The Pro: Jon Salk
Title: President
Company: SalkMarketing.com (asi/201713), Boca Raton, FL

While good email open rates tend to hover between 10% and 20%, SalkMarketing.com strives for a high 50% when it’s sending emails to its primary database. It usually hits about 30%, which is excellent in the email marketing realm, but it’s always aiming higher.

“These are recipients who know us and have gotten quotes from us or purchased from us,” says Jon Salk. “We’ll send reminders that we’re here for them.”

The company uses several powerful email marketing platforms for its needs, including Keap, which also has a CRM, as well as Mailchimp, Zoho and ActiveCampaign; the latter is ideal for drip campaigns, says Salk, sending a series of emails spaced out over time.

Email marketing generates 174% more conversions than social media. (Campaign Monitor)

The SalkMarketing team, which offers both promotional products and digital marketing services for clients, has also found that changing the domain name slightly helps boost open rates. It’s the same with the sender name. If the “from” name is David Jones, the team uses variations like “Jones, David,” “David J.,” or “DJ.”

“The sender name and domain name are important,” says Salk. “But the first point of contact is definitely the subject line. We’ve been using more emojis in them and they’ve actually worked, but how clients receive emails will determine if they can see them or not.”

Salk says to make sure the subject and preview line are attention-grabbing (particularly for those checking email on mobile), “but they have to be related,” Salk adds. “You don’t want them to open an email and those two things have no correlation.”

Salk’s company is also very detailed in emails, discussing specific products and categories which can help clients. Others are reminders about upcoming events and seasons. “Sometimes it’s entertaining, other times it’s simpler,” says Salk. “We’ll say, ‘Let’s schedule a call to discuss your Q4 gifts.’”

Also important to note is that not every recipient wants to receive images and media in their emails because of security threats. Send both HTML (with images) and text versions to serve everyone. “People are scared now of receiving emails with active hyperlinks,” says Salk. “With the text version, we lose the flare of the images, but they can just copy and paste the URL and view the email in their browser.”

Also monitor your open rates with every email sent. If the rate suddenly drops precipitously, check your deliverability rate. It may be that an email service’s security filters have changed and for one reason or another, your emails are going straight to the spam folder.

“People sometimes say to us, ‘Oh, we see you aren’t sending your emails anymore,’” says Salk, “and it’s just that they haven’t realized the security changed and they’ve been getting sent to spam.”

And if a certain group of recipients haven’t opened emails in a while, check in with them. Many email marketing software tools will segment out those who haven’t opened in several months.

“We’ll send a different email in that case,” says Salk. “We’ll say something like, ‘Just checking in, are you still interested in receiving our emails? Is there someone else who should be receiving these instead?’ All of our recipients have opted in at one point, which allows us to be in touch.”