Marketer's Space: Proven tips to improve open rates – Part II - Online Help | Zoho Campaigns

Hello Marketers!

Welcome back to another post in Marketer's Space!

We're continuing from where we left off a fortnight ago. We ended the previous post discussing the subject line, and we'll continue from there. Let's dive right in.

Pre-header

Pre-header text accompanies the subject line. While the subject line tells your contacts what your campaigns are about, the pre-header text adds detail to it. We strongly recommend having it when you're creating campaigns.

The image below shows an email from Perplexity, wherein both the subject line and pre-header are present.

Here, the pre-header text drives home the point of why you need to use it. If you don't include it, you're missing out on important information you can display to your contacts even before they open your campaigns.

Here are some tips for crafting pre-header text:

• Keep the length between five and 12 words, and 30 to 60 characters. Any longer than that, and the text tends to get truncated and your contacts can't read it fully. Adhering to this length is also essential for making your campaigns mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive.
• Don't repeat what you've already mentioned in the subject line. You're wasting precious space by doing that.
• Place the most important hook in the first few words of your pre-header to grab your contacts' attention.

 
Sender name, from address, and reply-to address 

Let's say Patricia is the owner of Zylker Labs, an AI-centric marketing agency. She's new to this business, so she isn't fully aware of the dos and don'ts in email marketing. Though she sent well-crafted email campaigns to her contacts, she was dismayed to find that even after waiting for a couple of months, she didn't receive a single reply from them.

Upon closer inspection, she discovered that the fault lied with the sender name, sender address, and the reply-to address she had used. She didn't provide a sender name, and her sender and reply-to address was no-reply@zylkerlabs.com.

Zoho Campaigns provides granular control over sender details like these to help you avoid such mishaps. When you're creating an email campaign, you can add sender details such as your Sender Name, Sender email address, and Reply-to Address.

 

While "Sender Name" is not a mandatory field, it's best to specify a personalized or professional sender name, as it helps build trust. In Patricia's example, she can use:

• Patricia as a personable variant
• Patricia | Zylker Labs for a mixture of personableness and professionalism
• Zylker Labs for a simple, professional sender name

Not having a sender name will put off your contacts; they won't be tempted to open your emails.

Note: Zoho Campaigns automatically displays your sender address as the sender name if its left empty. 

If you use no-reply email addresses as your sender and reply-to addresses, you're telling your contacts not to communicate with you, which is a red flag. Instead use something like patricia@zylkerlabs.com, support@zylkerlabs.com, or help@zylkerlabs.com as your sender address. The same applies to your reply-to address, but if you wish to track the replies in a separate inbox, you can use a different address like mail-to@zylkerlabs.com or team@zylkerlabs.com.

Get consent

Let's say Julie has built a signup form using Zoho Campaigns and embedded it in her website (https://zylkerfashions.com) to attract customers. Many customers have signed up via the form to receive communications from her. Julie is excited and starts sending them campaigns. Soon, she realizes that half of these customers either marked her campaigns as spam, didn't reply, or unsubscribed—and that some campaigns didn't get delivered at all. Naturally, Julie is disappointed and frustrated, as she doesn't understand what went wrong.

Upon checking, Julie realizes that she didn't follow double opt-in to get consent from her customers. While you may assume that because people have signed up via your website, that means they're ready to receive campaigns—we strongly advise that you always confirm with them once.

Go to Settings > Manage Opt-in to enable double opt-in in Zoho Campaigns.



As soon as your contacts sign up via a signup form, Zoho Campaigns will automatically send a confirmation email that asks them to confirm their email address. Once they've confirmed, they'll be added as contacts in Zoho Campaigns. This is done to ensure that:

• Your contacts are genuinely interested in receiving communications.
• If they've specified an incorrect email during sign-up, the double opt-in email won't reach them, so they won't get added to Zoho Campaigns.
• You can avoid unnecessary unsubscribes, spam, and abuse complaints.
• Your mailing list remains clean, so you don't send campaigns to invalid email addresses, which can negatively affect your email deliverability.

 

Warm up your sender domain 

If you're starting out or haven't sent emails for quite some time, your sender domain is new or dormant—which means you have a cold domain.

Let's say you've imported 10,000 new contacts, and in your eagerness to start your marketing journey, you've sent campaigns to all of them at once—something called as an email blast. You should avoid this, because you can trigger the spam filters of email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook, which not only leads to your campaigns being marked as spam, but also to rejection.

Sending from a cold domain affects your email deliverability negatively. Your domain can ultimately get blacklisted due to poor reputation, as well, which means you'll lose out on the opportunity to do business.

Hence, it's vital to warm up your domain by sending your campaigns in equal or incremental batches. For example, you can send 1,000 campaigns per day for 10 days or increase the number each day number from 1,000 to 1,250 to 1,500, and so on.

We've explored essential techniques to boost your email open rates, from crafting smarter pre-headers to warming up your sender domain for better deliverability. Apply these practices consistently to build trust and achieve long-term campaign success.

In two weeks' time, you'll be reading the final part of this series.

Happy marketing!

Kind regards,

Sai Prashanth

User Education

Zoho Campaigns

• Topic Participants

• Sai PrashanthR

  

• Sticky Posts

• Marketer's Space: Proven tips to improve open rates – Part II

  Hello Marketers! Welcome back to another post in Marketer's Space! We're continuing from where we left off a fortnight ago. We ended the previous post discussing the subject line, and we'll continue from there. Let's dive right in. Pre-header Pre-header

• Tip of the week 03 - Sending emails in batches

  Today's marketers not only want their email marketing to be efficient, but also smart. For an email campaign, you may think you have all the essential elements for lead conversion—a big mailing list, an attractive template design, and the most-engaging message content, but after hitting the ‘send’ button, you may not get the expected conversions. Wondering why? Here’s one of the major reasons. Many marketers miss out on sending the email campaign the right way. Did you know that you should not be

• Tip of the week 04 - Know about your recipients' 'prime open time.'

  In today's market, the importance of customer behavior is astounding, with a vast amount of research and resources going into finding how customers make decisions. The process of persuading your customers to open your email and click on your call-to-action becomes easy when you understand the psychology behind their behavioral traits. Time to turn into a psychologist! Let's get to the basics—you want your emails to resonate well with your recipients. So, what's the primary thing involved here? It's

• Zoho Campaigns Expert Diaries on SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

  Hi email champs,  As email marketers, we find great lessons in each other's works—be it the subject lines that worked good, the design that was received well, or the CTA that had the maximum clicks. Email marketing encompasses a wide variety of topics spanning everything from creation and design to development and deliverability.  Here's when we from the Zoho Campaigns team found the need to build an email marketing community comprising of seasoned marketers and email geeks who can help each other

• Email Deliverability Tip #3: Seal the deal with the preheader

  In the last post, we learned about the subject line. Today we'll be learning about the preheader. A preheader is the short text that follows the subject line in an email. The preheader is designed to hint at what your email message is all about. A good preheader should act as a second subject line and convince your contacts to open the email. Now, let's learn the best way to craft a preheader. Your subject line and preheader should work together and accurately convey the gist of your email. Keep

• Recent Topics

• Bring your own credentials (BYOC) for connections in Zoho Creator

  Hello everyone, We're excited to announce an important step forward in how integrations and authentications work in Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator is a versatile platform for integrations, enabling you to connect with thousands of third-party services using

• CRM x WorkDrive: File storage for new CRM signups is now powered by WorkDrive

  Availability Editions: All DCs: All Release plan: Released for new signups in all DCs. It will be enabled for existing users in a phased manner in the upcoming months. Help documentation: Documents in Zoho CRM Manage folders in Documents tab Manage files

• Project Management Bulletin: March, 2026

  We are passionate about equipping our users with efficient solutions that help them run their businesses successfully. Our collective efforts over the past 2 years have culminated in the launch of Sprints 3.0— built with reliable features, impactful integrations,

• Composite items inside of composite items; bill of materials needed

  Hi Zoho and Everyone, I am evaluating whether Zoho Inventory will work for my small business. I grow and harvest herbs and spices but also get from wholesalers. I use all these items to make herbal teas, but also sell them as individual items on my Shopify store and Etsy. I discovered the composite item bundling and am wondering if I could get some assistance since there is no bill of materials: Our herbal company's best selling tea is a sleepytime tea. Sleepytime Tea can be purchased in three weights

• Automation Series: Sync Task Status with Zoho Desk Tickets

  In Zoho Projects, you can automatically close and reopen an associated Zoho Desk ticket when the status of a task is changed. This syncs the current state of the task with the support ticket without manual updates. For instance, a support team handling

• Auto-Generate Line Numbers in Item Table Using HTML & CSS Counters (Zoho Books & Zoho Inventory Custom Templates)

  <div> <style> /* Start counter from 0 inside tbody */ tbody#lineitem { counter-reset: rowNumber; } /* Increment counter for each row */ tbody#lineitem tr { counter-increment: rowNumber; } /* Show counter value in first column */ tbody#lineitem tr td:first-child::before

• Does zoho inventory need Enterprise or Premium subsrciption to make Widgets.

  We have Zoho One Enterprise and yet we can't create widgets on inventory.

• Introducing Radio Buttons and Numeric Range Sliders in Zoho CRM

  Release update: Currently out for CN, JP, AU and CA DCs (Free and standard editions). For other DCs, this will be released by mid-March. Hello everyone, We are pleased to share with you that Zoho CRM's Layout Editor now includes two new field formats—

• New UI for Writer - Disappointed

  I've been enjoying Zoho Writer as a new user for about 6 months, and I really like it. One of my favorite things about it is the menu bar, which you can hide or leave out while still seeing most of your page because it is off to the left. I think this

• Zoho CAMPAIGNS working hours

  Hi I use Campaigns Automation workflows to automate follow-ups to my Leads. I discovered this weekend that emails are being sent out on Sundays. How do I limit my Campaigns outgoing emails to business working hours? This is very important! Thanks, D

• Depositing funds to account

  Hello, I have been using Quickbooks for many years but am considering moving to Zoho Books so I am currently running through various workflows and am working on the Invoicing aspect. In QB, the process is to create an invoice, receive payment and then

• Create Receipt of a Donation (not a sale)

  We are a non-profit organization that receives general donations. How do I create a receipt of payment for the donor and categorize the payment as a Gift? I tried the method of creating an invoice; however that automatically created a "Sales" transaction

• Function #2: Create a Deal in Zoho CRM when an Estimate is created in Zoho Books

  For those who use Zoho CRM integrated with Zoho Books, here's a nifty function that helps you optimize your sales process by adding a Deal in Zoho CRM whenever an estimate is created in Zoho Books. Custom Function: To create the custom function, go to

• New Custom View -Sorting the Custom fields

  While creating a New Custom View in invoice , Customers, Bills ,expense etc , the sorting of custom fields are not available , a query function "order by / sort by  " may also be included in  Define new criteria module  which will be more beneficial to

• Grouping Undeposited Funds to Move to other accounts

  In the bank option it would be nice to check what transactions in undeposited funds I want to move to other accounts. Then while checking this it can accumulate totals and created whats essentially a deposit slip. Once the transaction is moved it should

• Finding rhythm through poetry

  Poetry has long been a powerful form of expression, discovery, and reflection. For many, it is a way to pen down their thoughts and experiences. The "poetic license" allows writers to shape their words with rhythm and flow. This year, on World Poetry

• Sync your CRM Tasks with Zoho Projects

  Zoho Projects integration with Zoho CRM helps you manage your tasks more efficiently. You can create all project related activities right inside your CRM using this integration. Create new portal or associate an existing portal, add projects to the portal,

• Zoho CRM strips whitespace in text fields

  When editing field text with multiple spaces: CRM - both UI and API trim / compress the whitespace to a single space when saving: Is this known / expected / documented behaviour?

• WorkDrive API returning empty response even after placing file in Team Folder

  Hi everyone, I am trying to fetch a file from Zoho WorkDrive using a Deluge standalone function in Zoho People. The API call executes successfully using a configured connection, but the response is coming back empty. I have verified the following: The

• Custom Button makes scroll bar go down in report

  I have a report with a Custom button called Completed. A colleague mentionned to me that when he pressed this custom button it scrolled down the page which is annoying since he want to stay at the same space on the repoort. There is no reload linked to

• Quickbooks Integrations Stopped Working

  All of our Quickbooks integrations have stopped working. I am checking in to see if: a) this is a known issue b) if anyone else is having this issue. As usual, Zoho support is unavailable.

• sync two zoho crm

  Hello everyone. Is it possible to sync 2 zoho crm? what would be the easiest way? I am thinking of Flow. I have a Custom Module that I would like to share with my client. We both use zoho crm. Regards.

• CRM x WorkDrive: We're rolling out the WorkDrive-powered file storage experience for existing users

  Release plan: Gradual rollout to customers without file storage add-ons, in this order: 1. Standalone CRM 2. CRM Plus and Zoho One DCs: All | Editions: All Available now for: - Standalone CRM accounts in Free and Standard editions without file storage

• Incorrect Functioning of Time Logs API (Version 3)

  We need to fetch the list of time logs for each task for our company internal usage. We are trying to achieve it by using the next endpoint: https://projects.zoho.com/api-docs#bulk-time-logs#get-all-project-time-logs Firstly, in the documentation the

• Zoho CRM Queries Now Support Databases and Cloud Data Sources

  Hello everyone! We're thrilled to announce a major enhancement to the Queries feature in Zoho CRM! Queries now support a broader range of external data sources, allowing you to fetch live data and combine it with CRM records, all using a unified query

• Salesforceに添付ファイルを格納したい

  お世話になっております。 Salesforceに添付ファイルを格納したく、カスタムオブジェクトに連携し、 「ファイルのアップロード」項目を設けました。 実際、エラーもなく送信出来たのですが、実際生成されたカスタムオブジェクトのレコードを見ると、どこにも添付ファイルがありません。仕様として、この添付ファイルはSalesforceのどこに格納されるのでしょうか？ 今回作りたいフォームは、複数の書類を添付するため、Zohoformのファイルアップロード項目「本人確認書類」「源泉徴収票」などの項目を、Salesforce側にも設けた「本人確認書類」「源泉徴収票」という各項目にURLリンクとして紐づけたいと思っておりました。

• Dynamic image in form works in the app but not on the customer portal.

  img = frm_Fichas[ID == input.Nombre].Foto; imgno = Nophoto[ID2 = 1].Image; if(len(img) > 1) { img = img.replaceAll("/sharedBy/appLinkName/",zoho.appuri); img = img.replaceAll("viewLinkName","Fichas_de_personal_public"); img = img.replaceAll("fieldName","Foto");

• Is it possible to retrieve function (Deluge) code from Zoho CRM externally?

  Hi Everyone, Is it possible to fetch or retrieve the Deluge function code from Zoho CRM using an external method (API or any other approach)? I would like to know if there is any way to access or extract the function script outside of Zoho CRM, or if

• Uplifted homepage experience

  Editions: All editions. Availability update: 17th February 2026: All editions in the CA and SA DC | JP DC (Free, Standard and Professional editions) 23 February 2026: JP (All Editions) | AU, CN (Free, Standard, Professional editions) 27 February 2026:

• Darshan Hiranandani : How many participants can join a Zoho Meeting at once?

  Hi everyone, I'm Darshan Hiranandani, trying to find out the maximum number of participants that can join a Zoho Meeting at once. Has anyone here used Zoho Meeting for larger groups and can share their experience or knowledge about the participant limit?

• Where is the scheduled report in New UI?

  Hi Team, Seems there is not such a field in New UI, hence I have to switch to old UI to handle request..

• Approval Workflow for Purchase Orders Abrir

  The requirement is , that all purchase orders greater than or equal to 5000 go through an approval process from certain people, but within books I only see that the approvers can be by levels or any approver but we cannot enter a rule like these. Can

• WeTravel + Zoho CRM Integration - Has Anyone Built a Connector or Extension?

  Hi all, I'm exploring options for integrating Zoho CRM with WeTravel (booking & payment platform for tour operators). Zapier seems to be the common method but seems limited. I'm wondering if anyone in the community has developed a more comprehensive solution,

• Option in pipeline deal to select which hotel or branch or store if client has more than one local store

  Hi, I would like to know if there is an option in the deal pipeline to select which hotel, branch, or store a deal is related to—if the company has more than one location. For example, I have a client that owns several hotels under the same company, and

• Undo article like/dislike

  It seems to be not possible to undo your like/dislike for an article. Would be great if you can. Kind regards, Helen

• Nested notebooks

  Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to know if it is possible to nest notebooks. It would be very helpful when there are too many, as it would improve organization. Thank you for your response. Best regards.

• Tax in Quote

  Each row item in a quote has a tax value. At the total numbers at the bottom, there is also a Tax entry. If you select tax in both of the (line item, and the total), the tax doubles. My assumption is that the Tax total should be totalling the tax from

• Issue with "Send Email" from Quotes not loading Email Template data

  Hi everyone, I'm currently experiencing an issue when using the "Send Email" option from a Quote record in Zoho CRM. What’s happening: When I go to the Quotes module and select a record, then click Send Email, the attached file (Quote) correctly pulls

• Dynamically Fetching Lookup Field Display Value

  I have an audit trail form, Audit_Changes, that tracks old vs new values across different forms. For lookup fields, the old/new value is the ID, but I also need the display value. What's a best practice for dynamically fetching the display value of the

• Stop Scrolling, Start Asking: Meet Zia for Your Files

  Hey everyone 👋 The era of 'scrolling and searching' is officially over. Whether it's a dense legal contract or a long meeting recording, searching for specific details is a massive time-sink. We think you should be able to interact with your files, not

• Next Page