By S Mohan Ramkumar



Email marketing is one of oldest channels of online marketing. It’s an often overlooked fact that email is one of the most nonintrusive modes of reaching out to an audience. They are free to open and read emails at a time and place of their convenience. It’s a pleasant alternative to cold calls and unannounced walk ins.

Over the years, the sheen of email marketing has lost its lustre quite a bit, thanks to the uncontrollable flood of email spam. Even so, being a very cost effective marketing tool, email marketing figures at the top of every marketer’s todo list.

So, you can bet the barn that you’ll always to competing for the attention of your audience without much room to maneuver beyond the email subjecline. Crafting emails that stand out in a crowded inbox is a tall order.

After the break, let us discuss a few ideas that will help you maximize the chances of getting your emails opened.

Tips for Writing Emails that Get Opened

Build an Email List

It wouldn’t be wrong to say email lists are the bread and butter of outbound marketers. Getting people to submit their email addresses is the next toughest job to getting their phone numbers.

When it comes to list building, the World Wide Web makes this tedious job a simple affair. All it takes is some creativity and candidness to get people’s attention and make them submit their email addresses in them little form fields!

An email form placed prominently in the homepage (and all other relevant pages) is the first place to start. If you have a buzzing blog, then it’s even better. Try using an email signup form (that isn’t annoyingly intrusive) that doesn’t come in the way of your content to collect more email addresses.

There are two things that will make these email address submission forms effective. First is to design them in such a way they blend with the website instead of sticking out like a sore thumb. It shouldn’t hamper user experience in any way and it shouldn’t appear like you are imposing on the visitor to fill the form.

The second one is a good reason. What does a person get in return for submitting their email address? Are you going to send them weekly newsletters? Tips and tricks that’ll benefit their personal or professional lives? Or, is it just a one off requirement to download a whitepaper or an ebook? Make it abundantly clear the value of subscribing to your mailing list and you’ll see a marked difference in subscriber count.

As you might have noticed, it’s way easy to build an email list if you are using online channels. The chances of building an effective list aren’t impossible via offline avenues though. The concept of making it easy for people to subscribe to a list holds good here as well.

When people are filling out forms or leaving feedback, make it a point to get their email addresses. Visiting a trade show or conducting a seminar or conference? Keep a sign up register or sheet and ask for email addresses alongside signatures.

Conveying the benefit of subscribing to your mailing list might not be as easy as it is on a web page, but, a brief description of what type of mailer they can expect goes a long way in making people to trust you.

People tend to forget who you are and why they are receiving an email from your business. So, it makes a lot of sense to send welcome cum acknowledgement emails to these offline subscribers at the earliest possible opportunity.

Focus on Design

The email copy and the subject line matter a lot, but, let us to get to them in a bit. A lot is riding on the way the email looks. When I say it is important how the email looks, I’m not just talking about a gorgeous, colorful design that’s goes well with your organizational colors.

There are dozens of ways people access their emails. They access emails from their browsers, desktop apps, mobile apps and the sad thing is that each email client has its own quirks.

The formatting and layout might not look uniform across the board. And, if you have people using Outlook, then things are bound to get even worse.

Building a standards compliant email template is the logical solution. Even in that case, there is a chance that the banner colors come across a tad brighter than you intended or the buttons to appear a bit crooked.

It’s alright if you have to comprise a bit on aesthetics so as to ensure that the email looks professional across all major email clients. Try experimenting with colors that’ll play nice with all email clients and choose layouts that are fluid. And, never forget to include a plain text version of the mailer.

Crack the Subject Line

If you ask me, I would say email marketing is a level playground when compared to all other marketing channels. No matter how big or small a company is, they are all equals when it comes to making subscribers to open the mail.

There is no way your competition can outspend you ten to one to make people open an email. This isn’t anything like PPC or SEO or any other form of paid advertising. The one who writes the sensible subject line wins!

Here are some time tested techniques to write a subject line that’ll get your emails opened:

Convey the benefit of reading this particular email. Pique their interest with quantifiable value that they stand to benefit from.

Use numbers in the subject and they are a great way to make people read atleast the subject line.

Use power words that appeal to the senses of your audience.

Establish a sense of urgency.

Keep it short and succinct.

Now that you have read the list of established practices, it is equally important to think out of the box and experiment on your own. It’s always a good idea to subscribe and follow the mailers from a wide variety of businesses to identify new trends when it comes to writing subject lines.

Write a Compelling Copy

Crafting a perfect subject line is the first major hurdle. The one that comes after is the email copy. There are a variety of mailers that are sent as a part of the email marketing campaign - newsletters, promotions, announcements and the like.

The one thing that’s common to all formats is a call to action (CTA). At the end of the day, you expect the subscriber to either click a link, hit a button or some other variant of this to get them past the email to a web page.

A simple, straightforward email copy will get that job done for you. You have to bear in mind that writing an email copy is a bit different than writing a web copy. It has to be personal and should build trust in the reader so that they indulge your request to take the next step.

Conventional wisdom acquired over ages tells that personalized greetings, asking and answering questions in the copy, and avoiding anything and everything that might make the copy sound robotic deliver better results.

A mailing list contains a handful of email addresses and they are all sent out en masse. However, if you could write a copy that resounds with the reader and feels like it’s written keeping him or her in mind and not a hundred others like him is what you should go for.

Figure Out the Logistics

You can’t send out emails willy nilly. There ought to be a reason for you to send an email blast. Failure to meet the lead generation quota for the month is definitely not one among them.

It costs pennies to send large volumes of emails. That doesn’t mean you can send whatever you feel like to your subscribers. Focus your efforts on figuring out what your audience would love to hear about and if they are open to receive more than one email a month.

Also, fix the right day of the week to send out the mailers. All weekdays aren’t ideal and you might want to check the feasibility of sending mailers on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for maximum open rates.

Create and manage an email marketing calendar. Mark the regularly scheduled email newsletters, seasons greetings, promo offers and other forms of communications clearly in the calendar. Space them out evenly so that your subscribers aren’t frustrated by a flood of your mailers.

It’s a good idea to use an email marketing application like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Mad Mimi or something similar. This way, you don’t have to worry about forgetting the best practices of email marketing.

These apps will help you with double opt in, maintaining multiple email lists for better targeting, tracking analytics, easy opt outs and most importantly, get past the spam filters.

Sure, if you are sending spam, there is no escape from spam filters, but, these apps ensure to the maximum extent that legitimate emails sent from your whitelisted email addresses aren’t caught in spam filters by mistake.

If you are struggling to design an email template that’s standards compliant, many of these apps come with dozens of great looking templates that you can edit and customize to your tastes!

Pay Attention to Analytics

Another perk of using an app like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor is that you get access to the detailed analytics they offer. Right from knowing if the email has been opened to what links have got the most number of clicks, the analytics are quite comprehensive.

The emails open rates, number of clicks and the number of people who hit the unsubscribe button are key metrics to watch out for. Geography wise split up is a good indicator of how appealing your content is to a wider audience.

Mine the data provided by these analytics and put them to use in the future email campaigns. Use A/B testing of subject lines to understand which ones work and which ones don’t.

It’s great to have 30 to 40% open rates (varies with industry) and you should pat yourselves in the back if the number is any higher!