The stats are in—email is influential, especially for B2B markets.
According to ImaginePub.com, they’re the third most influential source of info for professionals, behind only colleague and thought-leader recommendations. Especially if you sell commercial insurance, that’s important to know when planning your campaigns. Read more here.
But before you can influence your prospects, you need to make sure they’re seeing your emails to begin with.
“Email deliverability” refers to the ability to get your emails past a recipient’s Spam filters. A lot of factors go into deliverability—and one of those is engagement.
Engagement is how often your recipients open your emails and click on your links. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email providers (like Gmail) notice what your recipients do with your emails.
If they’re often deleted or even relegated to Spam, your domain name and sending reputation could be hurt—and those emails will be more frequently sorted into Spam folders before your recipients even see them.
But if your list is engaged, email providers and ISPs will work with you—filtering your emails into your recipients’ inboxes, where you want them to land.
So how do you make sure your emails are engaging? Here are a few tips.
Know what your readers want to read about. What problems keep them up at night? What issues are they trying to solve in their own lives that your product or services can help them with? Once you know that, you know exactly how to craft subject lines and develop a content strategy that will keep them opening emails.
You can find out by looking at the performance of past email campaigns—what topics generated the most opens and traffic? Beyond that, check out social media conversations, forums, and hashtags around your industry to get a sense of what the critical topics are.
Be strategic with your subject lines. Subject lines should be less than 63 characters long—ideally, less than 50. This makes them more readable on mobile devices—where 40% of people read their emails. Make a promise in your subject line that your reader will want to click through to—and be very clear about what they’ll get.
Make it mobile-responsive. Make sure your email designs look great across any device—run a test campaign and check it across a wide variety of devices before you launch. Approximately 40% of people check their email on some kind of mobile device, so it’s crucial to know how your content looks on all devices.
Know what your content strategy is. Are you sending sales messages—or informational articles with a light pitch at the end? Either one needs to offer something of value. Keep sales messages shorter, with a concrete offer in the end, while informational emails should have a little more length to give the reader worthwhile information.
Test everything. Never assume that a change will work the way you think. Always test things—headlines, new design elements, the placement of your call to action and links within the text.
Once you land on the right combination, you should be able to boost your engagement—and your deliverability. Make sure your readers are getting the information they want and need, and this aspect of engagement and deliverability gets easier.
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