Digital marketing is arguably the most essential component of any brand’s long-term viability and strategy. Without a steady stream of visitors, subscribers or customers, how else can a company or website maintain a successful operation?

One of the oldest and most basic forms of digital marketing, email marketing, is still is widespread use today. Given that its use is virtually free and that it remains an effective strategy for most brands, it shouldn’t be too surprising that its popularity remains.

To help brands seeking to gain additional exposure with their loyal audiences, we’ll be looking at some straightforward tips that can improve the open rates of your upcoming email marketing campaigns.

Perpetually Freshen Up Your Lists

Some people really do think bigger is better, but this can lead to more expensive – and messier – outcomes in the world of email marketing. Everybody wants as large of a mailing list as possible, but are those inactive subscribers doing anything of value for your brand?

Periodically, you should be pinging servers to see who is and who is not interacting with your email campaigns. By removing those who aren’t opening or interacting with emails, you can free up additional space for new subscribers without having to increase email marketing management costs.

Likewise, your open rate will increase by default. However, it’s important to point out that over the long-term, a more streamlined list of active subscribers can help better focus your email marketing efforts in a variety of ways. This can produce actual improvements that lead to increased open rates among a static list of subscribers.

Create Email List Segments

You cannot properly market your brand to audiences with a one-size-fits-all approach. This doesn’t work in digital marketing or traditional marketing, yet all too many utilize such an approach with email marketing.

It’s understandable: collecting information on email subscribers can be a bit more difficult. However, using past behavior – along with any info provided at the time of sign-up – can be a useful way to break your list down into more manageable, customized segments. With such segmentation, you can more effectively market precise campaigns and increase open rates due to each email being more relevant to its recipients.

Minimize the Chances of Getting Flagged

Lastly, ensuring your open rates are as high as possible means ensuring your emails are actually being seen in the first place. All too often, email campaigns find themselves being jettisoned straight to spam folders. How can you prevent this from happening?

Be sure to send your emails through legitimate domains and use IP addresses that have not been associated with email spam in the past. Incorporate merge tags to make messages more personalized. Keep your language and subject lines clean and free of misleading or promotional keywords.

And as always: make sure the people you’re emailing actually subscribed in the first place!

With these tips in-hand, your email open rates can naturally begin increasing. You don’t have to be a marketing whiz to start pinging servers and inboxes more effectively: you just have to be cognizant of the basis of email marketing!