How to Get Customers to Open Your Sales Emails

Before you hit send, follow these tips.

So you’ve collected a list of email addresses and have launched your email campaign, but you aren’t getting the response you’d hoped for. Why not? Sending emails is the easy part, getting your prospect to actually open them is a bit more difficult.

To understand why your email campaign might not be engaging your audience, you need to look no further than your own inbox. What emails do you get that stand out? What emails do you ignore? Why? In this post, we’re going to look at the ways your small business can improve the content of its email campaign to get people to open and read its message.

First, consider your subject line. It is the first thing your audience sees when receiving an email, and this can make or break your campaign. If your subject line isn’t engaging, your audience will ignore it. Your subject line needs to be written in a way that makes it stand out from the rest of the inbox. Think carefully about what your prospect is interested in, rather than what is interesting to you. Your subject line shouldn’t necessarily be a summary description of the email, either. It should be a hook that gets people curious about the contents and encourages them to open it up to see more.

Taking a quick look at our inbox, it was not hard to come up with lists of winning and losing subject lines.

Losers:

• New in September: traffic value, JS crawling, “delayed” links & more
• Customize Your Ads For Your Audiences
• [Free Virtual Conference] Ready, Set, Strategerize!
• Can you attend?

Winners:

• Webinar – New AdWords Updates to Finish the Year Strong
• [Free Case Study] How to create high-quality content in 30 minutes or less
• Content Engagement | Google and Your Content | Productivity Killers, Email Mistakes | Healthcare
• Facebook Targeting Expansion: The Test (and the results…)

The losers are vague, and one even includes a misspelled word (even if the misspelling was intentional, it’s a loser). The winners include some keywords and elements. Free is always a good thing. One offers a way to save time (30 minutes or less), one offers a benefit (finish the year strong), and one offers the results of some research.

Once you’ve hooked your readers, you need to keep their attention with the body of the email. Being concise is key. No one is going to want to read a novel. The first few words of your email body are just as important as your subject line. Keep it to the point; there will be other opportunities to share information with your audience after you’ve gotten them to click through to your website. Many people are checking their email on their smartphones while they’re on the go, in line at the store, on the bus or subway, or between tasks at work. They won’t have the time or willingness to read more than a few sentences/paragraphs when they have multiple emails to contend with.

Another thing to consider is the timing of your email. Depending on your industry and your audience, there can be an optimal time of the day or day of the week to schedule your email campaign. Your prospects might be less likely to read an email in the middle of their workday when they’re distracted or swamped with work, but once they’re home at the end of the day, they’ll have more time to check their inboxes.

The most important thing you can do to drive engagement with your email campaign is to have engaging content. You can schedule an email for the perfect time and write the perfect subject line, but if your content isn’t interesting or engaging, none of that will matter. Knowing your audience is key to copywriting. You can learn a lot about what sort of messaging your prospects are interested in by looking at social media posts, both your own and your competitors, and use that information to write copy that speaks to them.

At Dream Local, we’ve helped numerous businesses get their sales emails opened and would love to help you too. Get in touch with us today so we can get your sales campaign on the right track.