Emails are a great way to connect with your customers and remind them of your business. If you’ve ever run an email marketing campaign, you understand the importance of open and click-through rates.

You’ve worked hard to create your email, from brainstorming strategies to writing the copy and editing the images included within it. With all of the effort that goes into crafting the perfect email campaign, the last thing you want is for it to go unnoticed.

Don’t let your engagement fall flat and your emails sit unopened. Make sure that you are getting the most out of them by following these tips.

Test delivery times

Timing is everything. There is no way to figure out the optimal time for your business to send out emails if you don’t test it out. This means that you will need to run experiments by sending out emails at different times of the day and track the results to see when your customers are the most active. Just because one company’s best time to send emails is at 1:30pm on Tuesday, doesn’t necessarily mean that this is right for your business. Figuring out the optimal delivery time is crucial to increasing your open and click through rates because you learn which time your customers will be the most engaged. Once you figure out the optimal time, you will be able to use this information to your advantage and drive up engagement rates.

A/B test your subject lines

Your subject line can make all the difference to reads and click-throughs. Sadly, it doesn’t matter how great the content of your email is if you can’t get anyone to open it. One strategy you can use for figuring out which subject lines are best is through A/B testing. This is when you run the same campaign to two different groups, and switch up whatever it is you’re testing (in this case, the subject line) so you can determine which one was more successful in achieving more opens or click-throughs. This is a great strategy for learning more about the habits of your target audience and being able to relate to them and provide engaging content. After all, marketing is all about relating to your customers!

Personalize your emails

Addressing your customer by their name in an email can make a huge difference. Personalizing an email triggers more engagement by email recipients. One study found that the personalization of emails increased click through rates by 2.5 times compared to non-personalized emails. However, make sure that if you are going through the trouble of personalizing emails you are calling your customers by the right name! The last thing you want to do is use the wrong name in an email.

Segment your email lists

Segmenting who you send emails to can also help improve your open and click-through rates. You can segment your list by things like demographics or when a customer joined your list. This allows you to target your content to the people who will enjoy it the most. Narrowing your focus causes your emails to become more relevant to the information needs of the individual.  When someone first signs up for your list, segmenting also allows you to send them an initial welcome email. According to MailChimp, properly executed segmentation caused open rates to increase by 14.31% and click-through rates to increase by 100.95%.

Optimize for mobile

About half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. This means that it is extremely important for your emails to be optimized for mobile devices. You want to make your emails as easy to interpret and navigate for users as possible. Make sure to use a responsive template that will adjust for any device it is opened on. There’s no sense in losing new opportunities by neglecting mobile emails.

Include a call to action

Make sure that you include a strong call-to-action within your email copy to increase your click through rate. Create a sense of urgency with your messaging so that people will feel more inclined to click on your link. If you have an eCommerce business and are sending out an email campaign to announce a sale, include messaging like “Visit our site for 15% off for only 24 hours.” It is also helpful to include the link you want them to click on multiple times within the email.

Social sharing

Social media is ingrained in almost every portion of our lives, so don’t neglect adding social sharing options to your emails. One study showed that click through rates increased by 158% when including social sharing buttons into an email newsletter. That is an increase that you cannot afford to pass up! Next time you send out your newsletter, be sure to add social sharing buttons and maybe your click through rates will soar too.

Avoid words that trigger spam filters

The last thing you want for your email is for it to end up in someone’s spam folder. This makes it almost impossible for them to open it. When creating your email make sure to avoid sales-y words that trigger spam filters like ‘free’ or ‘guarantee’. The excessive use of punctuation or writing in all caps can also be interpreted as spam. Avoiding triggers in your email copy is vital to boosting your click-through and open rates.

About Lauren Usrey: Lauren is a student at the University of Texas at Austin and a marketing communications intern at Swyft. She supports clients with social media, blogging and tech PR activities. Swyft has offices in Austin, Denver and Houston and provides digital marketing and PR services for tech companies seeking rapid, sustained growth. Some of the services provided include content marketing, social media strategy and ad buys, email marketing, and media relations.