Email Marketing Tips – Increasing Open Rates
Email marketing is what makes or breaks most affiliate marketers. Even if your affiliate sales through your pre-sell pages are a little below where you want them, if you are growing a responsive list you can still come out on top. The key to effective email marketing is to get people on your list to open your emails.
You’ve seen all of the subject lines. Most email marketers make outrageous claims in their subject lines to encourage subscribers to open their emails. The problem is that after receiving email after email filled with nothing but affiliate links and hype, people quit opening them. Worse than that–they unsubscribe!
How can you keep your subscribers happy? How can you keep them opening your emails? Here are a couple tips. First, provide value in your emails. Every one must provide them with something of value. Sure, you can toss a couple of affiliate links in them, but don’t overdo it. And every email must provide them with a useful tip related to the niche you are operating in.
Provide them with value and your open rates will be much higher than otherwise. Also, once in a while provide them with some kind of bonus. It doesn’t have to be huge, but provide them with some kind of report, maybe just a few pages that they can download. This too will help.
Another trick is to provide scarcity in your email title. You could say something like “Free download for 24 hours only.” Have a free report they can download and after 24 hours pull the download link.
A few subscribers may complain that they didn’t open the email within 24 hours. But don’t give in. What you want to do is to train your subscribers to open your emails immediately rather than putting it off. Doing this once in a while can drastically improve the open rates you achieve!
Again, direct email marketing is all about value. By providing value you establish a degree of trust with your subscribers. And the more they trust you, the more likely it is they will buy from you at some point. So many affiliates send out so much junk email to their lists that if you just put yourself ahead of the crowd a little bit, you will likely find that not only do the open rates of your emails improve, your sales improve as well.
And one final thing, if you offer them something for free in your subject line, make sure you give them something that is absolutely free. Don’t make it a thinly veiled promotion for something you are promoting. That makes subscribers mad and it won’t help your future open rates.
