7 tips on how to increase the likelihood that subscribers will open your e-mail

One of the biggest problems facing marketers in trying to promote products through e-mail marketing, even if they are of interest to subscribers, is to get them to simply open a message.

If your business is successful and you get many subscribers through contact forms (through which they voluntarily subscribe to your newsletters, and you do not need customer lists from other sources), whether they will open your e-mail or not depends on many factors. which, one way or another, affect this probability.
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It would seem, obviously, that the most important factor is the subject of the message. However, in reality, the “context” is important first, which is often ignored. It is with his help that you can make the subscribers want to open your letter without having received it yet.

In other words: the way you increase the loyalty of subscribers and make them want to open your messages is important. Below you can read 7 tips that will help you to make your letters open more often, and avoid a number of problems.

1. Time elapsed since the subscription

It is difficult to maintain the interest of all subscribers for a long time. Often, those who have subscribed to your blog recently are more likely to open your e-mail than those who have subscribed to it for several years.

If you are not able to maintain the constant interest of subscribers using techniques similar to those described below, it is likely that they will find other blogs that will replace yours and be more valuable to them.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that the process works in the opposite direction, that is, your blog can replace someone else: if you express a fresh point of view, readers from other blogs come to you, and from this initial stream you should extract the most for yourself benefit.

2. Use a custom thank you page

The gratitude page to which your visitor is redirected after filling out the contact form is very important. It is on her that he can receive instructions to wait for valuable advice and the information he needs in the mailing list.

Do not settle for one of the standard thank-you pages offered by e-mail marketing tools, create your own. On your page you can put an additional message, such as: "Check the spam folder if you do not receive the material within a few minutes." This will encourage the subscriber to look in the mailbox and find your e-mail when necessary.

3. Welcome new subscribers

When subscribers find your e-mail and get what they needed, you can increase their loyalty by greeting them and telling a little about yourself and what you are doing.

Thus, even if they have subscribed to free materials, they will understand that behind the product and behind the brand there are real people who, if needed, will be able to work together with them for them.

4. Encourage them to sort your e-mails.

The best method to ensure that subscribers will open all your future e-mails is, first of all , to make sure that they reach them, bypassing all possible filters.

To prevent your emails from falling into the “spam” folder or the “advertisements” tab, if subscribers use Gmail, send them a detailed instruction explaining how to prevent these actions of their Internet provider.

For example, in the case of Gmail, you can advise subscribers to add your address to your contacts using the drop-down menu in the upper right corner of your mailbox, as shown in the picture below:


Another option is to ask them to add you to your favorite inbox configuration or create a folder (tag) for your messages.

5. All your posts should be valuable.

As already mentioned, the context is incredibly important in order for the maximum number of subscribers to show interest in what you offer. If you are only selling products or services and everything you publish is related to this, it is quite difficult to ensure that subscribers continue to open your emails.

You must provide them with valuable information. And these are not banal words. This does not mean that you should stop sending out advertising material, but it means that you should do this in such a way that advertising is not the only component of your messages.

Put yourself in the user's place: what do you do when the site you subscribe to is bombarded with information that is not at all interesting? The answer that you give yourself, you would not want to hear from users.

For example, sharing in a newsletter with what you have posted on your blog for the week is a good way to encourage users to read your e-mail. But only if the letter will be something different from the posts themselves. Even if its content has nothing to do with the blog, it should also be valuable.

Often, letters use inspiring content that is not necessarily related to the topic of the post. But it is interesting for the target niche.

6. Publication frequency

Frequent and constant publication in many respects contributes to the fact that subscribers become predisposed to receive your content.

It is not always possible to adhere to the same consistency for a number of reasons (especially when your publications are dependent on third parties). But it is best to send letters on the same day of the week, or once every two or three weeks. It is important to stick to the frequency of mailing to which your subscribers are accustomed.

If you publish in a random way, you will not be able to set up waiting subscribers.

7. Periodically update the lists

The following is often overlooked: for the percentage of read messages to increase, you need to leave only those users who open your e-mail on the mailing list.

It is clear that hardly every user will open your every e-mail. Those who do this very rarely or not at all should be removed from the mailing list. Keep in it only those subscribers who are interested in what you offer.

You will have to figure out when to shorten the mailing list, based on the percentage of open messages in the past few months. Leaving it to subscribers who have not shown interest to you for a long time is simply illogical.

You can try to attract the attention of such users before removing them from the mailing list in two ways:

1. Quite sharply. This method is applicable only to those users who do not open your e-mail at all. The subject of the letter like “We are deleting your subscription” rarely works. With this message, you want to convince a totally disinterested user in you that it makes sense to keep in touch with you. But sometimes such "explosive" messages still attract the attention of users.

2. More delicately. This is the most reasonable way to attract the attention of subscribers who have not shown interest in your newsletter for a long time. Themes of letters like “Are you still interested in our publications ...?” You create a more trusting relationship between you and the user.

In the text of the letter, you can ask subscribers to tell you why they do not read your e-mail. In this post, you can discover several ideas and examples that will help you regain the interest of users.

PS We recommend another useful article on the topic of business correspondence - Rules for writing a business e-mail .

The author of the translation is Vyacheslav Davidenko, the founder of the TESTutor company.