• by Jess Nelson , April 12, 2016

Email delivery platform SendGrid announced on Monday that the company now sends more than 1 billion emails per day. 

SendGrid now interacts with more than 1.6 billion unique email addresses every 90 days on behalf of its collection of over 34,000 Internet and mobile customers including Uber, Spotify and AirBnB.

Founded by three developers in 2009, SendGrid has since grown to employ more than 300 professionals and has extended its email deliverability platform to email marketing. SendGrid launched Marketing Campaigns in December, a communications service that helps marketers engage with customers via transaction and email marketing messages.

SendGrid now claims to serve 3,000 customers and has sent over 500 million emails with its Marketing Campaigns service. 

The Radicati Group estimates that more than 215 billion emails will be sent per day in 2016, according to a March 2015 Email Statistics Report. This number is expected to grow steadily at 5% year-over-year to reach more than 246 billion emails per day by 2019 according to the study.

Amidst such high volumes of email messages, Scott Heimes, CMO at SendGrid, shared six tips with Email Marketing Daily on how to make your messages stand out from the crowd and increase email engagement.

1. Design Emails Around A Call To Action (CTA)

“Rely on the main message of your email to showcase the benefit of your product or service and leave the closing to the CTA,” says Heimes. “Keep your CTA short and sweet so the recipient has clear direction as to next steps and avoid the temptation to give your users too many CTAs.”

Heimes says successful call to action phrases include ‘Shop Now,’ ‘Learn More,’ ‘Request a Demo’ and ‘Register Now.

2. Test Subject Lines of All Email Marketing Campaigns

Heimes recommends A/B testing as a critical way to determine the success of email marketing campaigns.

“Every business and email list is different, so we suggest that you test what works and what doesn’t with your recipients,” says Heimes. “By A/B testing, you can determine which tactic works best."

3. Shorten Subject Headers

While seven words is the most common subject-line word length, three-word subject lines have the highest engagement rates. Out of the three word subject lines, recipients also prefer certain words over others. Subject lines referring to “yesterday” and “tomorrow” have higher engagement rates than “today.”

4. Eliminate Links and Hashtags in Subject Lines

Heimes says that subject lines containing URLs or hashtags perform poorly, and are more likely to be marked as spam by email service providers.

Emails containing a URL or a hashtag in the subject line have effectively half the engagement rates of traditional email marketing messages, with engagement rates hovering below 10.5% according to SendGrid internal studies.

5. Make Use of Your Pre-header

Marketers often forget about one of email’s prime pieces of real estate -- the pre-header text,” says Heimes.  “The pre-header text is the small snippet of text that can be seen in the inbox, after the subject line. Don’t leave the automatic placeholder, ‘Can’t view this properly? View in web browser.’ Instead, you can use this space to reiterate the CTA, or add an additional important directive that you didn’t have space for within the subject line.”

A majority of emails are now read on a mobile device, but many email templates are still designed to be viewed on the wider screen of a standard desktop computer.

Heimes asserts the importance of mobile optimization for email marketers as a way to deliver a compelling customer experience across channels, platforms and devices, recommending that email marketers leverage responsive-design templates and include a plain text version of any HTML emails.