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


      Zoho Campaigns Resources


        • Desk Community Learning Series


        • Digest


        • Functions


        • Meetups


        • Kbase


        • Resources


        • Glossary


        • Desk Marketplace


        • MVP Corner


        • Word of the Day


        • Ask the Experts


          • 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

          Zoho CRM Plus Resources

            Zoho Books Resources


              Zoho Subscriptions Resources

                Zoho Projects Resources


                  Zoho Sprints Resources


                    Zoho Orchestly Resources


                      Zoho Creator Resources


                        Zoho WorkDrive Resources



                          Zoho CRM Resources

                          • CRM Community Learning Series

                            CRM Community Learning Series


                          • Tips

                            Tips

                          • Functions

                            Functions

                          • Meetups

                            Meetups

                          • Kbase

                            Kbase

                          • Resources

                            Resources

                          • Digest

                            Digest

                          • CRM Marketplace

                            CRM Marketplace

                          • MVP Corner

                            MVP Corner




                            Zoho Writer Writer

                            Get Started. Write Away!

                            Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                              Zoho CRM コンテンツ


                                ご検討中の方

                                  • Recent Topics

                                  • Zoho Projects - Has something changed regarding to linking Projects and Deals via the API?

                                    I am trying to link Zoho Projects to Deals in CRM using the API, but each time, the Deal Contact is added as a Client user and receives an email invite asking them to join the organisation. These are internal projects and the customer should not have

                                  • Connection into Cliq?

                                    I have the SalesIQ chat widget on my site using the Zohobot but I'm not always on and my employees don't keep it open all the time. We do have Cliq open all the time though so I'd love a way to manage those discussions directly in Cliq as they come in.

                                  • Kaizen #264 - Using zoho-crm Skill to Write Functions

                                    Hello CRM wizards, Welcome back to another week of Kaizen. In our previous Kaizens, we explored how the zoho-crm skill can assist you across various Zoho CRM developer tools. This time, let us see how it can help you write Deluge Functions, from simple

                                  • Edit Pinned Comments in Zoho Desk

                                    It's great that private comments can now be pinned to the top of the ticket but what would be extremely helpful would be to allow for the pinned comment to be edited vs. having to find the comment in the ticket to edit it.

                                  • Recover accidentally deleted mail account

                                    Email account was accidentally deleted from admin console. 

                                  • mail sent to gmail goes directly to spam

                                    Hi TKIM and SPF are configured and verified. E-mails coming from zoho to my personal gmail account are going directly to the spam folder. How can I solve this? I can send you guys the headers privately if you need to.

                                  • print preview

                                    We are using microsoft edge, till 12 sep we were getting directly print option. Now we are getting this preview option we have to click print option again. How to bypass this-preview option?

                                  • Shopify Integration: How do I change the default Unit of Measure from KG to PCS

                                    For those using Shopify with Zoho Inventory, has anyone managed to have imported items default to PCS/EA instead of KG? If so, where is this configured? I can only find weight units in Shopify, not a sales unit of measure.

                                  • flexible subscription plan

                                    Greetings! We currently have 5 Standard plans, but would like to add 5 mail-lite one just to receive emails (do not need other business features or storage. As Super Admin, I tried to do that my self but didnt see the option on your sales platform. Please

                                  • mail

                                    We want our tracked links in campaign and journey emails to use our own domain instead of the shared maillist-manage.net domain. We have already created the CNAME links.rexven.com → customer-campaign.zoho.com (DNS only). Does our plan support a custom

                                  • Useless support and impossible to add users for whom I paid for

                                    Over a week ago i signed up for 5 emails addresses and 10GB, and so far I only have 1 email working, no access to the dashboard. Remote connection with "support"....useless Screen grabs sent to "support" useless Messages to "support"... now not answering

                                  • Mr

                                    can't access my email

                                  • Reduce Mail Lite Renewal from 2 licenses to 1

                                    Hello Zoho Support, I have a Mail Lite 5GB subscription with 2 licenses. have deleted the unused user, and now only 1 user/license is being used. My subscription is due for renewal, but the renewal page still shows 2 licenses and does not give me an option

                                  • Adding additional records dynamically to a subset of fields

                                    I'm trying to create a service ticket layout which will be passed to a Creator application for Field Service Management (FSM) purposes. We need to be able to define a specific subset of service product fields such as "Service Product", "Service Product Serial Number", "Service Product Warranty End Date" and "Service Product Current Warranty Status". We may need to record more than one of these subsets, in case the customer has more than one product which has to be serviced on their site. It seems

                                  • Zoho Books | Product updates | October 2026

                                    Hello users, October brings a range of new features and enhancements to Zoho Books, designed to simplify compliance, streamline accounting workflows, and improve inventory management. From the launch of the Nigeria Edition and France’s e-invoicing capabilities

                                  • Push error with Zoho Books and Zoho CRM

                                    I have successfully linked Books and CRM but I have some push errors with the following message: "The customer associated to this record is not linked to module chosen in the current contact sync configuration." I am unable to work this out, could you help please.

                                  • Function #24: Automatically display deal name from Zoho CRM on quotes in Zoho Books

                                    Deals allow businesses to organize and visualize their sales pipeline. This provides a clear overview of all potential opportunities and helps in making informed decisions. Zoho CRM empowers you to create deals or potentials for your clients and monitor

                                  • {"code":57,"message":"You are not authorized to perform this operation"}

                                    In my trial version of Zoho account, I am trying to integrate Zoho CRM Contact Module with Zoho books but when i call API it gives such type of error {"code":57,"message":"You are not authorized to perform this operation"}. I am using refreshed token

                                  • Allow widgets to be placed between native sections in the Ticket Properties panel

                                    One of our biggest frustrations with the Tickets module is how rigid the Ticket Properties panel is. Every section there is built only from native Zoho Desk fields. We can add sections, rearrange fields, and pick layouts, but we can’t put anything custom

                                  • #13 Understanding Your Zoho Invoice Limits

                                    Ravi's busiest month was also the month his invoicing stopped working. He had been using Zoho Invoice comfortably for months. Then, just when business picked up, he hit a limit he hadn't expected. The problem wasn't that he had missed a payment or forgotten

                                  • Map Dependency Upgrades in Zoho CRM

                                    Map Dependency Fields enhancements are now available across all DCs. Hello everyone, We’ve introduced a set of enhancements to Map Dependency Fields to make setup simpler, faster, and more intuitive. Map Dependency helps control how values appear across

                                  • How to Allocate Incoming Purchase Stock to Specific Sales Orders in Zoho Inventory?

                                    Hi all, We are using Zoho One Enterprise and need guidance on managing sales order–wise allocation of incoming stock in Zoho Inventory. Our workflow is: A customer order is received, and the Sales Order is confirmed. The sales team immediately creates

                                  • How to disable automatic ticket closure emails for specific outgoing communications?

                                    Is there a way to disable the automatic "Ticket Closed" email notification for specific tickets or outgoing emails? Currently, every time we send an email to a customer, the system automatically sends a "Ticket Created" email, followed by a "Ticket Closed"

                                  • Zoho Webinar - Sharing System Audio (NOT AVAILABLE)

                                    Hi, We are having a serious problem with Zoho Webinar. In the webinars we run, we very often share the audio from a video we are streaming directly from YouTube or other applications. Until recently we were using Zoom, but as we use other Zoho applications

                                  • What's new in Zoho Workplace | September 2026

                                    Hello Zoho Workplace community! Here's a roundup of all the new features and announcements that went live across Zoho Workplace applications in September. Zoho Mail Compose Options Across Templates You can now use the Undo, Redo, and New List options

                                  • Unable to export reports despite enabled report export permissions

                                    Hi Zoho Community, We are unable to export reports in Zoho CRM. When attempting an export, we receive the following error: “Cannot Export Report — You do not have permission to export one or more modules used in this report. Please contact your administrator.”

                                  • What does "Tickets for Review" do?

                                    What is the purpose of the va nilla view " Tickets for Review?"

                                  • Set department automatically for incoming calls

                                    Is it possible, when receiving an incoming call through Zoho Desk (using Twilio integration), for the department to be auto-selected based on the phone line being called? Currently, we have to manually select the department from the dropdown menu when

                                  • Zoho Desk training for administrators in EU and US region

                                    Hello Everyone, Get ready for the certified Virtual Classroom training for our Zoho Desk users in Europe and the US. Our in-house Zoho Desk expert, @Dheeraj | Zoho Desk, will conduct the virtual classroom training. This training focuses on simplifying

                                  • Support Plan: Recuring Issue

                                    Hi Zoho Team, Could you please look into this recurring alert and provide clarification on why this restriction is still in place? This issue has become a bottleneck in our workflow, significantly limiting our automation capabilities. We are unable to

                                  • Webinar de Zoho People: tecnología para RR. HH.

                                    ¿Y si RR. HH. pudiera estar tan conectado con el negocio como el resto de tu organización? La gestión de personas está evolucionando, y los departamentos de Recursos Humanos necesitan herramientas que les permitan ir más allá de las tareas administrativas

                                  • Zoho CRM still doesn't let you manage timezones (yearly reminder)

                                    This is something I have asked repeatedly. I'll ask once again. Suppose that you work in France. Next month you have a trip to Guatemala. You call a contact there, close a meeting, record that meeting in CRM. On the phone, your contact said: "meet me

                                  • WhatsApp in Zoho CRM Plus: inbound works, every outbound message fails with crm.bm.msg.failed.undefined since Oct 14 (business stopped)

                                    Hello Zoho team and community, We are Roxo Inc, a Zoho CRM Plus customer in Florida. WhatsApp is our main sales and support channel, and since October 14, 11:11 AM EDT we cannot send any WhatsApp message from Zoho CRM. We are facing a large drop in sales

                                  • 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

                                  • Problem in Mannual journal in Zoho Books

                                    When I Put Manual Journal in Zoho Books Software not allow me to select VAT Rate what is the solution United kindgom version

                                  • Zoho CRM's WhatsApp integration now supports multiple accounts, multiple numbers, and custom modules

                                    Hello all, WhatsApp Business now comes with a few exciting enhancements. So far, WhatsApp integration has worked with a single account and a single mobile number. As reliance on the WhatsApp integration has grown, along with the need for multiple accounts

                                  • 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,

                                  • 【開催報告】Zoho Championに学ぶ！Zoho Campaigns メール配信の基礎・活用勉強会

                                    Zoho ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。 コミュニティグループの中野です。 10月15日（木）、Zoho ユーザーコミュニティ初となる「Zoho Campaigns メール配信の基礎・活用勉強会」をオンラインで開催しました。 今回は、Zoho Campaignsの導入を検討している方から、一斉メールを配信しているものの 現在の設定や運用にを見直したい方まで、28名のユーザーさまにご参加いただきました。 本投稿では、当日のセッション内容をご紹介します。 （セッション資料については登録者限定公開となります）

                                  • Integration

                                    Can Zoho noted about to get an integration with Dext? I believe will be helpful at least in UK. thanks

                                  • Deleted Module

                                    I accidentally deleted a module and its fields. Im trying to get it back. Thanks to Youtubers flooding the internet with out of date videos I can't find how to get deleted modules back. The Recycle Bin doesn't have modules. Anyone know how to do thi

                                  • Next Page