He laughed that marketers still to this day send email from “DoNotReply@” email addresses. “In what world can you tell customers they can’t reply,” snarked Barber. It is part of the feedback loop to get a reply from the message that created the engagement.
Not all emails should go to all subscribers all of the time. Do not blanket customers with every email. Send them only the things that interest them.
If emails are going to be personalized, make sure the data is clean and the right things are personalized. Just because the name is dropped in an email does not mean the email is fully personalized.
8. Subject Lines Matter
While Barber believes that the length has no impact, he does see that the addition of emojis can make subject lines even better. For example, even in business-to-business (B2B) communications, emojis of thumbs up and check boxes can increase open rates. Emojis do work better if they are coming from an individual.
Even using someone’s first name in an email can have an increase of 26 percent in open rates.
The most read emails are the ones that are about them. For example, make the topic about the individual’s birthday.
9. Getting Emails Through Might Get Harder
Talking about spam folders, Barber said, “For years we had a junk box, if people self-reported you as junk. Now Gmail and other services are filtering messages based on deliverability, reputation data, how many people are unsubscribing and how many are actually reading the emails.
These services are and will make it easier to report emails as spam and unsubscribe. Not only is Gmail, the category leader, using promotions tabs to separate promotional emails, but they will be proactively asking if users want to unsubscribe.