Tips For Better Email Marketing - Part I

Thankfully, there are a few little things that you can start doing immediately to improve the open rates, clickthrough rates, and lead generation for your email nurturing program.

Email new prospects within 24 hours.  It's important to take advantage of the window of opportunity when your company or product is at the top of your prospects' minds.  You can really get a pulse of what future engagement will look like by what people do when you email them within 24 hours.  If you don't have any automated email workflows set up, you're likely missing out on some major opportunities to nurture and engage your existing prospects.  If you haven't already done so, find and implement a personalized, automated email workflows that can be triggered in a number of ways: when a prospect gets added to a list, submits a form on your website, clicks a link in an email, views a page on a blog, clicks on one of your AdWord ads, or becomes a marketing qualified lead.

Send your email from a real person, not your company.  When you send email from a real person, your email open rate increases.  Plain and simple, recipients are typically more likely to trust a personalized sender name and email address than a generic one.  People are so inundated with spam now days, they often hesitate to open email from unfamiliar senders -- and they're more likely to trust a personalized sender name than a generic one.

Pre-set the preview text.  Outlook, Gmail and other email apps allow you to display the first few lines from the body of your email alongside the subject line.  Use it to provide a short, to-the-point synopsis of what you're offering -- and keep it to 50 characters or less. When you don't set the preview text, the prospect will automatically pull from the body of your email, which may be confusing, but is also a wasted opportunity to engage your audience.

Keep your emails short.  Everyone's busy and their inbox is already full.  Why add to the problem with a huge, long email?  People generally like short, concise emails better than long ones. Plus, when they're scanning through all their emails in a short amount of time, they're more likely to skim and glean the overall message before deciding to take any action.  To keep your emails short, write like you're talking to someone in real life.