The four technical supplements that will help your email open rates reach peak performance

Email: The easiest way to either a high marketing ROI or the easiest way to ruin someone’s day. According to a survey ran by Crain BtoB Magazine, 59% of marketers say that email is the highest revenue generation channel in their company. However, over 50% of people who receive subscription based emails unsubscribe because they never expected communication from the company.

Even if you have a loyal subscriber list to your content, there may be other factors in the way of your email marketing. These other factors can be summarized into one general issue: technical optimization. Emails are much more than sending awesome copy and a great content offer, they have several other properties that affect how they are sent, where they will get sent, and even the first impression people make of them in their inbox!

Luckily, we have a prescription if you think you’re suffering from the ailments of poor technical email practices:

Your Email Technical Prescription:

1. One verified sender to email from — If you’re using a CRM or marketing automation software for email campaigns, that’s great! BUT… you have to make sure you have a verified sender in that software. Using the default sender tools in CRMs will insert a @company.image: /uploads/.com at the end of your sender line! Your recipients will immediately know that you’re sending an automated email, which can lead to unsubscribes and unopened emails. There is a cure though! Just make sure you have a dedicated email address, and verify it through your CRM! Not only will you agree to be compliant with CAN-SPAM law, but your subscribers will feel as if a person is sending over the content they love!
2. KISS: Keep it Sweet and Simple (for subject lines and preview text) — So you’ve made a killer subject line, your preview text does a great job describing your content, but when you send the email it cuts off. Generally, you want to aim for 50 or so characters when writing subject lines! Hopefully you tweet a lot because 140 characters is tough enough, but 50 is less than half of that! Meeting this challenge creates a simple but effective outcome: your subject lines and preview texts can be fully read without needing another click. This also ties into our next item…
3. Optimize for mobile devices always! — Did you know that almost 80% of email recipients open email on their mobile device! Yes, you’re reading that correctly! Over the last five years, email opens have greatly shifted from desktop to mobile! Hence why we say optimize your emails for mobile always! Those short but sweet subjects? Already optimized for mobile and desktop! CTAs? Make your CTA a square button to perfectly accommodate mobile screens! Always test your templates and see what they look like on phone screens. Apple Mail dominates mobile opens (over 55%!) because they integrate with every client. Now another nice transition (two for two) as clients are hugely important in technical optimization…
4. Make sure your emails are viewable in any email client! — There is an ongoing argument about HTML vs. plain text and which one is better. While most subscribers (people who have already dedicated their time to see your content) wish to see HTML emails from companies, colder leads are generally more inviting to plain-text. However, there are even people who still use basic clients that can ONLY VIEW PLAIN TEXT! So what do you do? Make an HTML and plain-text version of course! This increases not only how many emails you are able to send, but also allows “client-challenged” email users to view your content!

If you use CRM software or similar tools, you should be in great shape to use technical features of email marketing to your advantage! And as always, make sure to double up on CloudAid prescriptions to supercharge your CRM/marketing automation!