Are you happy with the response rates to your sales and marketing emails? You can greatly improve the number of responses if you stop giving your readers too many choices.
What are response rates?
The response rate you get is the percentage of people who actually respond to your emails. Obviously the higher your response rate, the more people are actually reading your emails and doing what you want.
What is a Call to Action?
It must be very clear to recipients what they need to do after they read your email.
Why are you sending out your email? What do you want recipients to do? Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to email you? Do you want them to click on a link? Do you want them to reply?
If possible, only ask readers to do one thing… or at least have the one main thing you want them to do extremely obvious.
Why a SINGLE call to action is better?
Research shows that when people have to choose between several options (that may all be better than doing nothing), they very often still do nothing.
We all fool ourselves by deferring action… saying that we will make a decision once we have more time. The problem however is that your unresponded email soon sinks down the Inbox and may never get responded to.
In summary…
Try and have ONE VERY CLEAR CALL TO ACTION in your emails.
What are some other things you can do to improve response rates
1. Send each person a separate personally addressed email instead of stuffing many email addresses in the To, CC or BCC fields. Research shows that personally addressed emails are more like to get past SPAM folders and into Inboxes.
You can use an addin like Email Merge for Outlook to automate this instead of typing each email manually.
This makes your email look less like SPAM and more like an email from a real person.
2. Add a P.S. after your signature.
Restate the benefits of what you are selling and the call to action. Readers often scroll to the end of the email instead of reading the whole thing.
What are some other things that you do to increase response rates? Please share your ideas with other readers by leaving a comment below.
