TorstenDr. Torsten Schwarz, Germany’s Email Marketing guru, published his advices recently, emphasizing that it does not always have to be Big Data and omni-channel, but that sometimes even small things can make a big difference.

Just make your decisions what you want to implement in 2015.

Insert a pre-header

More and more people check their email on their smartphone. Therefore, one of the key things is to remember that the first readable text will be displayed next to sender and subject line. Still, many companies use old templates that start like this: "If this email is not displayed correctly ...". To actually reach the customer on a mobile device, make sure to put the title of the message there instead.

Check yourself, how the message is displayed on your smartphone

To make sure that no mistakes occur when displayed on a mobile device, you can do this quite easily by checking them yourself on your mobile phone. One way is to subscribe to your own emails. In addition, another effective way is to set up mail accounts on Gmail and Yahoo, and then load their mobile apps to see how the messages are displayed.

Is everything displayed properly - even without images?

Although Gmail now displays images, Outlook does not. Therefore, check how your emails look like without images. Write everything important as text and not as an image. Shape the buttons not only as images, but also use the graphical possibilities offered by HTML: large, colorful, bold font and a big range of colors from the color table.

Point out the address book in the welcome email

The welcome email has the highest opening rate. Take advantage of this in order to ask the interested parties to put your address into their address book. This is to ensure that your offers are guaranteed to reach the recipient - even with pictures.

Address non-responders

Once your formerly great opening rates fall below twenty percent, you should start waking up, as over four-fifths of your recipients are already asleep. At that moment, this might not disturb you, but at some point the algorithms fight back: If your mailing lists are bad, the modern mailing systems will soon screen you and sort you out. Facebook is already doing this. Threaten all those who have not clicked or opened your mails for two years with expulsion. Threaten three times and then actually delete them. You will see that the opening rates suddenly will go up.

There really should be only five tips this time as one of Dr. Schwarz’s resolutions was not to do too much. But if you have already done all that, there's even more: Have you ever tried special characters in the subject line? A little heart can do miracles for the opening rates. And this brings us straight to the main topic: A / B test. Make it mandatory. If you want even higher opening rates, just try a second email to the non-opener. After a few days you select a different aspect or another benefit, and thus alter the thrust of the subject line. Finally, look at your list removal mail in detail. Could it be that the frequency of the mailer is too high for the reader? Do you offer an option so that he gets fewer emails, without dropping from the list?

Source: Absolit