We all get them and most of us have some experience of sending them but do they work? We’ve spent some time fine tuning our own newsletters which has proven to be very effective. The average open rate is 24.79% with an average click through rate of 4.19%.
Following our hard work, we now have an average open rate of 45% and a 15% click through rate.
Not sure what open rates or click throughs are or keen to improve them? We’ve used our experience in improving ours to share some tips with you. The newsletter can be a powerful tool if it’s used properly, as a PR agency with communication at the heart of everything we do, it is imperative that we don’t just send out newsletters but that they are effective. Email marketing in general offers one of the best returns on investment when it comes to your marketing budget, this doesn’t just magically happen though; we have to work for it.
To ensure our messages are read and engaged with, we have focussed on improving two important metrics: open rates and click-through rates.
Open Rate
The open rate is the number of recipients who opened your email. Here are three tips to improve your open rate:
Resend unopened emails
It can be disheartening to see that your carefully crafted newsletter hasn’t even be opened but don’t take this as a personal slight, very often people just haven’t had time to open it. So, try resending your newsletter to the recipients who haven’t opened it yet with a new subject line. This way you’re getting another chance at being read without having to create new content. This can increase your open rate from 30% - 50%.
Delivery times
Depending on who your recipients are and what they’re typical day involves, they are likely to open emails at different times. Experiment and try sending your newsletter at different times of day to see if it obtains a higher open rate. We’ve found that as most of our recipients are business owners, a lunch time send out works best as they’ll hopefully have some time to open non-urgent, work related emails then.
Words that trigger spam filters
More than 100 billion emails are flagged as spam every day so avoid using any trigger words, overuse of symbols and unusual formatting. This site provides a useful guide for avoiding spam filters: http://blog.automational.com/2016/03/08/spam-trigger-words-to-avoid/
Click-Throughs
A click-through is when the recipient clicks a link within the email. This is a great way of increasing traffic to your website or delivering a call to action. Here are five tips to improve your click through rate:
Keep it simple
People need to know why they should click on a link and they need to have an incentive to do so, if the message is unclear then people won’t commit to a click.
Mobile responsive
A huge 65% per cent of all emails are first opened on mobile devices. And because we’re all impatient, you need to make sure your emails load quickly and are easy to read, otherwise we give up and delete.
Click bait
We’ve all been subject to this, a shocking statement on a social media post but you can’t find out the whole story unless you click on the link: click bait. You need to do this on your newsletter to up the ante on you click through rate, try piquing the reader’s curiosity and tapping into what your intended audience would want to know.
Videos
Research shows video email marketing is on the rise and has a 280% higher rate of return than traditional emails. Insert a relevant video (not one of your dog doing something cute) to capture your audience’s attention and motivate them to click.
Multiple chances
Give your newsletter the best chance possible when it comes to its click through rate by creating many call to actions. We hyper link specific words to our website as well as adding buttons such as ‘Find Out More’, ‘Read More Here’, ‘Find Out How’ depending on the content.
Now for the call to action (it would be amiss to miss), if you would like some advice or support with your own newsletter get in touch with the team on 01202 293095 or email us at hello@sunnybirdpr.com