4 Scientifically-Backed Ideas for Getting Leads to Read Your Emails

You may think you've written a great email campaign, and are wondering why your leads aren't responding by the masses. But consider your own personal email reading (or avoiding!) habits. How many emails do you receive in a day? Of those, how many do you actually open?

• Over 20% of marketing emails never make it to a subscriber's inbox.
• Nearly 200 billion emails are sent every day worldwide, and 84% are considered spam.
• 55% of email users admit that they don't open and read messages regularly – whether business or personal.
• According to a recent study, 41% of all emails are now opened on a mobile device, and 42% of users delete emails that don't display correctly on their mobile phones.
• Only 11% of email campaigns use responsive design to optimize their email layout.

There are a lot of new factors and trends to consider now in the world of email marketing. How do you get leads to actually read your emails? Here are four scientifically-backed strategies to write emails that get opened and read more frequently.

1. Subject Line

Your subject line is the first thing your recipients will read, and the first chance you have at engaging them. Forty-seven percent of email recipients open an email based on the subject line. Some best practices we've found for the most enticing subject lines are below:

• Subject lines with 6 to 10 words deliver the highest open rate. Eight words is an ideal number for a subject line.
• Subject lines 70 characters and up were found to engage to readers to click-through at a higher rate.
• Those fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%. The one area to avoid: the subject line of 60 to 70 characters.

The best performing subject lines are quick, to-the-point, and effective. Copyhacker's Joanna Wiebe offers a few basic tips for making email subject lines as engaging as possible:

• Lead with an action word
• Include your brand name
• Avoid spam-trigger words, exclamation points and odd punctuation
• Avoid being cutesy or clever

While these suggestions are a good guideline to get you started, crafting good email copy should not be something you set up once and forget. Test what works for you in your specific market and for your particular audience. Something that works for your clients may not work for someone else.

2. Incorporate Quality Images

Just like using clear, quality photos are crucial for a successful listing, good images are important to an engaging email. Images catch a reader's attention better than text does, and can keep people engaged just long enough for them to decide if your message is worth a longer glance.

"When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later," says John Medina.

However, catching greater attention is only possible if you select good images. Clip art and obvious stock imagery won't cut it.

3. Captivating First Sentence

Okay, so the lead has clicked and opened your email. What does your very first sentence say?

Aaron Orendorff of Fast Company writes, "Your first line of text, following your recipient's name, is often as far as the reader gets. If the message is short, not packed with nonessential junk, you're more likely to get that reader to venture further."

So make your first sentence a good one! Perhaps you can start with a probing question, or mention how the rest of your email can help solve common issues that homebuyers run into. The job of every line in your email is to make people want to read the next line. So don't bore your readers!

4. Make It Scan-Friendly

Spritz, a speed-reading company, did some research and found that when most people read, only about 20% of the time is spent processing content, while the remaining 80% is spent moving their eyes around to scan the text.

Studies show whether people are reading articles, emails or websites, the predominant user behavior was scanning. Often, users didn't even scan the entire page of content: 35% of the time, readers only skimmed a small part of the screen or glanced at the content.

Readers are very likely to skim, so you want them to find what they need quickly. Bullet points, along with other readability features such as numbered lists or bold headlines, are your friend. Help your leads get the most out of your email content!

To view the original article, visit the BoomTown blog.