You might think that people don’t use emails as much these days with the popularity of social media. However, email marketing is as important as any other form of online marketing. Through emails, you can connect with your customers and increase your sales.
Companies in Kenya are beginning to utilize email marketing in their online marketing strategy and are reaping big from it. Depending with the industry you are in, the type of emails you send out will vary.
What is email open rate?
Email open rate is the number of emails that were opened or viewed from an email campaign and used to evaluate engagement. To measure email marketing campaigns you need to test and analyze because your email campaign success relies on the open rate from your subscribers.
How to measure email success metrics
When you run an email campaign from an email marketing software, you can check the following metrics:
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Reply rate
- Delivery
- Time spent reading
- Unsubscribes and opt-outs
- Bounce rate
- Spam reports
For you to improve your email marketing efforts, focus on reviewing your open rates to see what has been working and what hasn’t and depending on the trend you can adjust accordingly.
- Personalize your email
Keep your email content and subject line personal.
If your database has the contact’s first name be sure to use it in your email. If you don’t have any person’s name just use the company name so that the recipient can see that at least you took time to personalize it.
In most email marketing softwares, there is always a field to personalize depending on how you have saved your database. For example you can have first name, company name, phone number… so if you wanted to use the first name depending on the software you are using you will see the “contact first name” or “first name”. When sending out, all emails will be personalized as per the contact persons details.
2. Use an engaging subject line
The subject line of an email is the single line of text people see when they receive your email.
47 per cent of emails are opened based on the subject line alone.
This is very crucial and will be the determinant of your open rate and which part of the inbox your email will go.
Your email subject lines are your brand’s first contact with potential customers and, if used correctly, they can contribute to a thriving, profitable email marketing campaign.
You need to know what will influence your target audience to open your email, what will catch their eye and what will not. From this you can craft an email subject line that you can be sure your recipients will be attracted to.
When your email subject lines sounds salesy your emails are bound to go to the ‘promotion’ box and most likely won’t be read. Words that will take you to promotion tab are: “free’, ‘ promotion’ ‘Incredible deal ‘ ‘Increase sales’ ‘Cheap ‘ ‘Limited-time offer’ also avoid using All Caps.
With so many techniques for writing good subject lines, it’s easy to leave these words out of the mix for better open rates and a clean reputation for your brand.
Also remember to not use misleading subject lines because your recipients might end up reporting you as spam or unsubscribing.
3. Right time to send emails
Depending on the field and location among other factors that affect your open rates, it is important to know when to send your emails.
You need to know when your recipients are likely to open their emails. You can test different campaigns and depending with the open rates you get per campaign, you can nail the perfect time to send your emails.
If your audience are in Kenya you need to know when they are likely to open their emails depending on their occupation, for us it’s in the morning when people are likely to be in the office, say by 8 AM so they can see our emails before they get busy or get out of the office for meetings.
Email marketing is not dead and is here to stay. In Kenya most businesses are embracing email marketing in their digital strategy and they are reaping big from it. Email marketing in Kenya can still work for your business, you just need to work on a strategy that will help you ace it.
We offer email marketing services in Nairobi, Kenya and across the world, and would love to have a chat on how you can use emails to grow your business.