using PHP, which can cause complications between your server, the email providers of your subscribers. Platforms like Yahoo, Gmail, and Outlook have cracked down on emails that come from unreliable sources and will block the emails from being delivered with no warning or notification.
As a result, your emails could end up blocked before they make it in your subscriber’s inbox. There are tools you can use to improve the odds that your message will get delivered. First, you must ensure that you switch to an SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) when sending emails from your website. WP Mail SMTP replaces the PHP protocol with SMTP, which increases the odds that the receiving email client will accept your email.
If you’re not sure, you can use a mail tester tool to see if your messages appear suspicious or spammy. It may take some time to master your email deliverability, but it’s an important step in ensuring that subscribers open your messages.
Use Lead Magnets to Attract Your Target Audience
Our last tip includes multiple takeaways you can use to improve your open rate. Generally speaking, your lead list should consist of subscribers who are genuinely interested in what you’re offering, and they should always willingly add themselves to your email list.
In other words, never, under any circumstances, should you buy an email list. Purchased email lists are full of people who didn’t ask to be put on your list, they likely don’t know your business exists, and they are probably not interested in your niche. Buying your lists could result in decreased deliverability, loss of trust, and time wasted.
You should always build your email lists from the ground up. Things like contests and caption contests are great for drawing in a crowd, but they are not the most effective way to bring in consumers who are honestly interested in what you have for sale.
The best way to build a high-quality lead list is by creating a lead magnet that only your target audience will click to join your mailing list. For example, if you want to convince an audience of pet owners to subscribe to your mailing list, you could create an ebook or checklist for new pet owners. This tactic ensures that only people who have pets or want pets subscribe to your email list. When you send out your next email campaign, the people on your list are more likely to open your email because it’s a topic that interests them.
Conclusion
Business owners in every niche use email marketing as a way to keep in touch with their subscribers. If you want to run a successful campaign, you have to create content that gets delivered and is targeted towards your audience. Before you begin, always review your analytics data so you can plan for future campaigns based on the data you’ve obtained. As your subscriber base grows, you’ll learn what your audience expects from your content, and this will help you improve your open rate long-term.