Email is a great marketing strategy.

But it’s a damn hard work.

I wrote about winning new clients with email and shared my personal experiences of running an email newsletter here on Ahrefs already.

But truth be told, all this advice is pointless if no one opens your emails.

And the trouble is, not many people do.

According to this Mailchimp benchmark report, typical open rates in marketing and advertising are 18.81%. According to my account, it’s even lower, 14.5%

My list average, however, is 63.5%.

I’m sure there is a very scientific explanation for this but I honestly don’t know. I know, however, what I do that might be contributing to this result.

1. Prequalifying Subscribers

Email marketing seems like a numbers game. The more people join your list, the better, right?

Not in consulting.

Unless you prequalify subscribers, you’ll end up with many people who joined only to grab your freebie.

These people won’t open your emails. They don’t care about you and what you have to say.

This typically happens for two reasons:

• Poor targeting. You don’t explain who you want on your list.
• Generic incentive. Offering an eBook targeting small businesses in general may seem like a good idea. That’s until you realize that you talk to people who’d never buy from you.

Your incentive should be targeted at businesses you want to attract. If you want companies with big bucks, don’t offer them “10 tips to optimize your site” in exchange. After all, what are the chances that it will attract people interested in spending top dollar on SEO?

Improve your targeting by attracting only potential customers to your list

I mentioned this in my previous article already – a consultant’s email doesn’t work as one your favorite store sends you each month. They want you to click and buy, you aim to nurture your leads.

They don’t care about whom they send an email to. You are trying to build a relationship with each subscriber.

Pre-qualifying them makes it easier to nurture and build that relation.

2. Regularly Weeding Out Stale Subscribers

People drop off your list. It’s only natural.

Some might get bored with your message but won’t be bothered to unsubscribe. Others might have inquired about your services but didn’t like the quote. They won’t work with you and thus your newsletter becomes obsolete to them. Or they simply move jobs, something else happens or they weren’t that interested in the first place.

Monitor your list for people who stop opening your emails. If you feel they will never hire you, remove them from the list. Your list will get smaller but your open rate will go up.

3. Segmenting

I’m sure you know about the benefits of segmentation already. It allows you to send targeted emails to various subscribers.

But there is another reason to pre-segmenting your list at the signup. It’s another way to pre-qualify your potential leads. People who do not meet the criteria you specified in the form (location, type of jobs, industry, etc. ) will naturally drop off before signing up.

4. Personalisation

It’s a known fact that generic emails fail.

A personalized email stands out from the typical advertising or sales message we are being bombarded with every day.

But apart from the obvious benefits of personalization – overcoming the feeling of automation, starting with a recipient’s name sets the tone for the entire message.

In addition to mentioning the recipient’s name, use a personal email address too. I only have one email but chances are you have few – a personal one and a generic “hi@…”or info@yourcompany.com” for instance. When sending emails, do it from your personal one. It will make the recipient feel they are getting an email from a person, not a company.

5. Killer Subject Lines

This one goes without saying. A subject line is the most important aspect of your content. It has to be catchy and interesting to entice a recipient to click on it.

It should also hint at what a reader should expect from the email without revealing the entire message. Otherwise who’d need to read the email?

Some ways to achieve that include:

• Asking questions. Questions have long been one of the most popular marketing strategies. In 2000 two professors, Gavan Fitzimmons and Patti Williams discovered that by posing clever questions, marketers could change a purchaser’s behavior “in a systematic and predictable fashion.”

Questions also help to arouse our curiosity, especially when they relate to something we might be missing. All in all, they’re a great email conversation starter.

• Being a smart ar*e. Witty or funny headlines tend to attract attention. They are, however, hard to come up with, especially if you try to target many lead preferences. Hence, they work best with segmented lists.
• Using Negative Words. It’s sometimes easier to grab someone’s attention by telling them what they might be doing wrong rather than how to do it right.

6. Timing and Consistency

In this article, Helen Jane says, “consistency in e-mail also encourages recipients to open” and she can’t be more right. After all, we are drawn to familiar things. Regular emails appearing in your inbox when you expect them stand a much greater chance to being opened.

Which also brings us to the other aspect, timing.

I’m religious about sending my emails on Tuesday. There’s no other reasons for it apart from the fact that I’ve always done it this way.

But when it comes to what time I send them … now that’s a problem

The majority of my subscribers are in the US. I, however, try to send emails so that they arrive when my subscribers in other time zones are awake too.

And those weeks when I’m late getting the email out, my open rates drop significantly.

There’s a lot of research on best time to email. From experience, however, I believe you should find the most optimum time for your audience. It may take some trial and error but it’s worth it in the end.