How To Get Your Emails Opened

How often has this happened to you? You send out email after email, waiting to see the requests coming in. You send out a sale. Nothing. You send out a coupon. Nothing. You start to try tricks to get them to open the email with a catchy subject. Nothing.

Your emails are going straight to junk mail. Do you know why? If this is your problem, it is because you are pitching to people you don’t even know. People don’t waste time reading pitches. If they need your service, they will look for your service. You are offering them nothing of value.
Promotional sales emails rarely get read or even opened. In fact, most go straight to the junk mail filter.

Do you want to get your emails read?

The first thing to remember is it is not all about you. You are asking people to read your email, you have to give them a reason. You can’t expect people to want to spend their limited time every day reading your sales pitch along with the other 180 per day they get. I checked my email inbox, it is 5:21 pm, and I have received 177 emails since I went to bed last night, no doubt at least 150 of them are sales pitches. You have to give them a reason to open your email. Of my 177 emails(plus about 10 I did not delete or read from yesterday) I will read about ¼ of them. I will read my actual real email, and I will open about 10-20 sales pitches knowing they are sales pitches.

Which sales pitches, you ask?

The ones who offer me something of value bundled in with the pitch. Give me a tip on how to boost my engagement, and I will read your sales pitch along with your advice.

Now your customer may not care about engagement. Say you are a car dealer. You would then show me ways to save money on fuel efficiency, then pitch a better MPG car. I will read that. You may make me realize it is time for a new vehicle while trying to get better mileage. Or a doctors office. Will your child not eat veggies? Wow, here is an email about how to get kids to eat vegetables! And now that you mention it, it may be time to schedule a checkup.

Next, get rid of the flashy space wasters. You do not need all that high graphics eye-catching attraction inside an email. It is annoying and bulky. You are not trying to attract attention, the email is already open. But, you may get flagged as being potentially unsafe if there is too much code in the email.

Go easy on the pitch, Soft sell here. Offer some value, throw in a special offer of the month. But, in general, you want your effective email copy to let the reader decide they may want to contact you without you asking for it. Go easy on the links. One per page is fine unless you are linking some helpful news articles or something similar.

Finally

Test test test. Take these tips, try them out, mix and match and look for what works best. There is no one size fits all, you want to continually try out new ideas and see what works and what doesn’t. The goal is to keep what works, discard what doesn’t. In a few months, you will have a lean, mean, email marketing machine.