Increase Your Low Partner Email Open Rates.
Decades of spam has made low email open rates the new status quo. The saturation of the modern channel ecosystem exacerabtes the problem with most partner communications going completely ignored.
On this page, you will learn:
The First Piece of the Partner Engagement Puzzle
If you've read our strategy, Gamify ROI: The New Partner Engagement Paradigm, you already know that achieving a critical number of touchpoints with partners is the key to increasing activity and driving new partner revenue. Getting touchpoints with partners comes down to marketing and user experience (UX) best practices.
You need to present a series of stimuli that drive small partner actions, like continuing to read or clicking a button. In many cases, your emails are the first stimulus in the journey. Low open rates will destroy any potential for the rest of your stimuli.
This diagram shows IncentivePilot's UX, designed to automate touchpoints with partners. Note that users can be invited by email. If emails aren't opened, the entire process fails before it has a chance.
Common Culprits: Why Partner Email Open Rates are Low
You might be going straight to the spam folder. Partners can't click if they don't see your email.
Email subject lines are the very first partner stimulus. Most are too vague or boring to get a click.
Humans are easily conditioned to filter out sameness. Emails that look or feel the same become ignored.
Best Practices to Improve Email Open Rates
Tackling low email open rates is as simple as addressing each of the Common Culprits. If you can solve each one, your open rates will improve. The first piece of the partner engagement puzzle will be in place.
1. Avoiding the Spam Filter
Are you going to spam? The easiest way to find out is to use a tool like Mail Tester to check it out. Send a partner email to the temporary email account provided and review the results.
Mail Tester will score your email across Authentication, Errors, and Blocklists. If you score poorly, you may need to consider acquiring a new email domain and warming it up with a service like Instantly.ai.
2. Writing Compelling Subject Lines
If you're not going to spam, your partner email subject lines are the problem. The subject line of your emails is the very first stimulus that your partners see. It has to be compelling enough for partners to click and open your message. Here are some tips for effective, high-converting email subject lines.
- Subject lines with 21-40 characters tend to see higher open rates.
- Questions can build intrigue and work against negative perception of mass emails.
- Subject lines should address partner benefits if they take action.
- Example: John, don't miss out on $100!
If you want to get feedback on your subject lines before you test them with your audience, the Email Subject Line Tester on Omnisend can be helpful to provide feedback.
This is an email Subject Line Score from Email Subject Line Tester. The score page also includes individual subscore categories and provides context for your score.
3. Keeping Content Fresh
Fresh, interesting content comes after an email is opened. However, if you have been using the same templates and content for awhile, partners will stop opening emails because they have been conditioned to expect the same message inside.
With the success of new subject lines, your content needs to deliver. It needs to look and feel different than what you have been doing. This doesn't mean switching your template once and forgetting about it. Introduce a variety of templates and value propositions into your campaigns so your emails feel fresh each time.
IncentivePilot's Email Improvement Framework
We make it easy to improve your partner email open rates. This service is designed to help you identify issues with your emails and determine if gamified campaigns are a viable path to increase partner revenue for your program.
This is the simplest, easiest way to begin making meaningful improvements to your partner engagement. It's low cost is a no-brainer. Since we want our incentives aligned with yours, we work on a pay on results basis.