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

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.

NotesNote: 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



      • 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

        • Accrual Data - Zoho Books API

          Hi Team, When we integrate Zoho Books with Zoho Analytics, we usually receive a consolidated dataset called “Accrual Transactions,” which contains all types of transaction data. Could you please confirm whether it is possible to retrieve this same data

        • Zoho Books | Product updates | May 2026

          Hello users, We're back with the latest updates and enhancements we've rolled out in Zoho Books. From sales tax automation to scanning receipts for free, explore the updates designed to upgrade your bookkeeping experience. Sales Tax Automation [US & Canada

        • Qualified electronic signatures (QES) via SIGN8 in Zoho Sign

          Zoho Sign now integrates with SIGN8, a qualified trust service provider (QTSP) under the eIDAS regulation, so you can collect qualified electronic signatures (QES) that are legally recognized across the EU. With QES via SIGN8, you can: Allow recipients

        • SalesIQ Live Chat Widget Upgrade For Zoho Desk Customers

          The older version of the SalesIQ live chat widget will be deprecated on May 15, 2026. SalesIQ powers the chat experience across Zoho Desk, Help Center, and ASAP widgets. To ensure continued support, Zoho Desk will begin rolling out the new SalesIQ widget

        • Set Custom Icon for Custom Modules in new Zoho CRM UI

        • Support Custom Background in Zoho Cliq Video Calls and Meetings

          Hello Zoho Cliq Team, We hope you are doing well. We would like to request an enhancement to the video background capabilities in Zoho Cliq, specifically the ability to upload and use custom backgrounds. Current Limitation At present, Zoho Cliq allows

        • Looking for Guidance on Building a Zoho Website

          I'm exploring the possibility of building a custom website with specific features using Zoho as an alternative platform. My goal is to create something similar to https://gtasandresapk.com , with the same kind of functionality and user experience. I'd

        • Linking Contacts to Other Modules

          In creator, I've got a Contacts page with a lookup that searches Suppliers. Is there a way to have the contacts attached to the Suppliers modular as a list automatically, similar to the CRM version? It goes the other way. If I entered an Employee in the

        • What's New in Zoho POS - April 2026

          Hello everyone, Welcome to Zoho POS’s monthly update, where we share our latest feature updates, enhancements, events, and more. Let’s take a look at how April went. Access and manage other web applications in Zoho POS with Web Tabs You can now access

        • Plug Sample #9 - Get Notified on Cliq When Your Premium Customers Interact with SalesIQ's Zobot

          Hi everyone! We're here with another simple yet effective plug for your chatbot to integrate with Zoho Cliq to make your job easier. Just imagine whenever a potential lead or your premium customers are on your website, and they engage with your chatbot,

        • Zoho IP address blocked by Microsoft

          Today I tried to send emails to Outlook email addresses and all of them failed. The log displays like this: Reporting-MTA: dns; mx.zohomail.jp Arrival-Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2025 12:52:30 +0800 Original-Recipient: rfc822; ######@outlook.com Final-Recipient:

        • Remove "Subject" as a required field on Quotes

          Currently, when you create a quote in CRM, the field "Subject" is mandatory. The properties of a system defined field cannot be edited which means we cannot de-select the mandatory requirement. A 'subject' on a quote is a little vague and not something

        • Integrate QuickBooks with Bigin and streamline your sales and accounting!

          If your business relies on Bigin for customer management and QuickBooks for accounting and invoicing, this new integration is here to make your operations more efficient. By connecting these two platforms, you can now manage your CRM and financial processes

        • Upgraded sentiment analysis model for more accurate detection

          Hello everyone! Sentiment Analysis in Zia is being upgraded to a newer model to improve how customer sentiment is detected and interpreted. This transition is aimed at getting better contextual understanding across all supported channels. As part of this

        • Adding contact to account automatically in helpdesk?

          Hello, We're using Zoho desk to managed our helpdesk tickets.  Is there a way to add contacts (email senders) automatically to an account based on their emails domain name?  For example:  when UserA@companyx.com send an email to our support mailbox, a trigger or a workflow would automatically add the userA to Companyx account if it does exists  Please advise Thank you 

        • Automated entries past the current month in a calendar report

          Hi all, I have an automation problem. I have a form which on successfull entry adds either 5 or 10 more of these entries with a slight change so our customers can see it throug a calendar report on the webiste. The entry put in manually shows up perfectly

        • DYK 4 - Reactions

          Did You Know that you can react to comments in Zoho Projects? In a collaborative workspace, comments come in throughout the day. Some need a detailed reply, others just need to be acknowledged, and the more the replies, the harder it is to follow the

        • Atlassian Jira integration live in Zoho Apptics

          Tracking crashes and fixing them often happen with different tools. You might use Zoho Apptics to track crashes and understand what went wrong and Jira to resolve those issues. If you use both, you're probably familiar with the manual effort involved

        • GLM 5 not available

          Hello, I am trying to setup a Zia Agent using agents.zoho.com. The settings says that GLM5 is among the list of free zoho hosted models available. However, when I try to setup an agent and pick a model from the list only GLM 4.7 Flash is available. How

        • Native QuickBooks integration for Zoho CRM: Connecting sales and finance

          Greetings, I hope all of you are doing well. We're excited to announce Zoho CRM's integration with QuickBooks Web, which is designed to synchronize your CRM data with your QuickBooks accounting records and bridge the gap between sales and finance. This

        • Knowledge base articles is now available in the Zoho Desk mobile app!

          Hello all,   As a customer service agent, every day you might have to deal with many questions and issues reported by the users. With Knowledge Base, you can reduce the issue resolution life cycle for your organization.   We are delighted to announce that we have brought in support for 'Knowledge Base articles' in the Zoho Desk iOS mobile app.  This feature is already available for Android users.   KB articles are available to iOS users in the latest version of the app (v2.4.9). You can update the

        • Multiple Pipelines

          Is it possible to create multiple candidate pipelines?

        • Urgent Issue – Draft Reply Fails to Save When Message Contains Code Snippets

          Hello Zoho Desk Support Team, We are experiencing a critical issue in the ticket reply editor that is directly impacting our support operation. Whenever we write a reply containing code snippets, URLs, or technical content (for example, terms like “curl

        • Introducing parent-child ticketing in Zoho Desk [Early access]

          Hello Zoho Desk users! We have introduced the parent-child ticketing system to help customer service teams ensure efficient resolution of issues involving multiple, related tickets. You can now combine repetitive and interconnected tickets into parent-child

        • Zoho CRM Meetings Module Issues

          We have a use-case that is very common in today's world, but won't work in Zoho CRM. We have an SDR (Sales Development Rep) who makes many calls per day to Leads and Contacts, and schedules meetings for our primary Sales Reps. He does this by logging

        • Huge confusion in zoho crm and zoho analytics

          Context => We have reporting based hierarchy in zoho crm and basically there will be one sales head and couple sales managers and 10 pre sales excutives divided between 2 sales managers we have maintained that in zoho crm and there is complex reporting

        • information on a suggestion how to treat old records in the - pipeline deals, notes, activities (tasks- events-calls) and emails etc.

          Hi, I would like information or a suggestion on how to treat old records in the - pipeline deals, notes, activities (tasks- events-calls) and emails etc. ? As each option (pipeline deal, notes, activities, emails etc.) counts as a record and as we advance

        • Inventory batch details

          Hi there, I'm trying to get the batch details of an item, here's what I've done so far. I've sent cUrl request to the below endpoint and I get a successful response. Within in the response I find the "warehouses" property which correctly lists all the

        • Zoho Trident Windows - Streams Not Visible

          Namaste We’re having an issue with Streams not being visible in Trident (Windows), which is important for us as we share many emails internally. It appears that the feature to show Streams above the Inbox folder, as seen in the default mailbox view, is

        • Search through email contents

          Is there a way to search through the email history of a lead? Meaning if among the 50 emails to a lead about different topics I want to find all the ones with the word "pizza" in the body of the email, is that possible? Thanks for your help, Hanan

        • Adding Multiple Products (Package) to a Quote

          I've searched the forums and found several people asking this question, but never found an answer. Is ti possible to add multiple products to a quote at once, like a package deal? This seems like a very basic function of a CRM that does quotes but I can't

        • Early Access: Check Printing in Zoho Books

          Hello Everyone,   Are you constantly writing checks to pay your vendors?   We've got a great news to share with you! You can now pay your vendors by writing and printing a check directly from Zoho Books. The feature is ready and we'll be rolling it out to our customers in phases.  It is available in the  US Edition of Zoho Books and also in the Global edition, where the country is selected as USA and the currency is USD.   Here’s a summary of what’s possible:   1. Write and print a check. 2. Make

        • Trash - Delete All

          We use 6 inbox shared (via IMAP). The Trash bin contains a lot of messages. Is it possible to delete them all permanently? Is there a rule to empty trash bin after xx days? Deleted permanently message in TeamInBox are deleted permanently in the related

        • Internal mails on our company domain (managed by Zoho) do not get delivered

          Hi last week Thursday and Friday a colleague had sent me two emails which did not show up at all in my inbox, spam or anywhere else. What this a problem with Zoho mail in general or did this affect just us? From the forum is reads like many problems had

        • Paste Options don't work

          I've always wondered about this, as I've experienced this issue for quite some time now. Why don't the right-click Paste options work properly in Zoho Writer? I can use Ctrl + V without any issue, but if I right-click and use one of the Paste menu options,

        • What's New - April 2026 | Zoho Backstage

          Hello everyone, April has been focused on improving speed, reliability, and overall platform performance. Here are a few updates from this month. Safaricom M-PESA for event payments in Kenya Organizers hosting events in Kenya can accept payments through

        • Enrich your contact and company details automatically using the Data Enrichment topping

          Greetings, I hope you're all doing well. We're happy to announce the latest topping we've added to Bigin: The Data Enrichment topping, powered by WebAmigo. This topping helps you automatically enhance your contact and company records in Bigin. By leveraging

        • Consolidate your workflows and be more productive - Introducing Multiple Conditions in Workflow Rules

          Workflow rules in Zoho CRM helps you automate your routine tasks and save time. Usually, while creating a workflow rule, you'd provide the basic details of the rule, specify when the rule should be triggered and associate set of actions to be executed whenever the rule criteria is met. And you’d create a new workflow rule for every new automation that you required.  Not anymore! You can now combine multiple conditions and the corresponding actions to follow in a single workflow rule. Let’s look at

        • How has Zoho still not resolved Daylight Savings Time?

          According to these forums Zoho has been working on DST for 12 years. Totally unacceptable. Am I missing something? Why are other customers who observe DST not screaming for this to be fixed? Are there reasonable workarounds? This is a must-have for

        • Overview on users IMAP settings

          We have about 30 users who all have the channels/email/email configuration/IMAP integration/O365 enabled and emails are synchronized. Here my problem: Passwords for the email accounts are expiring on individual bases and most of the users forget to update

        • Next Page