When it comes to digital marketing, to succeed, businesses need to leverage all available content platforms. And email marketing is central to that effort because, unlike social media platforms where your message can be viewed fleetingly in the newsfeed, your email message gets delivered directly to your target audience’s inbox.

As a result, if they respect you, they will likely respond because your message is front and center, not a passing news ghost floating by for a moment, soon to be replaced by some later news.

The Sikich consulting firm discovered that 70% of marketers regard email marketing as the best of any of their marketing efforts for producing ROI. There’s a good reason for that; email is effective, even after all these years.

No wonder, then, that you will want to make sure that your emails are opened and that they also are constructed to lead to high conversion rates.

What do you need to concentrate on to be effective? Here are some suggestions.

Open rates tend to be higher when your emails have a “preheader” after the subject line to stimulate the reader’s interest. A preheader is a short bit of text you include in the email that many email clients (such as Gmail) show beside or below the subject, rather than showing it in the email itself.

Make sure the sender’s name that shows up in the inbox “new mail” list is similar to the your actual email address.

A personalized email with a subject line and the name of the receiver correctly stated or used makes a big difference.

In fact, 64% of subscribers say that “who sent the email” affects whether they read it. And 47% of email recipients choose to open emails based on the subject line.

The time the email arrives matters too, so experiment to find out which times work for your business. Even if the research shows that between 8 pm and 12 pm are the times people are more likely to open emails, in general this might not be the case for your business.

Also, targeting your emails to the segment of your list most interested in the particular topic of this one email (of course, this requires that you actually segment your list) will positively impact your open rates and conversion rates.

When you have a deadline for a sale, mention the deadline; the fear of missing out (FOMO) can be a great motivator. For instance, Trickmaster got a 7.6% increase in conversion rate when it run a FOMO campaign.

To improve conversions, make sure you include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that includes a button at the end of your emails so it’s easy for people to click on it.

Campaign Monitor witnessed a 127% rise in click-through rate when it added a CTA button. Another example: Creating button CTAs boosted CreateDebate’s clicks by 45%.

This is just an overview of email optimization. For a more detailed explanation of the things you need to emphasize when optimizing for emails, check out this infographic: https://99firms.com/blog/email-marketing-optimization-hacks/

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