Being an online business owner for over ten years has given me opportunity to see a multitude of email messages, especially those from autoresponders. And as an owner of an autoresponder service I have seen many messages that can be classified anywhere from a disaster to highly professional.I am not going to get into evaluating actual content of messages but simply how they look, what image they project and based on my experience of having sent thousands of messages out over years, some tips to getting more of your messages read.
1. Format
This seems to be one of worst problems. Many people just type up a message, load it in autoresponder and let it go out. Some of them go out and look like one big paragraph, others have intermittent lines going all way across page and automatically wrapping. Others are full of spelling mistakes. They look very unprofessional to say least.
Every autoresponder message series that I make up, and I have over twenty autoresponders working 24 hours a day, is prepared offline in a text program, usually NotePad. I format them to 55 to 60 characters per line including spaces and use a hard return(enter) at end of each line and paragraph. Then I copy and paste it into my email program and send it to myself.
This way I can see what it is going to look like and I can make any adjustments it needs before I load it into my autoresponder. This also gives me a chance to check spelling.
2. Don't Yell
Typing words or entire phrases in caps has impact of seeming you are yelling and is used regularly in spam to get your attention. Many of spam filters use capitalized words and phrases against you and may forward it directly to junk box. I see caps used majority of times in subject line which is probably worst place since filters will probably flag it very quickly.
3. Make Sure You Have Links To Your Site And That They Work
So many times I see messages where there is a lot of information and I get to bottom of message and there was no link to sales page or information site. In addition many links, when clicked went to error pages because link was not correctly entered, especially those long affiliate links.
Remember to test links. I always check all links after I email myself draft message by actually clicking on links. I even do link check when I am preparing my weekly newsletter to make sure all advertiser links work properly.
4. Refer to The Subscribers Request
In todays email world, users are getting deluged with email. Many online surfers are out there requesting anything and everything. So when they sign up for your autoresponder info they might forget they requested it hours or days later when they check their email again.