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

• Supervisor Rules --> Custom Function

  Hello, currently I can't add a custom function to a supervise rule. Is there a reason for this? Background: We have BluePrint managed tickets and actually we have a Supervise rule which should set the ticket to "closed" after 168 hours since the last

• Vault Chrome Extension Asks for Master Password every single time

  Is this supposed to be a feature, or is this a bug?  My assumption is that it's a bug, because every time I click on the Extension, there is a red exclamation mark/notification on the Zoho Vault extension.  Is the idea with the Extension that I have to

• What's New in Zoho Inventory | April & May 2026

  Hello users, We're excited to roll out the latest Zoho Inventory updates for April and May 2026. These enhancements are designed to make your daily operations smoother and more efficient, from advanced inventory management and flexible pricing to automated

• Permission Denied for Worklogs URL

  We're attempting to pull worklogs data from service desk plus and when using the below URL we are met with a message stating we do not have permission. https://sdpondemand.manageengine.com/api/v3/requests/xxxxxx/worklogs/ We used SDPOnDemand.requests.ALL

• Anyone in Australia using Zoho Books AND has their account with NAB?

  Hi I have an account with both NAB and Suncorp. Suncorp transaction come in the next day however NAB transactions take 4-5 business days to appear. eg: A deposit made today in my Suncorp will be imported into Zoho tomorrow. A deposit made today to the NAB account will be imported maybe Saturday (Friday overnight). I have contacted both Zoho and NAB but noone seems to know why. I was just wondering if anyone else in Australia uses NAB and has this issue (or doesn't) maybe we could compare notes and

• Partner with HDFC And Sbi Bank.

  Hdfc and sbi both are very popular bank if zoho books become partner with this banks then many of the zoho books users will benefit premium features of partnered banks.

• #12 Never Leave a Billable Hour Behind

  A client approves a website redesign project. The estimated effort? 40 hours. The project is going well. A few additional review meetings are scheduled. Several rounds of content changes are requested. A few "quick fixes" get added along the way. The

• Close task on Completion Date entry

  This discussion is similar to my issue: "backdated-task-completion-date" discussion Scenario: A bunch of tasks have been completed. But, they have not been closed. Time goes by You finally get around to closing those tasks Projects assigns the date the

• Can I add Conditional merge tags on my Templates?

  Hi I was wondering if I can use Conditional Mail Merge tags inside my Email templates/Quotes etc within the CRM? In spanish and in our business we use gender and academic degree salutations , ie: Dr., Dra., Sr., Srta., so the beginning of an email / letter

• Records from ATE 29: Knowledge Base, Community, and AI for smarter user education

  Hi Everyone, "Ask the Experts 29" was an engaging session, where we explored how to utilize the Knowledge Base for customers and internal teams, as well as emphasizing the importance of our Community. This post highlights the questions and use cases discussed,

• Deleted User Emails

  I need to delete a user as I need to re-use their license, but I'd like to keep all their emails that are attached to various contacts in the CRM. Their emails are hosted externally on an M365 license. Anyone any idea how best to engineer this? TIA

• Its 2022, can our customers log into CRM on their mobiles? Zoho Response: Maybe Later

  I am a long time Zoho CRM user. I have just started using the client portal feature. On the plus side I have found it very fast and very easy (for someone used to the CRM config) to set up a subset of module views that make a potentially extremely useful

• Kaizen #246 - Incoming Lead Email Intent Detection using Zia Assistant API in Zoho CRM

  Hello all! Welcome back to a fresh Kaizen week. In this post, we will explore how Zia detects positive intent from incoming emails in the Leads module using the Zia Assistant API along with Workflow Rules and Custom Functions in Zoho CRM. Use Case Problem

• Smart URL Determination

  I would like to see Vault implement some sort of "smart" URL determination. When one starts to add a new username-password combination from a new site, Vault brings in the exact URL of the page from which this is happening. All too often, it looks something

• Removing To or CC Addresses from Desk Ticket

  I was hoping i could find a way to remove unnecessary email addresses from tickets submitted via email. For example, a customer may email the support address AND others who are in the helpdesk notification group, in either the TO or CC address. This results

• Tip #76- Exploring Technician Console: Quick Launch- 'Insider Insights'

  Hello Zoho Assist Community! Welcome back to our Technician Console series. Last time we explored Power Options, and this time we are turning the spotlight on a feature that quietly saves you dozens of clicks in every session by getting you exactly where

• Multi-Book Accounting Support in Zoho Books

  Currently, businesses that operate multiple entities, regions, or divisions need to maintain separate Zoho Books instances or resort to manual consolidation processes. This creates significant operational friction and increases the risk of errors. PROBLEM:

• Automated Multi-Subsidiary Consolidation Engine in Zoho Books

  For organizations managing multiple subsidiaries across different geographies or business units, consolidation is a quarterly/annual nightmare. Zoho Books lacks native consolidation tools, forcing companies to export data, manipulate it in Excel, and

• Zoho Books | Product updates | April 2026

  Hello users, Welcome to our April 2026 product updates roundup! Highlights include profit margin for sales transactions, insights in reports, recording deposits from undeposited funds in banking, and faster production workflows with improved assembly

• Unable to charge GST on shipping/packing & Forwarding charges in INDIA

  Currently, tax rates only apply to items. It does not apply tax to any shipping or packing & forwarding charges that may be on the order as well. However, these charges are taxable under GST in India. Please add the ability to apply tax to these charges.

• How to add packing & forwarding charge in purchase order & quotation???

  Hello Zoho Team I have just started using Zoho for my company and I wanted to make purchase order. My supplier charges fix 2% as packing & forwarding on Total amount of material and then they charge me tax. For example, Material 1 = 100 Rs Material 2

• How to book GST paid in zoho books

  hi, i am a new user to Zoho books and not able to book GST paid in books, kindly suggest how i can book it in books. thanks, siddharth

• [Bug] WebAuthn passkey registration blocked on rpIds with TLDs longer than 6 characters (.accountant, .technology, etc.) — isValidDomain regex too strict

  Hi, Filing on behalf of an enterprise customer where Zoho Vault is deployed across the company. The Chrome extension blocks WebAuthn passkey registration on legitimate sites whose Relying Party ID (rpId) has a TLD longer than 6 letters. This affects every

• Zoho Payroll: Product Updates - H1, 2026

  Over the last few months, Zoho Payroll has added updates that make payroll easier to process, review, explain, and manage for businesses. The most important improvements focus on payroll flexibility, gratuity tracking, employee self-service, reporting,

• Pushover Notification Module

  Hello, it would be good if there would be a "Pushover" (https://pushover.net/) module besides the standard SMS module. Pushover is now very well known, especially in IT, and is becoming more and more popular. The biggest advantage are the customizable

• E-Mail Blacklist via GUI

  Hello, It would be helpful if the GUI included an option to block specific email addresses (both incoming and outgoing). I want a setting where I can completely block certain email addresses. This means that no tickets can be opened from those addresses,

• How to migrate cpanel mail to new zoho mail?

  Hi, I have a client whose email (for his website domain) is currently on "cpanel mail". Now client wants to move to Zoho Mail. I checked migration docs and its mentioned that I can migrate using IMAP or POP but I am not getting exactly what steps should I follow in order to achieve this. As soon I will add clients domain and setup MX Records and SPF for that, I will lose access to currently setup email (cpanel mail) and without adding domain in zoho mail, I can't setup email for that. Sorry if I

• SalesIQ Integration with LINE: API Rate Limit Issue and Pre-Chat Flow Concerns

  Hello SalesIQ Developer Team. I have investigated the issue and found that the LINE Rate Limit is being consumed unusually quickly. LINE API free usage limit: 300 messages per month per brand. This limit will be reached within the first few days. 1. LINE

• How to Backup Zoho to PST?

  I'm looking for a simple way to backup Zoho Mail emails to PST format. I tried the IMAP method with Outlook, but it seems slow and complicated for large mailboxes. I need a solution that can: Export Zoho emails to PST Preserve attachments and folder hierarchy

• Zoho CRM Deal API returning null pipeline in case of default pipeline

  Hey team, We are writing to report an issue with the Deals module pipeline API behavior that we believe stems from how the default (Standard) pipeline is handled when no custom pipelines have been configured. When the "Manage Pipelines" page under CRM

• Warehouse -> Locations Transition Causing Errors

  After saying "okay" to the transition from 'warehouses' to 'locations', I've now got shipped Sales Orders that I cannot invoice. How does one proceed?

• Zoho CRM Community Digest - May 2026 | Part 1

  Hello Everyone! This edition introduces the new centralized Zoho Announcements Hub, a single dashboard designed to let you track and filter live product roll-outs from across the Zoho ecosystem. Alongside the Announcements Hub, this month also features

• SalesIQ : Automatically clear all HTML formatting when pasted into the chat replies field (Markdown Textarea) ?

  Hello, Is it possible to Configure the chat reply field to automatically remove all HTML formatting when content is pasted, leaving only plain text? Users should still be able to apply Markdown formatting (WYSIWYG) after the text has been pasted. The

• Converting XML to JSON

  Hi! I need to convert a variable in XML to JSON. Can i do it without using an API on deluge? I looked into the documentation but couldn't get any answers to this. Thank you in advance!

• 元問い合わせメールに返信したときの統合処理

  ワークフロー作成したので備忘録です。 Zoho Desk で作成したメールアドレス宛てに既存のメールアドレスにきた問合せ先メールを転送してチケット作成を行っています。 元の問い合わせメールに返信、転送した際にRe,RE,re,Fw,FW,fwが件名の頭に付くため、その度に新規起票が乱立します。 メールの頭にRe,RE,re,Fw,FW,fwがある時それを除いた件名と同じ件名が既にチケット作成されていれば統合するワークフローを作成しました。 条件が緩いので既存チケットの検索で完了済みや5日以上前に作成したものは除いてもいいとは思います。

• Marketing Automation Demo Video

  I would like to see a video demo for Marketing Automation.  Do you have one statashed away somewhere?

• is it possible to add more than one Whatsapp Phone Number to be integrated to Zoho CRM?

  so I have successfully added one Whatsapp number like this from this User Interface it seems I can't add a new Whatsapp Number. I need to add a new Whatsapp Number so I can control the lead assignment if a chat sent to Whatsapp Phone Number 1 then assign

• Automate Backups

  This is a feature request. Consider adding an auto backup feature. Where when you turn it on, it will auto backup on the 15-day schedule. For additional consideration, allow for the export of module data via API calls. Thank you for your consideration.

• How to record GST amount for Value of Service on Inward remittance charged by bank

  Hi please advice I have a situation.    1. I have HDFC bank account 2. I have a customer who has done inward remittance for purcahses from overseas. 3. HDFC is showing Value of Service say $100 and GST @ 18%. 4. Value of Service is not charged. But  CGST

• Sort by Project Name?

  How the heck do you sort by project name in the task list views??? Seems like this should be a no-brainer?

• Next Page