Although Email marketing has the potential to out-perform all your other marketing, open rates can be notoriously low.  With an estimated 75% of email comprising of spam and obvious sales pitches, who is surprised that so much good stuff ends up in the trash bin?

Like most things in marketing you have to test different approaches and see which works best with your audience, but fortunately, there are some rules-of-thumb to save a bit of time and wasted effort.

One of the most important is how do you get your email opened in the first place?

1. First impressions - your subject line

It won't matter how good your offer is or how well written the body of your email is - if the subject line smells sales-pitchy or self interested you will skip reading the rest.

Although it will vary by industry, the most successful subject lines :

• Let them know you are on their side and you understand their pain.
• Avoid obvious enticements such as free, reminder, etc
• But will create a sense of urgency eg "final 7 days"
• Are actionable - eg "sort your storage shortage today"
• Are less than 50 characters - keep it brief and matter-of-fact
• Are controversial - eg "are social media guru's ruining it for the rest of us"

2. Sort our your sender

If you can, send the email from a person rather than info@yourcompany name.  Personalised emails are more likely to get opened. 

3. Experiment with timing

Try splitting your email database and sending the same email at different times of the day or day of the week to see which gets the best response.  There aren't any set 'best times' because it depends on your audience.

4. Don't let them forget about you

If you collected someone's email address two years ago and haven't sent them anything since, they will have forgotten why they signed up in the first place.

So they'll either dump you in the trash or mark you as 'spam'.

5. Don't LOOK like spam

Avoid capital letters in your subject line, or obvious spammy phrases like 'free', 'get it now' or 'you must act now'.  Over-use of exclamation marks may also trip you up.

Bright red fonts could get you in trouble, as will crazy-fruit-salad colour schemes.

If you send out nothing but a huge graphic thinking it looks nicer and you can control layout easier you're making a mistake.  Not only do most email programs block images by default, many spam filters will block your email because it doesn't have the right balance of text and images. People don't like it either.

6. Don't BE a spammer!

Of course people are more likely to open your email if they actually asked for it.

Unsolicited email (ie SPAM) is illegal in NZ and can get you a fine of up to $500,000 for organisations.

If you are going to send out email marketing, make sure you are familiar with your obligations under the Anti-Spam Law which includes having a functioning unsubscribe facility and a restrictions against address harvesting software.

If too many people mark your email as spam, this can affect the performance of your campaign.