It’s the start of a new decade yet, email marketing is still as relevant as it has been in the previous years. According to Lyfemarketing, email marketing is [still] one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your audience. In fact, the importance of email marketing is so great that businesses still recommend most marketers to integrate it until this very decade. 

Having said this, multiple brands within your industry are highly likely to be into email marketing.  But the challenges are: 

• How will you make your brand stand out among other competitors who are also taking space in your consumer’s inbox? 
• Moreover, how can you get that high priority listing under their own personal emails? 

Now that we know that brands or specifically, our competitors, are still in the emailing game – let’s first determine the answer to the first question: How can you make your email stand out from a cluttered inbox. 

Email Marketing Tips to Stand Out in The Inbox

1. Eye-catching Subject Line

Your subject line depicts your brand’s first impression on your audience. Therefore, your subject line is the first gate to catching your readers’ attention. So make sure it stands out from the hundreds of emails inside their own cluttered inboxes. According to Campaign Monitor, average subject line lengths range anywhere from 50 to 100 characters, with anywhere from 50-70 characters as the “sweet spot” for readability.

When writing subject lines, one tip is to directly getting into the point! Don’t make your readers second-guess what your email is about. Email subject lines should be able to send a gist of what your email is about right away. Depending on the topic, it can be an offering, and engaging content, or even a surprise – Just make sure you choose the right words to deliver those messages clearly.  To simply put, you must ask yourself this question before crafting a subject line: What is the value of my email and how will I assure my readers that this is what they need? 

However, there is no perfect formula for you to follow in crafting the best subject line. In fact, it may take some trial and error to find a way that works. You can do an A/B testing to determine which tactic works best for your brand. 

And remember: “At the end of the day, you don’t know what works until you try something and you measure it,” Matt Harris, and CEO and co-founder of Sendwithus.

1. Keep Your List Clean

Sometimes it’s not just all about building your email list. You have to make sure that your quantity of leads equates to its quality. Cleaning your email list is vital in every email marketing because of these factors:

1. Deliverability – Cleaning your email database keeps your brand out of the dreaded spam folder. It ensures that duplicate emails, outdated email addresses, and other inconsistencies are not pulling your brand down.
2. Open Rates & Click Through Rates – By cleaning your email list, you are also making sure that you’re only catering to those who are highly likely to engage in your brand. This improves your open rates and click-through rates. 
3. Ditch The Pitch

According to Chapin Herman of Herman-Scheer, “We have to be cognizant of the fact that today’s consumer can smell a sales pitch from a mile away, and they’re not a fan of the scent. To really maximize your use of the valuable real estate in the subject line, you’ve got to promise the reader that something of value awaits them in the body of your email. And if you want them to open your next email, you actually have to deliver it. “

Your brand must focus rather on creating helpful content by showcasing your products as something that they might need. Your voice should sound sincere, authentic, and genuine. Refrain from asking something from them the first second they read your subject line or paragraph. You should be able to back-up your brand and explain to your audience what they want, when they want it, and when they need it. After those, that’s when you communicate how could they attain it.  

These are just some of the few hacks in obtaining your consumers’ attention despite all other marketing emails clamping their inbox. Now to the second question, and also our main topic – how can you get that high priority listing under their own personal emails?

What is a High Priority Email?

A high priority email is what Gmail identifies as what is important to you by evaluating who you send email to frequently and which senders’ email you open quickly. Therefore, this makes it crucial for your subject lines to be optimized for high open rates. Once Gmail has identified what’s most likely to be a high priority to you or to the consumer, they [the consumers] can manually set their notifications only for those that are labeled as a high priority. 

For consumers, one way to make an email sender high priority is to first, go to Settings, then Filters, and enter in your filter criteria. After clicking, it will show you options of what to do with those emails. There you should be able to select “Always mark it as important” or “Never mark it as important”.

Again, we want to reiterate the importance of optimizing your emails for higher performance in open rates and click-through rates. This will give your marketing emails a better chance to be prioritized most especially from the audience who are highly likely to respond to your emails. Furthermore, creating a stronger brand etiquette also helps in increasing your chances to be identified as a high priority in their email inboxes. To foster help in composing the most effective marketing emails, here are some email etiquette that will surely help you boost your brand’s impression among your market. 

Perfecting your Email Etiquette

As experts, we agree that your marketing email style and etiquette has the potential to sabotage your first impression with your customers. Therefore, we have created a list that will guide you to level-up your email game. 

1. Understand that your email reflects your brand. 

In email marketing, your words define you. According to Fast Company, Online trust is the backbone of a huge economy: we wouldn’t have eBay, Uber, Tinder, or Airbnb unless we were open to the idea of trusting strangers simply based on their digital footprint or crowdsourced reputation. Yet going beyond superficial relations with others still requires face-to-face interactions–and it probably always will. This is why our impressions of others are rarely the same in the digital as in the physical world: even phone conversations omit key information about individuals’ personalities. Therefore, your voice matters most in delivering trust and relevance within your market. 

1. Know your audience. 

Your subject line, email body copy, and call to action buttons that are integrated into your marketing emails are only a few of what we said makes the best emails. Focusing on your target audience is what’s more integral in the process. You cannot expect your entire email list to be interested in all of the emails you want to send. That’s why you have to deliver a targeted email to the right audience to customize and ensure content relevance. 

Always ask yourself this: Are your emails being sent to the appropriate audience?

1. Get straight to the point.  

Given today’s era of digital media, the average time spent reading emails increased to 11 seconds, an almost 7% increase, between 2011 and 2016 (Source: Litmus’ Research). 

The long e-mail is a thing of the past. Write concisely, with lots of white space, so as to not overwhelm the recipient. Make sure when you look at what you’re sending it doesn’t look like a burden to read – feel free to use bullet points. The person reading your e-mail should not have to dig through several paragraphs in order to figure out what you’re asking. You should state the purpose of the e-mail within the first two sentences. Be clear, and be upfront. –Lindsey Pollak, career and workplace expert, e-mail etiquette consultant