Creating subscribers is an excellent way to market to people who have visited your site. They might not have bought anything but left their email address in exchange for, say, an ebook.
On the other hand, they might have their email address because they loved the products you were offering and would love to know more about them.
In any case, email plays a vital role in your marketing strategy. But there’s one problem plaguing this part of your strategy; low email open rates.
An open rate is the number of people who have opened your email compared to those who have received them. The online shopping industry falls particularly foul of this problem.
According to MailChimp, a massive player in the email marketing industry, eCommerce emails have some of the lowest open rates.
Don’t lose hope yet. Your impressive email copy won’t go to waste. There are still ways to make your online store beat these low open rates.
In this article, we will show you some tricks you can apply to your emails to ensure that a larger share of your subscriber list opens them.
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How To Improve Email Open Rates
As we’ve already pointed out, eCommerce-related emails have a low open rate. This means that you have quite a task on your hands to ensure that customers open your emails.
A significant portion of the work to be done requires you to make your email as enticing as possible. After all, if clients don’t open your email, they won’t discover all the great offers and discounts you have waiting for them.
Below, we take you through the various methods you can use to make your subscribers want to click that notification when it flashes at the top of their smartphone screen.
1. Include Your Brand In The Sender's Name
When people are scrolling through their overflowing inboxes, they want to know who exactly the email is from. If they’re already interested in your brand, seeing the name will draw them in.
Additionally, some email services make the sender’s name very prominent in the recipient’s inbox. This is especially true if your subscriber uses an Apple device.
iOS places plenty of emphasis on the sender’s name. Something like “Jemma from J’s Jewellery” catches the customer’s attention because they already know the brand and are interested in its offers. And if you notice, the sender’s name includes an actual person’s name.
This shows the potential customer that it wasn’t just a machine that sent out a blast of thousands of emails. Your subscribers appreciated that personal touch.
2. Get The Subject Line Right
The subject line is a crucial part of an email. Before the receiver opens any email, they look at the subject line to see what the message contains.
So, if they don’t like what’s in the subject line, they’ll just skip over that email. And that’s just the best-case scenario. They could delete the email or even take it further and blacklist your email address.
Therefore, you have to make your subject line as enticing as possible. Your email marketing campaign depends on it. And by “enticing as possible,” we don’t mean that you should be sales.
Clients don’t appreciate that snake oil salesman charm. Be straightforward with the contents of the subject line. This isn’t the time to play hide-and-seek. In other words, don’t use vague promises.
State the purpose of the email clearly, highlighting any valuables the receiver should expect when they open it. This doesn’t mean you should use bland, corporate language. No.
Use friendly, engaging language that’ll make the customer curious about the contents of the email. To catch the recipient’s attention, type the subject line in the title case. Look at any of the headings in this article.
That is the title case. It makes the email stand out from the other text in the inbox.
3. Optimize The Preview Text
Before you open a single email, you’ll notice that there’s some part of the message just after the subject line of the various emails in your inbox.
Customers read through this preview text (pre-header text) to see if opening the email is worth it. If your subject line is the bait to make the recipient hover over your email, the preview text is the hook that’ll capture and draw them in to read the entire message.
Although the preview text is just around 50 characters, it’s essential in your efforts to improve email open rates for your eCommerce store. Add a bit of intrigue to the copy and inject a sense of urgency into the text. This piques the customer’s curiosity, pushing them to open the email.
4. Keep Your Subscriber List Fresh
Your email marketing process usually starts off with lead-capturing efforts. Debutify’s free Shopify theme helps you design effective lead magnets. If these efforts are effective, you’ll likely build an extensive list over a short time.
READ MORE: "Shopify Theme: Basic Fundamentals"
However, some of your subscribers might change email addresses. On the other hand, they might not be interested in what your brand has to offer. So, you might be investing plenty of resources in sending emails to ghost addresses.
The low email open rates might demoralize you, causing you to pay less attention to your ecommerce email marketing strategy. The solution? Scrub your subscriber list. This means you need to regularly comb through the list, removing dead addresses.
You should also remove the address belonging to inactive subscribers. An inactive subscriber could be someone who hasn’t engaged with your emails for at least 6 months.
5. Segment Your List
When people are scrolling through their inbox, they’re looking for emails that are relevant to them. If they don’t care a lot about the contents of the email (the subject line we mentioned earlier will tell them), they won’t give it much thought.
The answer to this is quite simple. Send emails about a specific subject to your subscribers who are interested in the topic. This means different subscribers will always get separate emails from the rest of the list. The analytics on your site will show you what your various visitors are interested in when they move through the store.
Debutify allows you to add several powerful add-ons for insightful analytics. For example, some visitors buy products the majority of the time they log onto the site. Others browse through individual sections only.
From this visitor activity, you can form the customer segments; buyers, browsers, and those interested in specific product categories.
Tag these addresses in your list. When you have emails addressing a particular segment, send them to only the members of that faction. When they receive emails with subject lines and preview text that is in line with their preferences, they’re more likely to open them.
6. Send Your Emails At The Right Time
Email open rates rise and fall depending on the time of day and day of the week. As a result, sending emails at the wrong time can end up in plenty of them remaining unopened.
The ideal team for sending depends on several factors. Some studies show that more people open their emails during weekdays compared to weekends. Additionally, the majority of recipients open their emails in the morning, just before midday.
Therefore, you should send your emails on weekdays in the morning hours. However, this isn’t set in stone.
People interested in different fields open their emails at other times. With that in mind, you need to do some A/B testing to find out the right time when you get higher email open rates for your eCommerce store. Another thing to keep in mind is the frequency with which you send the emails.
If your subscribers feel that you’re sending too many emails in a short time, they’ll opt out of your list or even label you spam. If you’re sending a newsletter, once a week is excellent. If you have other promotional emails, test them and see how often your clients would like to receive them.
7. Write Relatable Content In The Email Body
Now that you have done everything to ensure that your subscribers receive the emails at the right time and open them, you need to give them something worthwhile.
This means the content needs to be valuable. Not only that, but you should also present it in a way that appeals to the audience. People prefer personal emails, where it seems like the author is speaking to them directly.
Therefore, you need to know what your subscribers think. Before writing the emails, you need to craft buyer personas for what you believe is your ideal customer.
This gives you an insight into what your subscribers are like. Craft your emails using language and a style that your ideal customers relate to. When they open the email, they’ll feel like the brand really understands them. If they like the first email they open, they’ll more likely open your future emails.
Moving Forward
Embarking on an email marketing campaign can seem like a challenging task to undertake. Using these ways to improve email open rates for your eCommerce store is a great starting point.
Apply these tips as you see fit. Many of them apply to all kinds of online store brands. For example, some niches might not appreciate a laid-back tone in your emails.
All emails should be optimized to link back to your store to result in conversions. Debutify provides a free Shopify theme that encourages customers to buy products. Download the top converting Shopify theme Debutify now for free!
