Email marketing is a very common strategy for driving customers to your site and increasing conversions.

Being so common, consumers are exposed to 78 new emails on average every day (The Radicati Group). This is a lot of noise your email is surrounded with.

So what can you do for your email to stand out to customers?

Follow these 5 hacks below to increase click-through-rates and sales.

Hack 1 – improve your subject line

Your subject line is the first thing your customers see in their inbox and so it greatly influences the email’s open rate. According to Chadwick Martin Bailey, 64% of people open emails because of the subject line.

The subject line must be interesting to entice the consumers’ curiosity and so the opening of the email.

How can you make it interesting?

– Ask a question or provide an answer in the email
– Use captivating words such as “surprising”, “now”, etc
– Capitalize all words in the subject line (as you do for titles)
– Make it short and to-the-point

Hack 2 – have one call to action (CTA) per email

Too many calls for action will be overwhelming and give customers too much choice, so customers will most often be confused and do nothing.

Instead, use one CTA to focus the attention of the recipient, increasing the likelihood of click-throughs.

Hack 3 – make your CTA more desirable

The more desireable your CTA is, the higher the likelihood of click-throughs and sales are.

How?

Copywrite – what you write before the CTA and on it matters. Some motivating techniques are:

– Ask a question before the CTA (“want to see how to…?”) or lead to it (“find out how to…”)
– The CTA should emphasize personal choice (“I want to…”, “show me…”)

Buttons – do not use linked text as your CTA, instead use buttons. They are more visible and more attractive to click on.

Color – use attention-drawing, urgency inducing colors such as red or orange.

Change on hover – use 3D buttons that move on hover and/or a color change on hover.

Hack 4 – be personal

Your recipients are not to be viewed as statistics, but as people who you need to form relationships with. For this reason, you should not write as a corporation but rather in a personal manner.

How?

To – instead of addressing the recipient with “Hello!”, address them with their first name (“Hello, Sarah!”). However, some argue customers already understand their names are software-generated. For this reason, check the effectiveness of this strategy with A/B tests.

From – instead of sending the email from Sephora: email@sephora.com, you should use the a personal name of an employee, such as Josh from Sephora: josh@sephora.com.

Replies – you must allow and encourage customers to reply to your messages, and then, of course, reply back to them. Make it easy on them to begin a conversation, simply by replying to the email you’ve sent.

This is important as it shows the recipients that they are treated as humans and the company cares about them. It allows them to get help with anything they need, reducing barriers to purchases. It also allows the company to obtain more feedback and improve.

Inject the brand’s personality – throughout the email (the language, images, signature, more) express your brand’s identity. All of your emails should be on-brand and not bland. It could be humorous, trendy, use best friends vibe and more.

This allows you to maintain a strong, consistent brand as well as to make a personal connection with the consumers.

See how Etsy used hacks 3 and 4 – a clear, orange CTA and using their humorous personality.

Hack 5 – resend emails

An unopened email does not necessarily mean that the consumer was not interested in the email. It could simply mean they may have missed it or saw and forgot about it.

So send it again.

If it wasn’t opened the customer has not seen it. There is no harm in sending it again, just the benefit of increasing the probability of the email being seen.