Email marketing is not dead although it seems old-fashioned and outdated if lined beside newer marketing tools such as social media and mobile devices. The truth is, compared to social networks, email is still more effective in promoting your products and engaging your target market.

However, simply blasting emails to a list of addresses doesn’t guarantee qualified leads. Chances are, they will just end up marked as spam or deleted without getting opened. If you don t want your email-based marketing campaign to suffer the same fate, you must make it effective by giving it the following elements:

Personalized content

By “personalized,” we don’t just mean greeting recipients by their name. In fact, a research by Temple Fox School of Business even found the “Dear [name]” approach to be unimpressive because it gives off a faked familiarity that turns off possible customers.
What you should do instead is to get to know your target audience not just by their names, but through their needs and interests. This way, you can tailor your email content in a way that would appeal to their individual tastes.

Catchy subject line

The subject line can make or break your campaign. This is what makes the receiver decide whether or not they would open and read your message, so word your subject right. Make it honest and relevant to the content, but avoid over-hyping it with too many exclamation points and adjectives. Email marketing service provider MailChimp suggests avoiding words like free, help, percent off, and reminder because they trigger spam filters and decrease the open rate, which is the chance of your email being opened.

A study by Adestra also reveals that the character count affects your email’s open rate. Subject lines with above 70 characters are reported to engage readers to click through links in the message while those under 49 characters have higher chances of being opened. However, if you use 60 to 70 characters, your email will likely have zero increase in clickthrough and open rates.

Right timing

Your email can have higher open and clickthrough rates if you send it at a time when other marketers are the least likely to send theirs. Experian Marketing Services found in their benchmark study that office hours are not the ideal sending time because people generally open and read marketing emails from 8:00 pm to midnight.

Saturdays and Sundays are also found to be the best days to blast messages, but of course, you need to test this strategy’s effectiveness, as open and clickthrough behaviors vary from market to market.