The average office worker spends 49 minutes managing e-mail daily, while upper level managers spend up to four hours a day on email. A great email can reduce churn, drive engagement, increase revenue, help you learn more about your clients, and even make them more successful. A mediocre one, however, can cause cancellations to spike, erode trust, or just move you one step closer to irrelevancy in your client's inbox. Read the last few emails you've sent to people you're trying to connect with. Did you say the same thing every time? Is 40% of of what you wrote jargon? Do you sound like a robot?
I answered "yes" to most of those questions not too long ago. But then we tried something that I'd like to recommend here.
1. Get permission
Permission-based e-mails don't guarantee deliverability, as the statistics above confirm, but your success rate will certainly be higher than without permission. Also, once you have established a relationship with someone, ask them to put you in their address book. This is the single most important thing you can do to increase deliverability.
2. Focus on your Subject Line
This is critical to get your message opened. You have only a few seconds to get the reader's attention before you're clicked into the garbage pile. Focus on Value. Give the reader a compelling reason to open your message before deleting it and going to the next one. You will sabotage your efforts if you only use generic information. For instance, if you're sending a monthly newsletter with valuable home maintenance tips, don't use "March Newsletter" as your subject line (I receive numerous newsletters just like that). That won't entice anyone to open it. However, if your subject line reads "6 home maintenance tips that add value", you'll get a much higher open rate.
3. Front-load your message
Some recipients don't see the entire subject line due to shortened screens. Make sure your most valuable part is not cut off.
4. What's on the screen?
Do not put large graphics or a giant masthead on top of your e-mail. You're wasting valuable space. And include your most valuable content first, since the latter part of your message probably won't be viewed without scrolling. Send yourself a test and discover what you see in your preview pane.
5. Tighten up the body of your message
Avoid long blocks of copy by limiting paragraphs to no more than three or four sentences. Most people scan e-mails quickly because they're forced to deal with so many. Use numbers and bullets to make it easy for the reader to focus (if you're technologically challenged like me and don't know how to use html code, you can simply type in the numerical digits or copy and paste a "bullet" symbol from a word document).
6. List Maintenance - Keep your lists up-to-date
Delete undeliverable addresses and "bounces" before mailing again since not doing so can negatively impact future deliverability. You can make your job easier by including easy-to-follow unsubscribe instructions with every single message you send.
100% e-mail open rates are probably not realistic given the current online environment. But you certainly can improve yours by following the above guidelines.
Also having great tools to manage the workload help. This is a free tool: Folio by Amitree. Folio automatically places emails into Smart Folders for each one of your transactions. You can easily find important documents and contacts for each transaction you're working on.
Folio by Amitree
Another great piece of software is Helpscout. It's Email management software designed to keep everyone on the same page. Check them out! Helpscout's intuitive interface allows you to easily manage your inbox and respond to emails as they're received! Have clients that always ask the same questions? Helpscout has a "Docs" library to store articles to provide your clients.
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