Tag: email personalization

Email checklist: 8 things to check before sending

Even the smallest mistakes in your marketing emails can ruin an entire campaign.

There’s nothing worse than the feeling of hitting “send” and then realizing that you sent the wrong link to your entire contact list.

It happens more often than you might think.

About 33 percent of marketers send weekly emails, and 26 percent send emails multiple times per month. That’s a lot of chances for mistakes. And those mistakes can embarrass your brand, affect the email recipient’s perception of your company and prevent your email from achieving its goal.

An email checklist can help. Email marketing mistakes are easy to avoid when you know what to look for.

The following are eight things to check before sending your marketing email. This checklist can help ensure no mistakes get past you.

Send a test email to yourself

In general, you always want to send a test email to yourself and open it on multiple devices. This way, you can go over all the email content as it appears in an email client interface before your email subscribers do.

This gives you the best opportunity to see how everything looks and test all aspects of your email.

Confirm that you’re sending to the right contact list

It’s important to confirm that your email is going to the correct inboxes. Of course, your email has to start with a clear goal in mind. That goal will direct the right messaging for the right people. 

If you’re sending to the same message to all your contacts, it’s time to segment your contact list and personalize your messaging. DailyStory can help.

Remember that your customers and leads are all at different stages of your sales funnel. You wouldn’t send the same type of message to a past customer that you would a new lead, for example. 

Check for broken and forgotten links

One of the biggest mistakes that can be made is to send out a marketing email with a broken or forgotten link. A broken link is when the link either doesn’t work or is incorrect in another way. A forgotten link is when the link is missing entirely.

Forgotten links are common on clickable images, social media buttons and call-to-action buttons.

Manually check every single link before you send your email to your target audience.

Confirm your personalized greeting

Personalization is powerful in email marketing. The ability to address a mass marketing email with a recipient’s first name can improve your open rate and potentially your conversion rate.

However, if a customer gets an email that says, “Hi {first name],” and not his or her actual first name, it looks unprofessional. And they likely won’t continue reading.

Double check all dynamic tags in your email to confirm that your personalization works. This is a must for your email checklist.

Check your grammar and spelling

This is typically the testing commonly thought about, confirming that your email has good grammar and spelling. This is because no matter what your content, if it has grammar or spelling errors, then your business will appear unprofessional and lose respect.

It’s all about proofreading. Sending a test version of your email to others on your team can help get additional eyes on your copy.

Tools also can help. A free spell checker can catch any spelling errors, but keep an eye out for homophones, words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. For example: flower and flour, or deer and dear. These can potentially slip through spell checkers. Grammar checkers, such as Grammarly, can help identify poor grammar in your copy as well.

Deliver clear value (and CTA)

It’s important to confirm that every email you send has a point and offers clear value to the recipient. Otherwise, you risk your subscribers opting out from receiving your emails entirely.

This goes beyond the spelling and grammar checks. What are you offering? It could be a tip, a discount code, a link to a helpful article or guide or something else (as long as you don’t sound spammy).

The value should be aligned with your email marketing goal and larger goals for your business. 

Of course, this value is capped off with a strong call-to-action. What do you want your recipients to do? Keep it simple, direct and compelling.

Optimize your subject lines and preview text

No matter how good your email content is, it doesn’t matter if your recipients never open your email to begin with. Your email checklist should include subject lines and preview text.

Your open rate largely comes down to your subject line. How are you catching your recipient’s attention and compelling him or her to open your email? 

Subject lines need to be strong and sound conversational. You don’t want to sound overly sales-focused or robotic. It’s about creating excitement.

Also, keep the length of your subject line as breif as possible. Recipients should be inspired to find out more.

Check out our 12 tips to write subject lines that won’t be ignored.

In addition to subject lines, the preview text can assist in compelling recipients to open your email. Preview text is a short snippet from your email text that displays in the inbox next to your email’s subject line. 

Of course, you don’t have to let it default to the first 140 characters or so from your email copy. The preview text copy can be customized to display a message that supports your subject line in achieving a higher open rate.

Check your images and design

Blurry images or bad formatting can ruin your email. So, it’s not all about checking your written content. You also want to confirm that all visual aspects of your email work and work together.

Keep an eye out for pixelated or squashd images, and make sure that all images have associated alt text and display how you want them to. (Alt text will help if your images don’t render properly.)

In addition, you’ll want to consider:

  • Formatting, such as bulleted list appearance and whether there’s too much or not enough white space
  • Colors since background colors might not render for all recipients (so white text on a dark background might be illegible for some recipients)

Check out six ways visuals can increase your email conversions.

In conclusion

Every email matters. It’s important to confirm every aspect of your marketing email before sending to ensure success. The cost of mistakes is too great. Set up your own email checklist so that you can stay on top of your email marketing and ensure that everything you send is as professional and effective as possible.

Check out our 16 email marketing best practices than can make a positive impact for your business.

As you’re setting up your email checklist, consider optimizing your overall digital marketing process, which includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email and text message marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Increase your email open rates with these 8 strategies

In the email marketing industry, the consensus is that a good email open rate is between 15 percent and 20 percent.

If you are below this, there are some simple things you can do. But with a little more work, you can get your email open rate much higher.

Increasing your email open rate directly impacts the click rate, too. This leads to more conversions. And conversions directly impact the success of your email marketing campaign(s).

Below are eight strategies to get the highest possible email open rate.

Increasing email open rates requires getting to the inbox

Your first objective with any email campaign is to get to the inbox and not the spam (or junk) folder. Seems obvious, but too often, important steps are skipped.

So, before spending your time tweaking subject lines, A/B testing or doing anything else this article outlines, make sure you’ve set up your email marketing for success.

And, while this may sound surprising, we constantly find marketers sending marketing emails with simple email marketing fundamentals completely ignored: Bad sender domains, missing DNS records and so on.

Dive into these technical email setup details with our guide on email inbox placement and avoiding the junk folder.

Once you have confirmed your email isn’t landing in spam, it’s time to focus on increasing your email open rate.

It starts with the subject line.

A great subject line increases email open rates

The subject line is the first thing people read when they receive your email. The subject line is the determining factor when they decide to open your email, ignore it, trash it or mark it as spam.

Writing a clear, concise subject line is often the difference between a successful email marketing campaign and a failed one.

Below are some recommendations for how to craft a great subject line:

  • Ask a question: This can be as simple as, “Mark, what is your biggest marketing challenge?” A question is a great way to capture the readers’ attention. This is especially useful if you target your question to fit the audience.
  • Announce a product or offer: “15% off today for fitness friends like you, Anne.” An offer or announcement that is relevant to the recipient will have a high likelihood of getting read.
  • Offer a solution to a problem: “Our SMS marketing delivery rates are 95%.” By addressing a problem the recipient is facing (perhaps with sending SMS marketing, for example), you are positioning yourself as a solution to a problem.
  • Educate: “Update your terms of service to adhere to new CCPA laws.” Providing education creates value for the recipient and gives them the information they may need – before they know they need it.

There are many other opportunities. The point is to craft a meaningful subject line that the recipient finds useful and relevant.

See our 12 tips for email subject lines that won’t get ignored.

Personalize your subject line to increase email open rates

In the preceding examples of email subject lines, several included the recipient’s first name. While you may not always have this data available, personalizing the subject line is a great way to achieve higher open rates.

What should you consider personalizing? First name and company name are the most obvious candidates. However, depending upon the data you have, you can go even further. For example:

  • “Bill, you’re an O+ donor, and we’re low on your blood type“
  • “Amy, we know you love spin class, and we just updated our schedule“
  • “Tom, your favorite whey shake mix is back in stock“
  • “You made your 3rd purchase – thank you, Kayley, here is a 15% coupon“

In the examples above, the bold text is an example of content that is personalized.

Find out more about the email personalization available through DailyStory.

Use emojis to help your subject line stand out

Most email subject lines can be pretty boring. To increase email open rates, your goal is to stand out!

While not appropriate for every email, use emojis and other non-standard text in your subject line. For example:

  • Amy, the 🎥 [webinar] on SMS marketing for 💪 fitness gyms is tomorrow
  • [Cheat sheet for you] 🔍 the ABCs of A/B testing your emails

Both the bracketed, e.g. [webinar], text and use of emojis helps the email stand out in the inbox. It provides some visual cues to the reader about what the topic of the email is about.

Here is a list of the 100 most commonly used emojis. Just copy/paste into your email subject lines.

Consider different subject line lengths

Marketers love to debate which works better: a short focused subject line or a longer more detailed subject line.

Use a subject line too short, and you miss out on content you could have included.

But long subject lines get clipped on mobile email clients. This prevents them from even being seen. A long subject line also negates the benefit of the email preheader.

Aim for the ‘Goldilocks zone’

The “Goldilocks zone” for your subject line is not too short and not too long.

Therefore, the ideal subject line length is between 40 and 60 characters. This ensures your subject line is readable on any email client. A mobile client allows for less space than a desktop client, and in both cases, a longer subject line may get trimmed.

Staying in the “Goldilocks zone” allows you to optimize the preview text of the email. Set in the preheader.

Use this tool to check how many characters your subject line is. DailyStory has built-in tools to help you optimize your subject line length.

Always use a personalized preheader

Modern email clients show a preview of an email in the inbox. This provides additional information beyond the subject line.

Email clients determine what is shown exclusively by what text comes first in the email.

Set email preheader to increase open rates

While the subject line is the most important factor for your email open rates. The preheader is a very close second. And you should always take as much time writing the preheader as you do the subject line.

A preheader is text content, usually not more than 100 characters, that is added to the top of an email using some advanced HTML. The preheader is a feature provided in modern email marketing platforms.

When the email is opened, the preheader is hidden from view. But, by adding the content to the very top of the email, the preheader ensures that it is the content displayed when the email is previewed.

Learn more about how an email preheader works.

Writing an effective email preheader

The preheader content should not be the same as the subject line. It should be personalized, and while it can include emojis, the preheader should be treated like a small ad or the continuation of the subject line.

If the subject line captures the reader’s interest, the preheader is often used to validate the expected content. For example, here is a sample subject line with a related preheader:

Subject: “📅 Amy, we updated our spin class schedule”

Preheader: “More spin classes at 5:30 a.m., 6 p.m., and 7:30 p.m. Be sure to sign up soon as classes are likely to fill up.”

In the above preheader example, we include more copy that we expect to be shown in the inbox preview. Any overflow copy will be replaced with ellipses. But that’s OK. Too much is better than too little!

Remember, if you don’t set the preheader, you are letting the email client pick the text it shows. If you care about email open rates, always set the preheader.

DailyStory has built-in tools to tell you if you have the right length for your preheader text.

Don’t ignore the ‘from’ address

You’ve written a killer subject line. Optimized it with personalization, included emojis and complimented it with a preheader that just begs for the reader to open an email.

Don’t hit the “send” button just yet. There is one more thing to do: Set the “from” address.

A basic email address is “hello@example.com.” But an email address can also include a more friendly name. For example, “Rob Howard <rob.howard@example.com>.”

So, why not use something descriptive for your marketing emails, too? For example,  “Marketing Webinars <hello@example.com>.”

Your marketing emails should always come from an email address that identifies who the sender is.

Want to make the email important, make it appear to come from someone senior on your team that customers know? Like your CEO, “Elon Musk <elon.musk@example.com>.”

Is the email about an upcoming webinar? Set the address to include the company name and the focus “Tesla Webinars <hello@example.com>.”

The goal is to use the email address to signal who and what the email is about.

Should I send from a no-reply address?

Generally, we’re not fans of sending from a no-reply address.

Email is meant to be used for discussions.

Furthermore, it’s possible to set a reply address when sending the email so that the email comes from one address, e.g., “Tesla Webinars <hello@example.com>,” but replies are sent to support@example.com.

A/B test to optimize email open rates

Finally, once you’ve optimized everything, test it.

A/B testing works best if you are sending to a large audience and you have some good ideas about your subject line and preheader variations.

See our nine tips for effective A/B testing.

In conclusion

Start by focusing on getting your email to the inbox. Then, turn your attention to the subject line and preheader. Optimize these, and use personalization. And don’t forget about the “from” address.

Following these strategies will help you craft better email marketing campaigns that lead to higher email open rates.

As you’re improving your email open rates, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.