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

    • How to Fix an Outlook OST File That Cannot Be Opened

      Have you at any time attempted to open Outlook only to find that your OST file cannot be accessed? It can be very annoying, particularly since the file holds important emails, attachments, and other mailbox data. This problem might arise due to file corruption,

    • Record positive and negative bank transactions in the same expense account

      Hello, I hosted a promotional event and paid a vendor $600 for food catering (bento boxes). Twenty people attended the event, and each person paid $30 for a bento box, resulting in 20 separate $30 transactions deposited into the bank. I coded the $600

    • Is it possible to log text messages from iphone into Zoho CRM

      My team is more and more utilizing text messaging to communicate with clients. Does Zoho have a solution for logging these text messages when clicking "Send Text Message" from the Zoho app. Much like when you call, you get prompted to log a call, can

    • CRM Address Field - States with Countries in brackets

      Hi, Could you please remove the country in brackets from the Global State List, or at least allow us to edit these entries? It looks like the brackets were added during the initial data population, perhaps by someone building the list in a spreadsheet

    • 👍 Zoho CRM's Notes now gets Reactions and a new look

      Available in SA and JP DCs. Rolling out to other DCs in phases. Hello everyone, Notes help users capture important updates, collaborate with teammates, and maintain context for records. Now with Note Reactions, users can quickly acknowledge updates, express

    • How to mass find and delete duplicate files from OneDrive

      It is easy to save documents, photos, videos, and all other types of files using Onedrive, but if you upload the same files more than once then your OneDrive storage can end up being filled with a large number of duplicate files. Manually searching out

    • Different Report sharing filters within same Dashboard

      I have a question about sharing filters for a dashboard which contains separate reports built from the same query. Below are the pieces of the puzzle: - “Sales Query”: line-level query containing sales for a team of 5 sales reps; there’s no need for the

    • Specifying time increments on a Date/Time field

      Hi all, Im using a Date/Time field in my CRM module. At the moment the increments are 30 minutes. How can I change these to be 15 minutes? Thanks

    • not able to convert pdf to jpg and other forms and vice versa.

      i want to change my pdf to jpg, word, etc and some times jpg to pdf. i don't know how to do in this.

    • Make Your Workflows Smarter with Zia Agents

      Hello, Enterprise Support Community, Workflow rules can now go beyond predefined actions. Zia Agents can now be invoked directly from workflow rules in Zoho CRM, allowing you to bring contextual, AI powered actions into your automated processes. Choose

    • How can I add a Custom Field (or Customer_name) to a picklist?

      Our workflow is Shopify-->SO -->Picklist-->Package-->Shipment. We would like to have the Picklist template to include a custom field "Customer_Notes" (we have created this field already). This way we get alerted when a customer has notes on their account.

    • DYK 14: Create Tasks with AI

      Did you know AI can suggest tasks within your Zoho Projects portal? Breaking a project into clear, actionable work items takes time and manual effort. Especially when the same team handles both planning and execution. AI task suggestions in Zoho Projects

    • #11 Nithya's First Overseas Client

      Nithya designs for clients in three countries and has never met any of them. Her first overseas invoice took a full evening. The second took four minutes. The difference was not a clever tax trick. She stopped treating every international customer as

    • Other languages in Schedulers (Zoho Books)

      Hello everyone, currently we have create functions in other languages, like nodejs etc but on schedulers we can use only deluge.. Are other languages on schedulers roll out? Kind regards, Sakis Oikonomou

    • New in Office Integrator: Extract data from images into your spreadsheet

      Hi users, We are pleased to introduce the Data from Picture feature in Zoho Office Integrator's spreadsheet editor. It intelligently detects and organizes text and numbers from any image into structured cells using OCR. With this feature, users can turn

    • Edit PDFs using Zoho PDF Editor

      Hello users, In a previous article, we covered the organizing capabilities of Zoho PDF Editor. Here, we'll provide a quick recap of its editing features, including a few new additions. A few highlights of Zoho PDF Editor's editing capabilities: Add 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.

    • Multiple subscription plan line items in Zoho Billing quotes

      I run an IT company and sell a lot of licences. A client might have multiple subscription plans including software licences in different categories. A client might have Microsoft licences, antivirus licences, web hosting and maintenance package services.

    • Mail Merge templates in Sandbox

      Rolled out for all DCs Hello everyone, You can now create and test Mail Merge templates directly in Sandbox, making it easier to validate document generation without affecting your live organization. Why this matters Mail Merge templates are often used

    • 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

    • Dashboard Table of “My New Work Orders” Changes View

      Hi FSM Team, We noticed an inconsistency with the Dashboard Table of “My New Work Orders.” Initially, the table is configured to use the “My New Work Orders” view. When we go to the Home page, the table displays a different set of records. When we return

    • Tips & Tricks #6 | Zoho Vault: Audita actividad, Gestiona accesos, Comparte credenciales & mucho más.

      ¿Sabías que Zoho Vault puede hacer mucho más por la seguridad de tu equipo? Las contraseñas forman parte del día a día de cualquier persona y organización. Aplicaciones, herramientas internas, cuentas de clientes, servicios externos, plataformas de marketing,

    • Inquiry Regarding Customer Hierarchy & Sub-Customer Creation via Zoho API

      Dear Zoho Support Team, Our mutual client has requested support for implementing the Customer Hierarchy (Parent/Sub-Customer structure) within our existing workflow. At the moment, all invoices are being created in Zoho under the main (parent) customer

    • Which Zoho CRM tasks would you want an AI assistant to handle?

      I’ve started delegating my Zoho CRM work to AI – and many tasks now take me half the time. It has been so useful that we’re now working to make it available to everyone. Instead of clicking through records and tabs, I simply describe what needs to be

    • Introducing MCP for Zoho CommunitySpaces

      Hello everyone, Your AI assistant can now share the community workload with you. Zoho CommunitySpaces supports MCP (Model Context Protocol), so you can link an AI assistant like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor to your community and run it through plain language

    • CV-Library: The Newest Source Booster in Zoho Recruit!

      We’ve expanded your sourcing toolkit — CV-Library, one of the UK’s largest and most trusted online job boards, is now available as a Source Booster in Zoho Recruit. This gives recruiters instant access to millions of UK-based candidate profiles, all without

    • Tip 52#: Ways to improve data flexibility using related list

      A related list offers an ideal solution to string related data across entities together. It enables you to pull records from any module or external source and float them as a tab within your project, sprint, epic, work item, or release detail view layout.

    • Email Blast

      Hi, How do we send an email blast to thousands of customers? The email addresses are not yet saved in Zoho Desk.

    • Zoho ERP | Product updates | September 2026

      Hello users, A new month, a fresh set of updates in Zoho ERP. This month brings Netting, enhancements across our verticals, and more updates to help streamline your everyday work. Explore this month’s updates and see what’s new. Introducing Netting If

    • Introducing Zoho POS for Restaurants

      Hello Community, We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Zoho POS for Restaurants, unveiled at the 30th milestone edition of Zoholics India 2026. Running a restaurant involves multiple teams and workflows. A single table journey, from seating a guest

    • WhatsApp Business Message Pricing Update: Effective October 1, 2026

      Hi everyone, Starting October 1, 2026, Meta is updating how WhatsApp Business messages are charged. This guide explains the new per-message pricing model, how message categories work, and what changes for service messages specifically. How Meta charges

    • Zoho Calendar integration for Bigin

      Hello everyone, We're excited to introduce Zoho Calendar's integration in Bigin! For a while now, users have been able to sync events in Bigin with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar - but with this new topping, it syncs with Zoho Calendar as well.

    • Does Updating Employee Names and Profile Pictures in Zoho One Automatically Sync Across All Zoho Applications?

      Hi Zoho Team, We are currently using Zoho One in our organization and want to centrally manage employee profile information. As a Zoho One Super Admin, if I update the employee name and profile picture for all users from the Zoho One Admin Panel, will

    • Enhanced shared mailboxes: Dedicated Sent folders, Run-through filters & fresh UI

      Hi everyone, Collaborative communication is the backbone of smooth operations; whether you are handling customer support queries, managing vendor requests, or tracking sales leads. Shared mailboxes in Zoho Mail ensure your team stays on the same page

    • How to Manage Two GST Numbers / Two Companies in a Single Zoho Inventory Organization?

      Hi Team, We currently have two separate legal entities: A Proprietorship Firm with its own GSTIN A Private Limited Company with a different GSTIN However, operationally, both companies deal with the same products, and we would like to manage the physical

    • 10/22 15時〜 オンラインもくもく会のお知らせ | Zoho ワークアウト

      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22日（木）開催の「Zoho ワークアウト」をご案内します。 Zoho ワークアウトは、参加者それぞれが取り組みたいテーマを持ち寄り、ユーザー同士で交流しながら、 設定・検証・運用改善を進めるオンラインの「もくもく会」です。 「試してみたい設定があるけれど、なかなか時間を取れない」 「一人で進めていると、途中で手が止まってしまう」 「他のユーザーの活用方法や工夫を聞いてみたい」 そんな方は、Zoho ワークアウトで一緒に取り組んでみませんか？

    • Reporting tags associated to Project in Zoho books?

      Hi, I know you can add reporting tags to contact, articles and transactions. Is it possible to add reporting tags to Project. We Zoho reports I would be able to generate reports by tags. Sometimes tags for a contact is different for projects (ie Projects

    • Reporting Tags in Profit and Loss Reports Analysis

      Hello Community and Zoho Books Product Team, I would like to highlight a limitation I encountered with Reporting Tags in Zoho Books. Reporting Tags Not Applying to Automated Inventory Journal Postings from Product Invoices. For inventory product invoices,

    • Spam Quarantine: Manage suspicious emails in Zoho Mail

      When an email is quarantined by spam processing, it need not always be blocked right away. Some emails may be marked incorrectly, or may need to be reviewed before a final decision is made. The Spam Quarantine feature in the Zoho Mail Admin Console gives

    • What is the difference between "Reply" and "Public Comment" in a ticket?

      Hey, my company is thinking about switching to Zoho Desk but we do not understand the difference between the "Reply" and the "Public Comment" feature. When should we use which? And why? What is the difference between them? Thank you for your help! Kindest

    • Next Page