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

        • Es posible cambiar el lenguaje de los modulos del ASAP?

          Es posible cambiar el lenguaje de estos textos? Tengo Zoho configurado en español pero aun así me muestra estos textos en ingles:

        • Where do I edit the "Welcome to [portal name]" message

          I am looking for a way to edit the "Welcome to" part of the message that is seen on the landing page (ex: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/home). When I use the French interface, it doesn't make sense... I want to change it from "Bienvenue chez" to" Bienvenue au". Thanks!

        • Frustrated with Zoho Assist QuickSUpport

          Trialling Zoho Assist and I have a variety of clients. A lot are computer illiterate. Some have poor vision. The current support sessions are using apps which have desktop icons for the appropriate apps. I either connect on demand then the client approves

        • Zoho ERP | Product updates | July 2026

          Hello users, We're back with another round of updates to help you streamline your operations. This month's release brings new features and enhancements designed to help you work more efficiently. Read on to discover everything that's new in Zoho ERP this

        • 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.

        • Shared Snippets Everyone

          Hi, Now that the Shared Snippets have been released and I think will be the most used feature implemented in 2023 :) Creating and Using Snippets in Ticket Responses - Online Help | Zoho Desk Maintain consistency in ticket responses with shared snippets

        • Multi-currency and Products

          One of the main reasons I have gone down the Zoho route is because I need multi-currency support. However, I find that products can only be priced in the home currency, We sell to the US and UK. However, we maintain different price lists for each. There

        • Horrible download speed

          Using a trial of Zoho Assist and downloading a 316 MB file on a 500/500 fibre connection to a remote computer on the same network took 7 mins to complete. On AnyDesk it took 1 min or so.

        • Remove "Subject" as a required field on quotations

          Not sure why, but Zoho has made 'Subject' a system defined required field. I'm not entirely sure why subject would be required as a key field (i.e. you cannot deactivate it or change it from required). It doesn't make much sense on many product quotations,

        • Displaying only unread tickets in ticket view

          Hello, I was wondering if someone might be able to help me with this one. We use filters to display our ticket list, typically using a saved filter which displays the tickets which are overdue or due today. What I'd really like is another filter that

        • Best way to setup Inventory bin tracking for products with multiple boxes/crates

          Hi - we need some advice from the community on setting up Items in the Inventory for products with multiple crates. We have large products in our warehouse where the product is delivered as two large (double pallet) crates. We've setup the Items for these

        • Zoho Books | Product updates | August 2026

          Hello users, July has been an exciting month for Zoho Books! This month, we're excited to introduce HTML PDF Templates, Placeholders as Pills, expanded approval workflows for Sales Returns and Journals, and significant compliance updates across the India,

        • Tip #83- Give Customers a Faster Way to Reach You with the Quick Support Plugin – 'Insider Insights'

          Hello Zoho Assist Community! Think about the last time a customer needed urgent support. They emailed in, waited for a response, got a session link, couldn't find it in their inbox, called back, and by the time the session actually started, a good chunk

        • Can't find field from ZCRM for a trigger

          Hello, Currently I am revamping our CRM system and we have created second layouts from to try out new processes while not disrupting the old one. Moreover, we want to use different layouts for different processes. The issue is that when creating the ZCRM

        • Discount Per Item / Option Removed

          Hi, I was using Zoho Books for three years now and very saticfied. Now, as we try to add an invoice, we founds that the discount option per item was takn away, and a discount from total was implemented. However, we have cases when we add a diffrent discount to each item. Was this option removed permanently? Thanks, 

        • Any Possible to change the challan type in Delivery challan ?

          Hello Team, We need to add the more values in challan type in delivery challan module in Zoho Books.So how to add additional values in challan type field. Please find following snap for your reference. Thanks in Advance, Thisai Moorthy.

        • Show when an invoice has been viewed

          It would be nice to know if/when a customer has viewed an invoice. This would mean not having PDF attachments and just have the link to the invoice. My previous invoicing solution had this feature and I did not realize how much I used it until it was gone. Would this be possible, or this already available and I am just missing it?

        • Customer image field

          I created a custom image field for estimates, and it works as expected. The only issue I have is that I want to be able to place the custom image field in the estimate invoice. Is there a way I can do that, the field does not give the option to display

        • Zoho Books | Product updates | March 2026

          Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From Advanced Reporting Tags to the ability to mark projects as completed, explore the latest updates designed to improve your bookkeeping experience. Introducing Advanced Reporting

        • Separator line

          Is there a way i can insert a line in an invoice or quote without showing qty or prices? e.g. Options I Item description qty and price Option II Item description qty and price Thanks

        • All new Address Field in Zoho CRM: maintain structured and accurate address inputs

          Availability Update: 29 September 2025: It's currently available for all new sign-ups and for existing Zoho CRM orgs which are in the Professional edition exclusively for IN DC users. 2 March 2026: Available to users in all DCs except US and EU DC. 24

        • BCC Drop Box Centralisation

          Hi Team, For the last few years, I have had a question related to the Zoho CRM BCC Dropbox feature. Although BCC Dropbox is very useful for tracking customer email communication, I have always wondered why its configuration is managed at the individual

        • Kiosk Page Refresh

          We have a Kiosk running from a button in contacts to update values and also add related lists, which works great, but when the kiosk is finished the page does not refresh to show the changes. Is there a way to force the contact to refresh/update when

        • CRM Integration - Option to Sync Reporting Tags

          It would be nice to be able to sync reporting tags in Zoho Finance to a custom field in Zoho CRM. My use case is for a Customer in Finance to an Account in CRM (and vice-versa, of course), but I'm sure it's pretty obvious that this could also be used

        • Join the Zoho Desk Virtual Classroom Training (VCRT)

          Hello everyone, Have you heard about Zoho's Virtual Classroom Training (VCRT)? Zoho Desk's Virtual Classroom Training offers end-to-end training for Zoho Desk users. Join the VCRT and get hands-on guidance for setting up Zoho Desk and getting your business

        • Make Rich Text fields available in Canva Print Views

          Everything is on the title. I don't really understand why this is not already possible as Rich Text Fields are available in Canva Detailed Views for example.

        • Zoho CRM Approval Process based on Field Update

          Hello, In current structure, Zoho CRM send records to approval based on record creation and edit.  I think, it should be to set approval process trigger based on any field update in record. When the user update any field, the record can assign to approval

        • Approve records efficiently: Useful enhancements to My Jobs module and Approval process in Zoho CRM

          Dear Customers, As you might know, approval process is a process automation tool that allows you to automate approvals in your organization and My Jobs is where you approve requests from a single point of view. Here's how you'd go about it: You’d add

        • Filter isn't

          The ability to filter the history of a given flow to a specific status however it would be great to have the ability to filter to a status that isn't something for example if i want to find all history that isn't complete.

        • Introducing the Store Locator widget

          Hello everyone! Your website is often the first place customers visit before deciding where to shop. But when they can't quickly find the nearest store, check business hours, or get directions, many leave your website and search elsewhere. Every extra

        • Important updates to your connectors

          Hello everyone, Greeting from Zoho Creator! We're excited to announce that we'll be rolling out significant backend updates to Zoho Creator's built-in connectors to enhance security by following the latest frameworks. The existing version of some of the

        • Important updates to your Salesforce integrations in Zoho Creator

          Hello everyone, We're writing to inform you of an important change regarding Salesforce integrations in Zoho Creator. Salesforce has introduced new security requirements for third-party platforms that connect with their services via APIs. To comply with

        • Password Policy in Zoho Mail: Set password rules to keep your organization secure

          Weak or repetitive passwords are one of the most common causes of unauthorized account access in organizations. Zoho Mail's Password Policy feature allows administrators to define and enforce specific password requirements for all users in the organization,

        • What is Workqueue and how to hide it?

          Hi， My CRM suddenly have this "Workqueue", may I ask how to set the permission of this tab?

        • Zoho Community Digest - July 2026| Part 4

          Hi everyone, and welcome back! We're closing out July with a strong final week, from a major LinkedIn integration in Zoho Recruit to AI-powered forecasting in Zoho Analytics. There are also a few heads-ups worth noting, including API changes in Zoho CRM

        • Zoho CRM Community Digest - July 2026| Part 2

          Hello everyone! The second half of July brought five CRM updates, including a heads-up for developers on API changes coming in October, one Quick Win on keeping your attribution data intact through lead conversion, two Dev's Corner threads worth bookmarking,

        • Keeping project teams in the know with Zoho Cliq

          Project management is all about processes, data flow, and maintaining order. But communicating appropriate information at crucial times to stakeholders is as important as the moving parts of a project. Zoho Cliq can facilitate effective communication

        • Enable Credit Note creation for Sales Returns BEFORE receiving goods

          Currently, it is not possible to issue a Credit Note linked to a Sales Return until the goods have been officially marked as "received" in the system. In our business, we often need to issue a credit note to our clients immediately upon the initiation

        • Getting Internal Server Error message when filing for MTD

          I am trying to file for the MTD submission, and after I filled in all the information and click (Fetch Obligation) this message "Internal Server Error [500]" pops up. I have been trying for awhile and its still the same. What shall I do as today is deadline

        • No access to change view permission for team members

          Hi, I want team members to be able to update the percentage progress on their goals at mid year. Currently they cannot edit this, they can only update the comments against the goals. The ability to add view permission to goal progress for team members

        • Next Page