Marketers often focus on conversions, open rates, and other hard metrics to track the results of email outreach campaigns. These metrics give you insights into an email campaign’s performance. However, they may only provide a glimpse into the effectiveness of your emails.
How your emails are crafted has far-flung effects on your email outreach campaign results. In addition, you must ensure your emails are sent to the right audience, at the right time, every time. Otherwise, you risk missing out on opportunities to engage audience members. Even worse, you risk alienating prospects and customers and driving them to industry rivals.
A clear understanding of how people organize and manage their inboxes is a must. Once you know how people approach their emails, you can fine-tune your email outreach campaigns. From here, you’re well-equipped to craft engaging, informative emails that hit the mark with your target audience.
How Can You Get People to Read Your Emails?
People read emails that pique their interest as soon as they reach their inboxes. You may commit significant time, energy, and resources to produce these emails. Regardless, you need to understand how people view emails and what prompts readers to open them. Then, you can produce emails that consistently drive audience engagement.
There are many tried-and-true marketing best practices you can use to get people to read your emails. These include:
1. Learn About Your Target Audience
Most people receive hundreds of emails daily, but they may only read a handful of these messages. Time is scarce, and someone may spend only a few seconds checking their inbox to determine if an email is worth reading. Meanwhile, if an email comes from an unknown sender or looks suspicious, a reader may mark the message as spam.
Develop insights into your target audience for email campaigns. Consider customer psychology and why readers would want to open your emails. This can help you tailor emails to your target audience. Plus, it can reduce the risk that readers will ignore your messages or send them to the spam folder.
Use both internal and external data to learn about your target audience. You can review metrics from past email campaigns to see how customers have engaged with your brand. Also, you can conduct customer questionnaires and surveys. The more data you have from customers, the more likely it becomes you can provide them with emails that meet their expectations.
2. Personalize Your Emails
Sending a generic, one-size-fits-all email to dozens of prospects and customers won’t do you any favors. The email is likely to look the same as most others in a reader’s inbox. Therefore, it won’t garner much attention.
Create personalized emails to connect with readers like never before. These emails can include an email recipient’s first name and other personalized information. This can boost your email click and open rates.
Before you craft a personalized email, determine if you’re reaching out to a B2B or B2C audience. Knowing the ins and outs of B2B and B2C marketing cycles is crucial. This helps you produce personalized emails in a style, tone, and layout that aligns with your audience.
Use target audience data to create email lists that group contacts based on key demographics. Then, you can produce a personalized message that resonates with audience members.
Write an email that feels like it comes from a human being, not a robot. Avoid using jargon and other terms and phrases that can confuse a reader. Keep the message short and include a call-to-action that encourages the reader to follow up with you.
3. Track Your Results and Continuously Improve
Experiment with different emails and monitor your results. You can use email marketing software that lets you view and analyze relevant metrics. The software can make it easy to produce reports to track your email campaigns over time.
Perform A/B testing with emails. For example, you can test multiple subject lines for an email. This gives you insights into how readers respond to certain words and phrases used in your subject lines.
Consider the audience’s perspective, too. Put yourself in an email recipient’s shoes and think about how you would respond to an email from your company. If you read through an email and find it is filled with jargon and difficult to understand, revise it accordingly. Or, if you find an email is clear, concise, and relatable, you can send this message to readers and see how it performs.
Continue to raise the bar for your email marketing campaigns. Set email marketing goals and determine the steps that you will need to follow to achieve them. If you accomplish an email marketing goal, establish a new one. On the other hand, if you fall short of achieving a goal, find out why this happened. You can then revise your goal and revamp your email outreach campaigns as needed.
Make Sure That Your Emails Pass the Inbox Test
Email marketing can make a world of difference. Review your email marketing outreach carefully and consider how to engage with readers. Put your audience front and center so you can make sure that readers enjoy getting your emails. With this approach, you may find that your emails consistently pass the inbox test.
