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Archives for July 2019

How to Speed Up Your Website with Tips from 42 Pros

by Chris Herbert | Last Updated May 26, 2021

how to make your website faster

It’s no secret that a slow, clunky website is not a good look for your business or brand. In fact, there are tons of studies that suggest you’d be lucky if people stick around long enough to even see your website if it’s slow to load.

There goes your chance to make a good first impression. And you’ll be fortunate if they ever come back again. So just like that you…a) potentially lost a sale, b) increased your “bounce rate” (bad for seo!) and c) provided a very poor brand experience. Not gonna cut it…

So in this case you want your website to be the hare and not the tortoise, but just how do you make it so? Well that’s what this article is for! We recently spoke to more than 40 web design & development pros and quizzed them on “how to speed up a website?” They each talked us through one tip to make a website load faster, and we ended up with a bucketload of actionable advice ranging from the super simple (install a plugin or choose better hosting) to the slightly more complicated (coding knowledge required).

If you need to get your website out of first gear, spend some time looking through the tips below. Significant gains in website speed can be made with a very minimal time and monetary investment in many cases. There’s really no excuse!

How to Optimize Website Speed: 42 Tips to Seriously Cut Loading Times

Website Speed Optimization

Here’s a quickfire overview of all of the ways to make your website load faster that were mentioned by the experts we got in touch with. These folks have built and managed thousands of websites between them, with speed always a priority. You could say they have some experience in this area. Anyway, here are the tips…

  1. Defer image loading
  2. Optimize your images
  3. Install the SmushIt plugin
  4. Use a caching plugin
  5. Reduce clutter – convey the most using the least
  6. Install WP Rocket
  7. Choose your theme wisely
  8. Optimize SQL queries
  9. Clean-up your database
  10. Use WordPress management tools
  11. Keep WordPress core, themes and plugins updated
  12. Steer clear of bloated themes
  13. Minify HTML, CSS and JS
  14. Use the SG Optimizer plugin
  15. Don’t serve scaled images
  16. Prevent image hotlinking
  17. Optimize videos if you’re self-hosting them
  18. Clean up revisions after WordPress Updates
  19. Use sprite maps
  20. Build your own theme with Elementor Pro
  21. Reduce redirects
  22. Review your hosting plan
  23. Take advantage of speed testing tools
  24. Install the Async Javascript plugin
  25. Be consistent (& accurate) with your url
  26. Use Cloudflare
  27. Deactivate/remove unused plugins in WordPress
  28. Invest in a custom designed template
  29. Minimise all HTTP requests
  30. Lazy loading technique
  31. Write smarter CSS/SCSS/SASS
  32. Avoid using an image where possible (use CSS instead)
  33. Optimize DNS options
  34. Configure your expire headers
  35. Remove redundant code (particularly in the backend)
  36. Conditionally enqueue styles and scripts
  37. Serve your media from Amazon S3
  38. Reduce the impact of Javascript on the critical rendering path
  39. Host videos externally
  40. Use SPA to improve user experience
  41. Strip the cruft from your theme
  42. Choose your web host wisely

Other Articles You May Find Useful:

  • Best Web Hosting for Small Business? 90 Web Design Pros Vote
  • All Web Design + Development Resources

What the Experts Said: Faster Website Tips Explained

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat” as they say. That’s definitely true when it comes to figuring out how to make a website load faster. The more in-depth explanations of the tips that were shared with us are in the section below. Read through a few of them, take action and implement them on your website, and I’d be amazed if you don’t see some speed gains. In fact, I’d eat my socks (as I don’t have a hat).

We’ve ordered the tips into some rough categories, which you can filter using the tags below. Good luck, and we’d love to hear about any improvements you manage to achieve in the comments section!

{"filter_mode":"masonry"}
  • All
  • Code/Technical Stuff
  • Hosting
  • Images
  • Other Tools
  • Plugins
  • Themes
  • Video
  • WordPress

Matt Brubaker

I'm a web designer/developer working with small to medium businesses building custom websites for over 5 years. My focus is WordPress custom theme development. I provide web design and development services for multiple marketing and design agencies and individual small businesses in Lancaster, York, Lebanon, Reading and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
http://mattbru.me

  • Defer Image Loading

    – “A technique I’ve been using for a lot of custom site builds, which gives a good performance boost is simple for site developers to implement: defer image loading. This method allows visible page elements to load faster. Basically you load a tiny image source, such as a base64 image, then after page load you use javascript to swap the base64 image for your larger image source we want to display. Doing this tricks the browser into thinking the larger images are not there, resulting in a page loading much faster.

    Image loading (large images or a lot of images) is often a culprit of a slow page load. All page images compete for bandwidth as all other page resources such as javascript and stylesheets. To get around this we can defer image loading to speed up page load. To do so we can find image sources loading off screen, or below the page “fold” and load them differently.

    Find the image source, add a base64 image and put your actual source into a data-src attribute like this:

    Then add this jacascript to your page and you’re all set.

    I will not take credit for this technique. All credit goes to Patrick Sexton at varvy.com. For a more in depth explanation, see this great article.

    I have also learned some other very helpful pagespeed techniques on his site.”

Wendy Alessi

Wendy Alessi is a Calgary, Canada based website designer & graphic designer. With over 10 years' experience in the design industry, she specializes in WordPress website development & E-commerce Website Development.
https://kakatucreative.com/

  • Image Optimization

    – “Image optimization is a huge deal when it comes to the speed of your website. Many people find it tempting to upload large HD images to their websites, with the hope that the image quality will look amazing, but the truth is that large image file sizes can slow your website down considerably.

    While it is extremely important for your images to look their best on your website, It’s equally important to ensure that your images have been re-sized prior to uploading. As a professional, I use Adobe Photoshop CC to re-size and compress my images prior to uploading to my client’s websites, but there are lots of cheap or free alternatives such as Pixlr.com for those who don’t have Photoshop.

    There is a balance between using the lowest file size and retaining great image quality. As a rule, I recommend that images should be in .jpg, .png or .gif format, and re-sized to no larger than the size (in px) that you wish to display on your website.

    If you are a WordPress user like me, you can further compress your image file sizes (without losing quality) by installing the WP Smush – Image Compression and Optimization plugin.

    When developing a website in WordPress, I find that it’s common to upload images and then decide against using them, either because they don’t look good aesthetically or because the format of the page changes during development. When this happens, it’s important to keep on top of your “housekeeping” and remove any unused images from your WordPress media library. Leaving unused images sitting in your media library takes up storage and in turn slows down your website.

    Finally, you can test your images by analyzing your website at: http://gtmetrix.com. GTmetrix provides a vast amount of information about your website optimization as a whole, but there is a section which reports specifically on your images.”

Zach Schwartz

Expirit was founded by Zach Schwartz with a vision to help small brands go big. Today, Expirit serves as the go-to branding agency for top-quality work at affordable prices. Expirit offers brand and web development, graphic design and digital marketing.
http://Expiritco.com

  • SmushIt Plugin

    – “High resolution Images are obviously vital for the design of your website. However, using images that are hi-res means taking up a lot of space on the server. This means it will take longer for your site visitors’ computers to load those images, thereby taking longer to load the website. SmushIt is a WordPress plug-in that allows you to cut off extra data in images that is not necessary. Websites also load entire pages at once, which means it loads images that are not in the viewport yet. For this, SmushIt has an option called “Lazy Loader”, which postpones the images from loading until the user scrolls to that point of the web page. See this link for more info.”

Dortha Hise

As the Chief Overwhelm Eliminator at Pretty Smart Virtual Services, I specialize in rescuing YOU from Overwhelm so you can get back to doing what you love in your business. Take back your business and your life—let me tackle your to-do list!
https://prettysmartvaservices.com/

  • Use a Caching Plugin

    – “WordPress is a great platform to easily create and maintain your website. In addition to using other plugins for security and other functionality, using a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache is a great way to enhance your website’s performance. The W3 Total Cache plugin encapsulates all the features you need to cache your site and help it run faster. It’s as simple as installing and activating it in your WordPress dashboard.

    Some of the other benefits of using the W3 Total Cache plugin on your WordPress site include improved search engine result page rankings, improved conversion rates, and performance of your site, which affect how you show up in Google rankings. Your pages render and can be interacted with more quickly. You’ll also see faster page load speed which will help with keeping people on your site longer and ideally, they’ll be clicking on to more pages of your site.

    W3 Total Cache is very compatible with many hosting companies, offers mobile support and so much more.”

Hughie Wilmshurst

12 year strong freelance website developer, specialising in CodeIgniter and Wordpress.
https://hughiew.co.uk

  • Reduce Clutter

    – “Consider what you and your users actually need/want on your website. Far too often I receive requests to “just add this” or “just add that” – know your limits. The more you add, the slower your website will be. Do you really need your homepage to feature your Instagram feed, feefo reviews, featured products, featured brands, Facebook feed, Twitter feed, news articles, featured promotions etc?

    Use tracking services such as Google Analytics, MouseFlow and HotJar to track which parts of your site your users actually pay attention to. If nobody uses a particularly resource-intensive feature, consider removing it, or moving it to somewhere else on your site.

    It’s all about efficiency – convey the most using the least.”

Craig Murphy

Craig Murphy is the director of ALT Agency and spends his spare time working out ways to improve the speed of websites.
https://www.altagency.co.uk

  • Install WP Rocket

    – “A friend told me mid-last year about a plugin called WP Rocket which is a plugin specifically for WordPress. As a user of W3 Total Cache I wasn’t too keen on looking at switching, but due to a few caching issues and seeing the metrics of my friend’s website I decided to give it a go.

    WP Rocket is now used on our own website and every client who uses WordPress – it is that good.

    What WP Rocket does is, besides offering incredible support, it allows you to set files such as CSS, JS and HTML etc to compress and cache – Without breaking your design & layout.

    On all the page speed metric sites, such as Google Page Insights and GTMetrix, just through installing the plugin and enabling the basics it improved the percentage on average by 15-20%.

    Once we dialled in the plugin and messed around with the settings we’ve found it on average to jump the Google Page insights metrics by 20-30%, Increase the GTMetrix score by around 30-35% and decrease page load time by around 1.5 seconds on average.

    We highly recommend the tool, love it so much and you can find more about it and download a copy from: https://wp-rocket.me/”

Faye Williams

Full stack developer and writer. I provide hosting and websites for small businesses at Five Pixels.
https://fivepixels.co.uk

  • Choose your Theme Wisely

    – “There are thousands of WordPress themes available. Choosing the perfect theme for your website is not just about picking something that you think looks pretty. Since speed is such an important part of the user experience, you will want to choose a theme that is regularly updated and optimised for speed. There is no point choosing a theme that looks wonderful if it adds seconds to your site’s load time.

    Reading the theme owners description is an easy place to start. If there is no mention of speed or optimisation then it is likely that this isn’t a priority for the development team or individual. Asking for recommendations for themes that are fast is a good way to find out what others have used and liked.

    You can also do a basic evaluation of your current theme by switching to a vanilla WordPress theme (like Twenty Twelve which is excellent for speed) and comparing the difference in load time. As a general rule, the more adds-ons and functionality you have in your theme, the slower you can expect it to respond.

    My personal theme recommendation for WordPress is to start with Generate Press and customise it as needed. This is a very lightweight, but truly flexible theme that you can use to create some stunning designs. However, if you are looking for a super fast theme out-of-the-box then do your research (there are plenty of articles that compare theme speeds) and make sure you pick one that is tried and tested.”

Matthew Carver

Matthew is the founder of Pilgrim Blue, a digital innovation consultancy in Austin, Texas.
http://pilgrim.blue

  • Optimize SQL Queries

    – “This is especially true if you have a custom built solution in place. The issue isn’t just a problem for my clients with custom content delivery sites. For instance, maybe you have your main site hosted on WordPress, but you need a connection to a custom API. If those API calls aren’t optimized, it could block the render of the page. Sometimes it’s not just the query that needs to be optimized, but the response. If your API responds with too much content or overly verbose responses, it can cause your site to lag while it parses the response.

    The easiest way to address this issue is with a query optimizer. A query optimizer can cost anywhere from $30 to $130+ a month (personally, for SQL I like SolarWinds or Red Gate is a good overall SQL Toolset) and you’ll still need to rely on somebody to implement the solution and it won’t guarantee perfect results out of the box. For my clients I like to suggest a system audit first to rule out simpler fixes first. These can take as little as a week and be done with a one time up-front investment before committing to an ongoing expense and ensure the right solution is enacted.”

David Marmon

An experienced and accomplished web designer and online branding strategist, David Marmon injects years of experience and creativity into every project he touches. He is the visionary behind the Marmon Designs brand. He is a strong believer in collaboration and building a community that shares a vision for the future.
https://marmondesigns.com

  • Clean-Up Your Database

    – “It’s important to keep your site’s database as clean as possible. This will keep the database size to a minimum, which will not only help speed up your site, but also help important website processes (such as backups) happen at a much faster speed.

    Often fresh theme installations will come with demo content hidden in places that your site might not utilize, such as a portfolio feature filled with demo content.

    Spam comments may collect over time. Unused image variations will start to pile up in your media library. Unpublished draft content, no longer active users, and unneeded plugins can all take up unnecessary space in your database.

    Clean it up every so often!”

Vee Ridgley

I started designing websites way back in 2000. We are now an agency that helps businesses and organisations get online. And then make a success of their business.
https://webdesignuk.agency/

  • Use WordPress Management Tools

    – “Having looked at the list of tip topics so far it was hard to think of a new one. We carry out as many of them as possible to help with site speed. Which led to me realise I do have a tip that is not yet listed. And that is to use WordPress management tools.

    For example, no matter how many times you explain to a client that their images called ‘IMG_1234.jpg’ etc. at 3500px X 4000px and 300dpi will slow down their site, they often ‘forget’. Short of checking everything they do on site you cannot police this, especially when they insist on managing the content themselves.

    WordPress Management tools can help. I’m talking about tools that give an overall picture of a site’s performance, with details that can guide you to where the issues are. Whether the problem is un-optimised images, poor hosting or poor code etc. There are premium tools such as ManageWP, which has recently been bought by GoDaddy and now included in their managed WordPress hosting packages I believe. Also MainWP, InfiniteWP, iControlWP and a few more.

    For managing one or two sites, there are free online tools such as GTMetrix, Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test and many more. These will often also give insights to help you find out what is causing any slow speeds.

    Even Google Analytics can help. If you have a niche market and know where your customers/site visitors are coming from, plus what devices they tend to use, you can perhaps optimise your site design to reflect that. For example, if lots of visitors are from somewhere with poor broadband speeds and view the site on a mobile, then don’t waste time making them download a lovely big hero image.”

Danny Stone

I was brought into developing websites when a friend created their new one. The experience got me hooked and I haven’t looked back. Building a portal for small to medium sized businesses so that they can develop their strategy online efficiently and effectively happens to be a great way to meet and learn about different industries and the people involved in them. There are always new things evolving in the tech space so we all need to keep learning!
https://www.webstudiolab.co.uk/

  • Keeping WordPress Core, Themes & Plugins Updated

    – “The WordPress core, your WordPress theme and any plugins you install are written in code that is meant to fuse together well – ultimately providing you with a functioning (and fast) website. As things move forward with new features, enhancements and upgrades, this means that the developers of the above will have been writing new code. These changes in the packages are the updates and upgrades that are released.

    Keeping on top of this will improve the security and performance of your site.

    One may argue that you should not update everything immediately when the new release is ready, rather instead – whilst WordPress does score the confidence of compatibility of the updates – it can be wise to set up a staging environment to test these out before launching the upgrades as a live site to the public.”

John Sheahan

We specialise in engaging WordPress powered websites, as well as ongoing website care and maintenance plans
https://eggdesign.ie/web-design-portfolio/

  • Avoid Bloated Themes

    – “One of the best ways to speed to up your site is to avoid using bloated themes that come packed with too many features, 80% of which you probably wont even use. Combine that with a load of plugins and add-ons and you are just begging for a slow site! On top of that, the majority of these themes use page builders, which also can add to the load and slow it down. At Egg we use a very lightweight framework and only ever use the very basics in functionality that the client will need, all the while making it as user-friendly and easy to use as possible.

    We advise using custom fields plugins (such as the fantastic Advanced Custom Fileds) to create hard coded layouts that your client can then easily update themselves without the need for page builders which can lead to disaster at times if a client doesn’t know how to use them properly.

    So at the end of the day, keep things as cut back and streamlined as possible with your theme.”

Dave Ashworth

Freelance Technical SEO Consultant with 10 years of SEO experience and a further 10 years in web development
https://organicdigital.co/

  • Minify HTML, CSS & JS

    – “Minify your HTML, CSS and JS files to remove white space and unnecessary or redundant code (such as comments) which in turn minimises code across your site’s pages and script files.

    This will reduce file size which in turn reduces bandwidth usage and page load time. There are manual tools to help with this such as:

    • https://cssminifier.com/
    • https://javascript-minifier.com/

    There are also resources available which will generate minified code dynamically. There are a number of plugins available for WordPress sites:

    • https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/tags/minify/

    Whilst developers can find code to do this such as:

    • https://gist.github.com/tovic/d7b310dea3b33e4732c0
    • https://github.com/mrclay/minifyAlways

    Always make sure you test your minified code to ensure the CSS and JS files still work.”

Derek Rippe

Specializing in custom, affordable website design and development services for small and micro businesses, proudly built on WordPress and the Genesis Framework.
https://512designlab.com

  • Use the SG Optimizer Plugin

    – “I am someone who was late to the “Site Speed” game, largely because I always felt overwhelmed by the plugins available to WordPress users. The plugins I had tried undoubtedly worked well (based on ratings), but the user interfaces were so poor that I regularly felt overwhelmed and confused.

    Toward the end of 2018, after acquiring a SiteGround VPS account and the clients on it, I was looking for easy ways to reduce server load. It was then that I learned of the SG Optimizer plugin.

    While the SG Optimizer plugin is developed and maintained by the folks at SiteGround, the majority of features available will work on WordPress websites hosted anywhere (there are merely some extra perks for those who also host with SiteGround). What I love most about this optimization tool is not how well it works (and it does work well), but how incredibly easy it is to use!

    After installing the plugin as you would any other WordPress plugin (it’s available in the WordPress repository: https://wordpress.org/plugins/sg-cachepress/), you will see the optimization options are broken into 4 categories:

    • SuperCacher Settings
    • Environment Optimization
    • Frontend Optimization
    • Image Optimization

    SuperCacher Settings

    This section has tools for enabling “Dynamic Caching”, which stores your content in the server’s memory for faster access. It includes tools for purging the cache, excluding specific URLs, and testing the cache status. SiteGround users can also take advantage of “Memcached” – powerful object caching for your site.

    SG Optimizer SuperCacher Settings

    Environment Optimization

    In this section you can enable GZIP Compression and Browser Caching. GZIP Compression compresses the content delivered to your visitors browsers and improves the network loading times of your site. Browser Caching adds rules to store in your visitors browser cache to keep static content longer for better site performance. There are also tools for enabling and forcing HTTPS, and settings your PHP version, although I have only had luck with these on WordPress websites hosted with SiteGround.

    SG Optimizer Environment Optimization

    Frontend Optimization

    This is a key section within the SG Optimizer plugin, and it offers a lot of options for reducing the load time your site visitors experience. You can minify your HTML Output and JavaScript files, and both combine and minify your CSS files. You can also load render-blocking JavaScript files “asynchronously” (preventing javascript from blocking your page from loading) and remove query strings from static resources (to improve caching).

    I have seen rare instances where certain options here can affect frontend elements on a website (background images, forms, etc). Should you notice a display issue after enabling the Frontend Optimization tools, I’d suggest disabling them individually to find the culprit (then just leave that particular option disabled).

    SG Optimizer Frontend Optimization

    Image Optimization

    Today’s websites are full of images, and images are full of data… data that your site visitor has to download. The primary purpose of this section is to optimize existing images (with minimal or no loss in quality) and automatically optimize any new images you upload. You can also select a variety of images to “lazy load,” meaning they won’t be loaded and displayed to the user until they come into view.

    SG Optimizer Image Optimization

    While the majority of client sites I maintain are on SiteGround, I now use the SG Optimizer plugin on every WordPress website I create or manage. For me, it’s a “set it and forget it” plugin with measurable performance gains.”

Erim Foster

Erim has been working on websites since the days of Netscape Navigator and embedded tables. He currently specializes in WordPress optimization and support for small businesses and non-profits.
https://erim.net

  • Don’t Serve Scaled Images

    – “I see this issue all the time with websites I test. Often it’s with thumbnails on an archive or index page. The individual images are displayed at 200X200 pixels for example, but the images themselves are much bigger, sometimes full resolution. I once tested a major news outlet homepage and found a tiny logo image being displayed about 100 pixels wide, but the source file was a full resolution PNG that clocked in at almost 6MB. All for an image that should have been about 800 bytes!

    Your images should be scaled down to the largest size they’ll be displayed. With responsive design, this often means a larger size on a mobile device than on desktop. This is because responsive design will break a two or three column desktop layout down to one column and stack images and text on top of each other, making the displayed images larger.

    Assuming you’re going to use the same images for different screen sizes, figure out the largest size you’ll need to display and use that for the image source file. If you’re building a WordPress theme with thumbnail images, create a custom image size and use that. Do not just pull the full resolution image or one of the stock sizes if they’re not appropriate. If you’re inserting images into posts or pages, use the image size that’s right for the column width, don’t just use the full size and let the CSS scale it down.

    And when you’re done, test it with GTMetrix and make sure you’re not missing anything. Scaled images are one of the biggest performance issues I see with the sites I test, and I test a lot of them. And you see this all the time with high profile sites and sites I know somebody spent a lot of money on. A web page that should be 1.5 MB total is 10 or 15. That’s frustrating to users, makes a bad impression and is costing the website traffic, dwell time and search rankings.”

Wes Marlan

Wes has been webmastering up and down the front range of Colorado since 1997. He enjoys developing fast, clean, and smart layouts in WordPress for his clients.
https://www.lighthousewd.com

  • Prevent Image Hotlinking

    – “Don’t let other sites steal your bandwidth and resources by allowing them to hotlink to your WordPress website’s images and files! Believe it or not, this can contribute to overall server load and slow things down a bit (depending on the number of sites that are stealing your content).

    The best way to find out if other sites are hotlinking to your images is to use Google Images. Enter in the following line to instruct Google to search for your website’s images in other URLs:

    inurl:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

    If you see some images show up, then you’ll have your answer!<.p>

    Thankfully, there’s an easy fix for this that involves adding the following code to your WordPress website’s .htaccess file:

    /* Prevent image hotlinking */
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?facebook.com [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?instagram.com [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?twitter.com [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?other-website-urls-go-here.com [NC]
    RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|pdf|png|gif)$ – [F]

    The snippet of code above prevents websites other than yours, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from having access to your website’s images and files. The second-to-last line is a placeholder/template for adding additional domains you might want to whitelist for hotlinking. The final line of code specifies what file formats you want to apply the hotlink prevention rule to (you can tweak the filetypes as needed).

    Once you have this snippet of code in your .htaccess file, you shouldn’t have to worry about other sites leeching off your content while adding more stress to your server.”

Mike Sayenko

Sayenko Design was founded in 2009 to provide businesses of all sizes with user-driven web design and development solutions. I have a long background in visual arts with 10 years of design experience. I’m also passionate about performance, which comes from my history as a professional runner. I personally oversee all projects the firm takes on.
https://www.sayenkodesign.com/
  • Video Optimization If Self-Hosting Them – “Video optimization is important, as it can affect the performance and speed of your website. Here are some tips:

    • Video Formats – Convert to HTML5 Supported Formats. All modern browsers allow you to use MP4, with Chrome and Friefox supporting the newer format WebM. You want to deliver videos on your website with HTML5, which allows you to use both formats. Chrome and firefox will use WebM while other browsers will fallback to use MP4.
    • Video Compression – The smaller the file size, the better the performance. You can use online tools such as Hand Brake or Online Convert to convert and optimize your videos.
    • Removing Audio – If your video is being used as a background, or doesn’t need sound, by removing the sound you can decrease the file size.
    • Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) – Just like images and other website assets, you can use a CDN to deliver video to your visitors.
    • Defer Loading of Videos – If the video autoplays when a visitor reaches your web page, defer the loading until the page load has completed. This will allow the page to load faster.
    • Mobile Experience – If you have a larger video, then many visitors with slower connections won’t benefit from video. They’ll be waiting for the video to load, and this can cause a poor user experience. Hide the video for mobile and replace it with an image.”

Gene Armstrong

Gene is a web developer and founder of a digital design agency, Big Apple Media, specializing in SEO and small business WordPress website design.
http://www.bigapplemedia.com

  • Clean Up Revisions After Updates (WP)

    – “One of the most common mistakes I see people make, especially novice WordPress users, is not cleaning up revisions after updates have been made.

    I’ve seen some sites having as much as 20 or more revisions for each page. Having too many revisions can greatly increase the size of the database and hinder the performance of the website.

    Unlike other more technical techniques for speeding up the site, this one is easy to implement. You can limit how many revisions you want to keep by adding one line of code to your wp-config.php file.

    define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 5 );

    For example, this code will limit the number of revisions to 5 and automatically remove older revisions, which will reduce the size of your database and lead to better website performance.”

Eric Atallah

Web developer with just under 10 years of professional experience. I've built websites of all shapes and sizes.
https://onclickwebdesign.com

  • Sprite Maps

    – “In general, any way to reduce the number of round trips (http requests) to and from the server during page load is a good idea. Similar to JavaScript and CSS aggregation techniques, using a sprite map for collections of icons can help reduce server requests. Let’s say you need to render twenty small icons in various places on your web page. Instead of loading twenty small icons individually, use Illustrator, or your design tool of choice to lay all twenty icons next to one another on a single image file. Then you only have one image file to load. Now you have reduced twenty http requests down to only one. You can then use the CSS background rule to render each icon in the sprite map, individually, where you like on your page.

    Here is a pretty good blog post on creating sprite maps:

    https://fiorecommunications.com/2018/06/08/creating-and-using-css-sprites-to-improve-google-pagespeed-scores/”

Joe Gilbert

4 years running Milton Keynes' leading Web Design agency - Red Giraffe
https://red-giraffe.com

  • Build Your Own Theme with Elementor Pro

    – “When building a website in WordPress, themes and page builders often come jam-packed with features and awesomeness, each trying desperately to deliver better features than their rivals. However, do you need all these features, packed into both the page builder AND the theme?

    We build all of our websites using Elementor Pro, which not only comes packed with tonnes of amazing features, but also includes its own inbuilt theme builder. That lets us do away with needing a WordPress theme all-together, other than the “bare bones” Elementor theme which doesn’t contain any features at all, and so is unbelievably light-weight.

    The attached screenshot shows the GTMetrix comparison of a website we recently built. On the left the site is built using only Elementor Pro, and on the right is an identical clone of the site using Elementor Pro + Astra theme (in itself a very fast and lightweight theme!) You can see the differences in speed and performance are remarkable.”

Elementor Speed Comparison

Pawel Laczny

Entrepreneur, software engineer and business technology adviser. Full Stack Web Developer with over 14 years of commercial experience. Startups lover. Author and tech blogger.
https://www.beenet.london/

  • Reduce Redirects

    – “Redirects are instructions, which automatically take visitors of your website from one location to another. They are often necessary when you move or delete pages, and are the best way to eliminate issues with broken links.

    Having too many redirects creates additional requests, which can significantly decrease the speed of your website, especially on mobile devices. This means, it’s best to keep them to a minimum. Google says that site owners should try to eliminate them completely.

    There are two types of redirects: server- and client-side. Server-side use HTTP to direct the browser to the new location of the file. Client-side use HTML or JavaScript code in the user’s browser. If you can’t remove all redirects, make sure you use the server-side ones. Web browsers can handle them much quicker and can cache the correct location of the file.”

Simon Smith

Simon Smith is a Freelance Web Developer based in Bristol, UK. He operates Just Structure, which offers a full digital service for small and large businesses.
https://www.juststructure.co.uk

  • Hosting Plan Review

    – “Whenever I am asked to look at a slow performing website the first question I ask is “Who are you hosting with? “and “What hosting plan are you on?”

    Generally, I find that the website owner has signed up to an entry-level, low-cost plan and that plan is known as ‘Shared Hosting”. Just by upgrading the Shared Web Hosting plan, I normally see a real big difference in website performance. Though that does not say there isn’t other performance optimisation you can do as well.

    The reason hosting companies can offer such a cheap monthly hosting plan is they host many websites on one physical server. This server then has to share resources across 100’s and possibly 1000’s of other websites. So your site performance is affected by other websites’ usage, as they are pulling on the same resources, such as CPU and RAM from the server. Some hosting companies will even throttle usage on Shared Hosting, so if you get a spike in your traffic your website will run slow as it deals with the increase in resource usage. Unfortunately, it is a case of you get what you pay for with web hosting.

    It is worth speaking with your hosting company to see what upgrades you can get to your hosting plan, as some shared hosting companies can guarantee your website an amount of server resource for an additional monthly fee. If they are unhelpful, then it may be worth looking to move provider or look at other hosting options such as Cloud Hosting, VPS or Dedicated Hosting.

    In summary, it is really worth paying a bit extra to get your hosting optimised and performing as you expect. Your website is the first stop for your customers and a poor performing website is harmful to your business and negates all the other work you do to promote your business.”

Monica Pitts

Monica Pitts is the creative force and founder of MayeCreate Design. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture with an emphasis in Economics, Education and Plant Science from the University of Missouri. With a rare combination of design savvy and technological know-how, her passion for making friends and helping businesses grow gives Monica the skills she needs to make sure that each client, or friend, gets the attention and service he or she deserves.
https://mayecreate.com/

  • Use Speed Testing Tools

    – “Knowing how to make your website perform better is useless unless you know how to test if your performance updates are actually working. There are tons of great speed test tools out there. Google has two that I use pretty frequently. Page Speed Insights is easy to use and effective at telling you what is working and what is slowing down your site. If you’re a chrome user, Google Lighthouse is already built in! All you have to do is right click on an item and click inspect, once the google developer toolbar pops up just click on “Audits”. Then if that doesn’t satisfy your curiosity, Pingdom Tools is a third party testing site I use constantly to rate websites. It doesn’t give as detailed a report as Lighthouse, but it is still super useful for making sure your website is running as fast as it should.”

Roberto Severino

I'm a digital marketer who's passionate about SEO, web development, PPC, social media, and content marketing. In the last several years, I've worked with small to mid-sized businesses and e-commerce websites to boost ROI across the board. I also love chocolate, art, documentaries, and a good audiobook.
https://robertoseverino.com/

  • Install Async JavaScript Plugin

    – “There are dozens of ways you can speed up your WordPress site, many of which are fairly straightforward. But there’s one tool that I would highly recommend any business owner or marketer look into, and that’s Async JavaScript. Among the WordPress plugins you can find, it can be a little bit intimidating to use at first if you’re not too familiar with web development itself.

    However, as long as you follow these simple troubleshooting steps, you’ll be able to get it to work just fine for your business website.

    The first thing you need to do is to install the plugin and enable it, and then on the front page of the admin panel, you will be able to see the plugin in action. It gives you a clear overview of what’s happening and what has been optimized. For example, you will see a status telling you whether it’s enabled or not.

    Async JavaScript Status

    There are also several other options available. I will go through the main ones that I always use and generate the most results. After all, the 80/20 rule applies to so much about digital marketing and web development. You only need a fraction of these tools to have the most impact on your site speed.

    After you’ve gone through the installation process, hover over “Settings” on the left-hand corner of the screen, and click on Async JavaScript. Now, you will be able to make the changes that are going to speed up your site dramatically. This is getting good, but bare with me now!

    Now on this screen, what you want to do is click on the checkboxes for the options you want to be enabled. When I work with this plugin, I always click on the very first setting to enable the plugin itself. If you run an e-commerce site, you should also enable the plugin for logged in users and cart and checkout pages. However, be sure to test those pages out to be sure nothing breaks. That’s going to be a common thing you need to do every time you decide to play around with these settings.

    Async JavaScript Checkboxes

    Scroll down to the Async JavaScript Method section and click on the radio button beside Async.

    Async JavaScript Method

    As for the JQuery part of the page, you have to be extra careful with this option. Most of the time, it’s best to enable the Defer option. I’ve tried Async here, and it usually has resulted in a lot of issues for me on the sites I’ve worked on. If you’re still having problems, you can also exclude JQuery entirely. I ran into a situation where deferring JQuery completely broke a custom menu I had to make for a client, so depending on the kind of work you need done on your website, I would double check to make sure everything’s working just fine.

    Async JavaScript jQuery

    Lastly, scroll down to the bottom. You’re going to also need to have the Autoptimize plugin installed, so go back and do that if you haven’t already. It’s also another incredible WordPress plugin I use all the time to make my clients’ sites incredibly fast, but I want to stick with how to get this plugin up and running specifically.

    Autoptimize Plugin

    Click on the checkbox next to “Enable Autoptimize Support” and then click on Async for the method. This is why a lot of the time, you want to make sure that you have JQuery deferred already for this plugin. The Autoptimize plugin usually already takes care of it for you.

    And there you have it! After you’ve gone through these steps, test out your site’s speed.

    Combined with other popular WordPress plugins, your site should load much faster. If you’re having any technical problems, be sure to sort those out. Now you can really speed up your WordPress site’s JavaScript code without having to touch a single line of code yourself. It took several steps, but as you can see, it’s not that hard at all!”

Travis Smith

Owner of Hop Studios, a Webby-winning boutique web design and development agency.
https://www.hopstudios.com/

  • Be Consistent (& Accurate) With Your URL

    – “If your site is at https://www.hopstudios.com, then make sure you ALWAYS use https, and you ALWAYS use www, in every place you link to your site, publish it, mention it, print it, etc. If someone tries to visit http://hopstudios.com/, that’s going to require at least one, possibly two redirects before they arrive at the final proper request to load your home page, and that can add a delay of several seconds to the initial page load. The current best practice is to have https as the default, and the non-www as the canonical URL, but regardless of what you choose, just make sure that you are consistent.”

Ty Fujimura

I’m the founder of Cantilever, a web design and development studio. We help marketing people who are frustrated because they are spending a lot of time and money on their websites and aren’t getting the results they need. Clients include IBM, Esquire Magazine, and NYU.
https://cantilever.co?utm_source=wste&utm_medium=social

  • Use Cloudflare

    – “No tool can save a website that isn’t built properly, so start there. Minimize the amount of code on the site to just what you need. Reduce the number of third-party libraries involved. Monitor any database queries.

    After that… use Cloudflare!

    Cloudflare acts as a middle layer between your visitors and your site. It’s like a waiter. Instead of your visitors going all the way to the kitchen to ask for what they need or to pick up their food, they ask Cloudflare.

    Cloudflare

    The problem this solves is that your website’s server is _busy_. Every time a user visits, it has to prepare all the right files and send it over the internet all the way to the user’s location. This process is time-intensive and repetitive. Cloudflare stores the results of prior requests so that the next time somebody requests a certain file, Cloudflare can serve it to the visitor without even asking your web server.

    What’s more, Cloudflare has servers in major population centers around the world, so your files are usually served from a location closer to the visitor than your web server is. This minimizes the time it takes to communicate between the visitor and your site.

    These are all the traditional roles of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) – but Cloudflare is broader and delivers more features. With a traditional CDN, you need to change your website so that it links to the CDN’s version of a file rather than the one on your web server. Cloudflare sits transparently in _front_ of your website, so visitors can request files directly from their physical location and Cloudflare will intercept the hit without anyone noticing. Cloudflare requires a more all-in setup process and commitment to using their infrastructure for most of your content, so it can be overkill for some cases where a more basic CDN would suffice. You should evaluate both options in the context of your site’s particular performance profile.

    Cloudflare operates by taking full control of your “DNS” – the primary settings that govern where visitors are sent when they request the site. It takes just a few minutes to set up, and your site will be instantly faster. DNS setup is particular and can take time to reverse, so it’s a commitment, but once set up properly, you’ll hardly notice that Cloudflare is involved in serving your site.

    What’s more, this level of control means that Cloudflare can add additional features like making files smaller, taking advantage of the latest content delivery methods, and making your site significantly more secure.

    And it does all of this for the grand total of $0. Their free product covers the basic features I just outlined, and you can pay for more advanced features as you need.

    At Cantilever, we implement Cloudflare for virtually every project we do – usually the free version, but sometimes with their premium features too. We have no affiliation with them, we’re just grateful for their product and love to spread the word.”

Vernette John-Joiles

Vernette John-Joiles is the owner of 7D Web Design, an experienced website designer/developer, workshop and seminar facilitator and online branding consultant. She is the winner of the 2018 BeMogul Award for Entrepreneurship and a Women on the Web (WOW) contributor partner.
http://www.7dwebdesign.co.uk

  • Deactivate/Remove Unused Plugins in WordPress

    – “If you have a WordPress website that is currently online, then I extend the secret ‘WordPress club’ handshake to you! That’s just my way of letting you know that, like me, you have become part of a global tribe of WordPress website owners who are regularly on the hunt for tips and tricks about WordPress developments, and how to keep WordPress websites functioning well. WordPress has become so popular as an open-source platform that it is used for approximately over a third of all live websites on the internet. Your tribe is huge!

    I have a WordPress website for my business, and have also built and manage many of them on behalf of my clients. So, I can say that I know WordPress quite well, and I also have to keep my eyes open about the different things that can be done to make the most of WordPress.

    So, as you read this, I am going to assume that you are aware that plugins are a must to expand WordPress website functionality, so that we can do some sophisticated tasks online, but without having to do the heavy-weight coding work. Plugins are vital for any WordPress website, and depending on how you see things, they can be the lifeblood of your website or the bane of your online existence.

    Let me explain that last statement.

    Yes, when it comes to the plugins that are on offer to extend the functionality of WordPress websites, there are a ‘gazillion’ free ones available to install. This is great news if you are trying to build an online presence and you either want to try a few things out before committing long term, or if you don’t want to invest any money initially. Alternatively, there are premium plugins that can be bought from developers from many online stores and sources if you are seeking to build a website with more elaborate requirements. Lifeblood.

    On the other hand, because there are so many plugin options to choose from, it can mean that you end up with ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ which can cause unnecessary headaches. Sometimes, there are plugins that don’t like each other and cause conflicts… Or can drain on other resources present that your website might need… Or can have bugs and you have to spend time working to get the issue fixed, which is very time consuming. Bane.

    If you are familiar with WordPress, I’m going to assume that you would have most likely visited the WordPress repository (or catalogue) from the admin dashboard and installed your ‘go-to’ plugins; the ones that are tried and tested, and are known to be useful and reliable. If you’re new to WordPress and unfamiliar with the ‘go-to’ plugins, it’s most likely that you’ll install a few of them, activate them and fiddle around to see how they work and if they help with your website build. I used to do this a lot when I first started out with WordPress.

    So, when it comes to looking at aspects that affect the loading speed of our websites, the issue that can arise is that installing multiple plugins can create a loading delay. A good analogy would be to think of loading up a car with lots of stuff, which would make the car heavier and cause the car engine to have to use more petrol and power to get up a hill. When a website loads, the server that it’s hosted on also has to deliver all the plugins that may be installed or present in the website folder. Even if there are plugins that are not activated or in use on the website, having it installed can be a bit draining for the website server, and can increase the loading time for our websites.

    Tips for Moving Forward

    So, here are some suggestions about how you can do some work with your website plugins as part of ongoing work to improve your website loading speed, which can all be done once logged in to your WordPress dashboard. Please be sure to make a back-up of your website before you start.

    • Check if your current active plugins need updating. If you are seeing a message under the plugin listing informing that an update is available, it’s normally a good idea to go ahead and update the plugin. The update will most likely include improvements which will be helpful for your website.
    • Review the plugins that are currently active on your website. Check the plugin settings to make sure that it does what you ‘need’ it to do. Sometimes there are functions within a plugin that will be ‘auto-activated’ but might be unnecessary for your website and also affect the loading speed. So, give your active plugins a once over to make sure that all is as it should be.
    • Review the plugins that are currently installed but inactive. If they are not serving a purpose for your website, delete them. It is better to have a ‘lean machine’ of a website. If some of the inactive plugins are premium ones, be sure to have a backup stored elsewhere before you delete from your website.
    • When it comes to selecting the plugins to use for your website, be sure to take some time to read the reviews. You can check the reviews within the WordPress dashboard itself, from https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or from other sources online. This will give you an idea about the reliability of the plugin you are considering and will also save you time by not having to upload multiple plugins.”

Robin Clapp

Robin Clapp, owner of Web Design by Robin is a Certified Joomla Website Designer! She designs custom responsive websites, along with content management instructions, maintenance & security.
https://www.webdesignbyrobin.com

  • Invest in a Custom Designed Template

    – “If you want to accelerate the performance of your website, you should use a custom-designed template not a purchased template that is customized. There is a big difference. Let me explain.

    A purchased template is a product. For this reason, it must appeal to many. This type of template has many variations: various colors, styles, layouts, tools, features, etc. The developers have built the code necessary to switch between these variations into the template.

    A custom-designed website already includes your website content, style, layout, tools, etc. For example, with a custom-designed template, there is no need for code rendering color variations, such as blue verses pink or green or red. You do not have to make these decisions with a custom-designed template because the design is already set in stone. As a result, the webpage will be faster.

    If you are hiring a website design company, ask the question “Are you creating a custom template for my website or are you purchasing a template and customizing it?” Don’t make assumptions: ask! The answer will help you choose wisely because there really will be a difference in website speed.”

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is an online marketing expert with 15 years of experience with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Google Ads. As founder of Springhill Marketing, he helped various companies drive-up their website traffic via increased sales and enquiries. His company is a Google Partner, specialising in SEO and Google Ads.
https://springhillmarketing.co.uk/
  • Minimise all HTTP requests – “Around 80 per cent of a site’s load time is due to the loading of:

    • Images
    • Style sheets
    • Scripts
    • Other page components

    Each of these elements can require a separate HTTP request, prolonging the page’s loading time.

    You can reduce the number of such requests through your browser. Use Google Chrome’s developer tool to see how many HTTP requests your site is making:

    • Right click on the page
    • Click ‘Inspect’
    • Click ‘Network’ tab (If you can’t see the tab, consider expanding Developer Tools sidebar)
    • The ‘Name’, ‘Size’, and ‘Time’ shows the corresponding details of the files on the page
    • Pay particular attention to the ‘Time’ since this shows how long it takes to load a file
    • Down on the left corner is the number of total requests your site makes

    You can now check and remove the files not necessary for your site’s loading. Otherwise, you may combine some of the files instead.”

Felix Michael

I work as Technical Director at Web Choice UK. We have been helping clients in the UK and abroad over the past 10 years, building websites and web applications, as well as digital marketing. We have a proven track record of bringing great ideas to life in the most professional and friendly manner. Our mantra at Web Choice is
https://www.webdesignchoice.co.uk/

  • Lazy Loading Technique

    – “One of the techniques we use here at Web Choice for speeding up websites is called Lazy Loading Technique also called Asynchronous Loading which will help images to load only when pages are scrolled down.

    Jeremy Wagner who contributes to Webfundamentals says this:

    The portion of images and video in the typical payload of a website can be significant. Unfortunately, project stakeholders may be unwilling to cut any media resources from their existing applications. Such impasses are frustrating, especially when all parties involved want to improve site performance, but can’t agree on how to get there. Fortunately, lazy loading is a solution that lowers initial page payload and load time, but doesn’t skimp on content.

    Read his full article here

    If you are using WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal- most of the SEO plugins and extensions may already have Lazyloading integrated into it. If you are using a bespoke solution, your web developer can use scripts like this.”

Chris Williams

Award-winning website designer / developer in Wolverhampton, specialising in lead generation online.
https://williamsgraphics.co.uk

  • Write Smarter CSS/SCSS/SASS

    – “Lots of designers / developers talk about compressing CSS files into one document (and for good reason, that helps with page load), but very few people talk about being smarter with how those files are written BEFORE they are combined together

    Too often do we see hyper-specific CSS sheets that are 8 selectors deep before their property is rendered, or the shameful, but sometimes necessary evil “!important” tag contained within your stylesheets. As website professionals, we can’t just rely on compression algorithms and hope that processors and internet speeds keep increasing. We need a fundamental shift in how CSS is written.

    So what am I actually talking about?

    When developers are writing the CSS for a site, many will be using a framework which contains some ground-rules to get the site looking good right away. The problem with these is that they are often rammed full of very specific selectors which can make it difficult to change how some elements look. Or worse still, they use 1 variable which is used in hundreds of places when you might only want to change a colour/size in one location.

    This can lead to creating classes like: header > nav > .top-nav > ul > li > a > span.primary{ your classes }

    What we really want to do is think about how we can potentially reduce those very specific selectors down to something more manageable, as well as strip away the fluff we don’t need. It’s not too hard to see a world where, with a bit more planning and mindfulness of how we write code, that we see something like: nav > ul > span.primary{ your classes }

    CSS preprocessors are partly to blame for this as we often see neatly written code within a SCSS document, but rarely bother to check the final output to see if it makes any sense at all, often leaving hundreds of unused classes that have been generated by the final output.

    How would this help your page load speed?

    Being more careful about how CSS selectors are used within preprocessors (and just standard CSS code, too) will help in two ways:

    1. The File Size Will Be Smaller – the first and most obvious point is that we’re generating less classes, less code, and thus a smaller document. It may only save you a few KBs on a big project, maybe just a few bytes on a smaller one, but these add up over time in a web project to create a better, faster user experience.
    2. Faster Render Time – not only will your documents load faster (see above) but individual browsers will also be able to render your pages faster. Without having to go down hundreds of selectors and find the most !important !important!!! class, computers, phones and browsers will have an easier time painting your site.
    3. Manageability – ok so this isn’t load-speed related specifically, but a smaller code base makes it more manageable, easier to review and edit, and ultimately nicer to work with.

    Concluding, our final goal is to get our sites looking exactly as we want, loading as quickly as possible, and providing a good user experience. Just shaving off a few selectors within code can make all the difference in the world.”

Chris Scheler

Chris is a Senior Front-End Developer at Celerity and has been professionally working on websites and other design media since 1999.
http://www.csdigitaldesign.com

  • Avoid Using an Image When You Can

    – “Avoid using an image as a decorative element if you can. Before using an image, be sure to consider whether or not you can accomplish the same result with CSS. In most cases, with CSS, the file size will be smaller and visually, the element will appear to be more crisp on screen. One example would be styling buttons, backgrounds and shapes with CSS instead of using an image.

    Of course, there are many situations where using an image is appropriate, so use your best judgment to accomplish the desired result. Also, make sure you keep accessibility in mind when using images.”

Dustin Nay

Dustin is the founder of Genius Power & Magic, a boutique web agency based in Sandy, Utah.
https://withgpm.com

  • Optimize DNS Options

    – “An often overlooked aspect of site speed optimization is your Domain Name Settings (DNS). If you already own a domain (and maybe a website too), you may know where and how to do this. If not, I’ll try to give some instruction on how.

    First: what are you telling me to do? There are two main types of DNS records used to tell a site visitor’s browser where to go to find your website. 1) the A record. An A record identifies the IP address for the server which hosts your website, and 2) a CNAME identifies a domain to lookup, which will take the site visitor to a URL, which will then redirect their request to your website.

    Which one is faster? Well, the A record of course. There are legitimate reasons to use a CNAME, such as on shared hosting where the hosting company might move your site to a different server without telling you, and then your website would be down until you updated your A record. But for the most part, that is a rare occurrence: it has only happened to me once in 10 years, and my team corrected the problem within minutes.

    Generally, using an A record will be the best option as it speeds up your load time. Sometimes this only saves a few milliseconds, but as you’ll find while optimizing your website, every single millisecond adds up quickly.

    The most common way people do this is by using a CNAME for the “www” version of their website, and then they set the “www” version of the site to be the live version. They then redirect all other variations to that “www” version. The problem here is that even if a site visitor goes to their naked domain (e.g. mydomain.com, not www.mydomain.com), the site visitor is then redirected to “www” which goes through a CNAME and then finally redirects them back to the website. This all happens in milliseconds and you don’t see it happening generally, but understanding what is going on is important to speeding things up.

    All you need to do to change this is to delete your CNAME for “www” and replace it with an A record directing people straight to your server’s IP address, rather than to a redirect (e.g. myhostingplan.hostingcompany.com, etc.).

    I share this tip with this word of caution: if your hosting plan is shared hosting (which includes most managed WordPress hosting providers such as WP Engine), then you’ll want to keep a close eye on this, as they sometimes move servers around without telling you. The best way to do stay on top of this is to use a monitoring service such as Uptime Robot, which will send you a text message if your website goes down.

    If you are just building your website for the first time and have not already built a lot of backlinks to your website, I recommend starting with the naked domain, not “www” sub-domain. This is sometimes counter-intuitive, as a lot of customers are so used to that, they think they still need that prefix in order to access a website (just make sure it redirects properly!). Not having that extra sub-domain simplifies things for you.”

Joanne Somerville

As Founder and Managing Partner of Design Eclectic, a UK-based creative agency, Joanne has been responsible for the delivery of hundreds of successful websites over the last 18 years for a diverse range of clients ranging from sole traders to SMEs to multinational organisations. She has a particular interest in website user optimisation.
http://www.designeclectic.com

  • Configure your Expires Headers

    – “You’ve probably heard about browser cache, so in other words when a user visits your website, the website files are stored on their computer so that your website loads faster for them on their next visit. What is not so well known is that the file header contains an expiration date that controls how long those files are stored on their computer.

    Constantly downloading the same files when they are unchanged wastes precious load time, so Expires Headers not only reduce the load of downloads from the server, but also the number of HTTP requests for the server.

    Expires Headers obviously won’t improve page speed for first time visitors, who will have to download all the files for the first time, but using them will definitely help decrease load times for returning visitors.

    Expires headers can be set for specific files or even file types, so when the browser comes to the website, it can see the last time those were downloaded. If this was recent then it will display them from the cache. If the visitor hasn’t visited the site for a while, it will download the newest version from the web server.

    Usually set to 24 hours by default, you can set the expiration date so that it doesn’t impact your server and page load time. The idea is to set late expiry times for items that don’t change on your website (logo, colours etc) and set short expiry times for things that change regularly.”

Jessie Bacani

A full-stack developer with more than a decade of web development experience. 80% on maintenance, 20% on development.
http://jessie.bacani.xyz/

  • Remove Redundant Code (particularly in the back-end)

    – “This tip mostly applies to multi-language web applications that share back-end code. It could be done as one single package with each language or country as one module in the package. Each module could have the same code with the other modules like product listings and user session handling.

    Let’s look at the products. Each localisation, a country or language, might have a different set of product attributes. Say in the US, a product could be using UPC (Universal Product Code) code as unique code and in Japan, it could be using JAN (Japanese Article Numbering). But both countries use the same core set of attributes: product name, product description, dimensions, weight, and price. Instead of creating two separate back-end codes for both US and Japan localisations, we can create a common code for the two, say base products. The base products could have its own module. Each localisation will then inherit the base product module and add their own unique set of product attributes.

    Removing Redundant Code

    What happens now is there is the base products module, the US products module, the Japan products module. Modifying the base products module is done only once, no matter how many localisations are there. Redundant code is now lessened. If you’re using compiled languages like C#, you’ll appreciate this improvement more. Each module is a DLL file loaded in memory. As the site gets bigger, you’ll notice a hit in performance or page loading speed. Removing redundant code that way is very helpful.”

Ashley N Cameron

Ashley is a freelance designer & front-end developer specializing in Branding, Package Design, Website Design & Development. She has over 9 years of experience building websites using WordPress.
https://ashley-cameron.com

  • Conditionally Enqueue Styles and Scripts

    – “In addition to writing code that is clean and efficient, one way to optimize and speed up your WordPress website is by conditionally serving scripts and styles only when needed on a page. WordPress uses wp_enqueue_style and wp_enqueue_script to load your styles and scripts of your website for the best performance.

    Let’s look at an example of how to enqueue scripts and styles conditionally in your WordPress theme functions.php. Say you have a Fancybox pop-up that only needs to be on a specific template page.

    The following code shows how to write an enqueue function in your functions.php to load global scripts & styles (bootstrap & theme css) with a condition for enqueuing Fancybox only on the Gallery template page.

    https://github.com/ashleycam3ron/functions/blob/master/wp_enqueue_scripts2.php

    WordPress offers an extensive list of conditional tags to load styles and scripts anywhere – pages, posts, categories, archives, etc and as specific to the ID number. Here’s the full list of tags:

    https://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags”

Suzanne Bird-Harris

Suzanne builds, supports and maintains WordPress websites for small businesses like yours so you can increase your reach, grow your business, and as a result, your income and impact on those you serve. In short, she makes the web work for you and your business.
https://websitesinwp.com

  • Serve Your Media from Amazon S3

    – “With our appetite for video increasing all the time, and our smartphones taking higher and higher resolution pictures, the media we use on our websites is taking up more and more space. Worse, it uses much more bandwidth for display and streaming, and that can bring site speed to a screeching halt with even the most minimal traffic.

    The best way to avoid slowing down your site is to serve your media from servers built for media storage and streaming. I use and recommend an Amazon S3 account. You can’t beat the pricing, and serving images, video, PDFs and other media from your S3 account relieves your hosting account of this heavy load.

    Create your account and then upload your media files to it. Use the URL generated for each item in your posts and pages, video plugins — pretty much anywhere you’d use a media URL.

    If you want to get really efficient, and your site is a WordPress site, use a plugin like WP Media Offload to store your entire media library in your S3 account — automatically. The beauty of plugins like this is that your media library looks and functions the same as before, while the plugin actually moves and serves everything to and from your S3 account in the background.

    Another benefit to using Amazon S3 is the increased security options available there. So all those PDFs and videos your membership site offers? They can be secured such that only your members can access them — even if a member shares the URL with a non-member. Sweet!”

Mary Putnam

Wrangling programmers for 20 years and having fun evolving with Internet based technologies.
https://www.designyoursite.net

  • Reduce Impact of Javascript on the Critical Rendering Path

    – “With speed of web page delivery becoming more and more critical, you must pursue all options to minimize the impact of technologies used to display pages. Javascript is one of these technologies.

    Using Google Speed test you can parse your webpage to review issues with JavaScript. For now, let’s focus on critical request chain and render blocking issues. Once you identify Javascript issues, you first want to define your critical assets and load them as early as possible. Then decide to eliminate, defer or load async non critical assets.

    Critical Request Chains

    This has to do with how many directories the code must traverse to fetch and execute. This is an easy solution to implement. Bear in mind you have to update the directories and all pages that point to the code.

    EX:
    /scripts/videos/videoscript.js
    Vs
    /scripts/videoscript.js [Better]

    Render Blocking Scripts

    When Javascrpt is used, it actually blocks the parsing of the HTML document. The main thing you have to understand is that during script fetch and script execution; nothing else is being handled. Even when you have minified the code, it still has to be fetched and executed.

    Eliminate Scripts that are not Necessary

    Many developers load Javascript libraries which contain code not used for the current web page. The entire library will be parsed and compiled. Of course this wastes precious milliseconds of time to get your site to the First Contentful Paint.

    In order to enhance page speed loading you will want to groom your scripts to eliminate calls that are not used on the page. Easy Peasy…

    Run the Javascript using the Async Attribute

    Using the async attribute is super helpful if you are using externally located script files. The result will allow html code to continue parsing, while the script is being fetched. The parsing will stop again as the script executes. Simply add the async attribute in your code.

    Run the Javascript using the Defer Attribute

    Using the defer attribute gives you the ability to continue parsing during script fetch, just like async. Additionally, it allows you to defer script execution once the HTML is fully parsed. When you defer parsing you want to be sure that the asset is not critical to a function of the webpage. Keep in mind not all browsers utilize the defer attribute.

    When to use these attributes depends heavily on how they are used in the HTML code. One strategy is to place all Javascript at the end of your document. This will essentially defer parsing of the Javascript to the last step. This can be problematic when critical assets are needed for content display. Evaluate the wisdom of pulling critical assets and running them inline as needed.”

Linda Lovero-Waterhouse

Linda helps small businesses gain clarity, take action and increase revenue with her digital marketing solutions. Her current focus is teaching techniques on using LinkedIn to generate a stream of leads. Linda fits the pieces of digital marketing together like a puzzle to create an easy-to- understand, easy-to- implement plan.
http://lindawaterhouse.com

  • Host Videos Externally

    – “All the gurus are saying videos are really hot now and that everyone should be producing more videos. What they don’t tell you is, where should you be putting these videos so that users aren’t getting frustrated watching a frozen scene or a rotating circle?

    You might think that it’s easiest to have everything on your website. After all, that’s where you already store your ebooks, whitepapers, cheat sheets and images, right? But although your website is a great place to store these resources, for most of us, we should take the extra step of uploading our videos to an external hosting platform and then embed them on our site.

    There are a number of reasons why we should do this. First, most of us have our sites hosted on a shared server. Shared servers are cost effective, but they have limits on the size of our uploaded files, limits on the amount that we can store on the server, and a limited amount of bandwidth. If multiple people were watching your video at the same time, chances are they would be watching a lot of frozen video and would probably go to a different site.

    So what’s the alternative? Hosting the video on an external platform such as YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia and then embedding it on your site.

    YouTube:

    The biggest benefit to using YouTube is that it is the second largest search engine after Google (and owned by Google). This means that your video has a higher chance of being found so you can reach a larger audience. It might even go viral!

    Vimeo:

    Vimeo is generally considered to be an “upgraded” version of YouTube. Its video player has a nicer look than YouTube’s and the Pro version has some privacy settings to make it nearly impossible for someone to download your video and then re-distribute it as their own. It has a smaller audience than YouTube, so your video will not have as broad a reach.

    Wistia:

    Many people are discovering that Wistia is great to use if your main focus is marketing. People don’t usually go to Wistia to search for content, so it’s not as easy for people to stumble across your videos. However, it has excellent analytics so you know exactly how users are interacting with your videos. It also has a customizable player so it will look less generic and can match your branding. The free version allows only three videos, however.

    User experience is greatly enhanced by fast websites and one of the best ways to improve your site’s delivery of video is by hosting them externally. Define your priorities for your videos and pick the platform that can help you accomplish your goals.”

Praveen Kumar

Once upon a time, I was consistently ranked as top 0.01% developers in Stack Overflow. I am also a Pluralsight Mentor, Thinkful Mentor and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in the field of Visual Studio & Development Tools.
https://praveen.science/

  • Use SPA to Improve User Experience

    – “Single Page Applications are becoming more popular now-a-days. There are so many good reasons why a SPA will be better than MPA in terms of making the overall user experience much faster and seamless. SPA is an evolution of the MPA+AJAX design pattern, where the only core page is generated on the server and all UI is rendered by browser based JavaScript code.

    With the advent of AJAX, web apps started to refresh only the relevant portion of the page when a user submits new data or requests. For example, if a user selects county = Cornwall, then the web app can immediately use an AJAX request to validate whether the entered post code is valid for the county of Cornwall. However, once the user submits a form typically the web app takes the user to a new HTML page.

    – Some or most of the data validation activity can occur on the client.
    – The MVC implementation is on the server.

    SPA are quick, as the majority of the resources they use (HTML / CSS / JavaScript) are only loaded once throughout the user session. The only thing that is transferred and changed after user activities are just data in the form of JSON.

    So this improves user experience because the view is already loaded locally and the data will be asynchronously loaded in the background from the server. Even during development, you can reuse the same back-end API for web application as well as native mobile applications that rely on API based flow.

    Another advantage is leveraging the use of Offline & Caching. SPAs are more efficient in caching any local storage. It works as follows: a web application sends just a single reflex, collects the required data, and can function even offline at that point.”

Chris McMahon

WordPress Designer and Developer with over 20 years' experience helping small businesses and non-profits.
http://hellomynameischris.com/

  • Strip the Cruft from your Theme

    – “One of the strengths of WordPress is the robust open source support that provides so many free plugins and themes for anyone to use. It can also be one of it’s weaknesses.

    Most popular themes (free & commercial) become popular because they can do so much for so many. That comes with the cost of having a theme that can do way more than you need it to.

    When I start a new project I always begin with an extremely stripped down theme that is nothing but the very basic template files and a few lines of code to remove sections of WordPress my clients very rarely need. I can then begin to add only the functionality their site will need, usually limiting it to only the pages or sections that will need it.

    This greatly improves load time of the user facing pages, as well as keeping the admin section loading fast and without anything the client wouldn’t need.

    I also find that I can build a site to the client’s specifications faster from this blank slate than by modifying a theme they have chosen, but want to add functionality or design changes to, saving them time and money.”

Lawrence Harmer

I’ve over 20 years' experience in SEO, website design and web hosting. Building speedy websites that are optimised for users and search engines is what I do - day in, day out.
https://solve.co.uk/

  • Choose Your Web Host Wisely

    – “The web host you use greatly affects the load speed of your site. Each host houses your site on a server and the quality of that server dictates how fast your site loads. WordPress is the leading website development platform due to its high level of customisation and functionality. But all the bells and whistles require storage space, so basic hosting won’t cut it. You need a server that’s optimised and has enough space for the platform you’re using.

    Think of a server like a shop, the bigger your shop is, the more people you can get through the doors to make a purchase. If your shop (or server) is too small, it gets crowded, people queue up, and they have to wait to buy.

    And people don’t like to wait. In fact, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. A faster site means a better user experience, which in turn, boosts your ranking too. Keep your traffic moving and people buying with an efficient server.

    You also need a server that’s local to your users to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. If your business is European based, you need an EU server so your site loads quickly and you’re GDPR-compliant. If you have international traffic, you may need to consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to put your information closer to your customers and therefore, optimise your site speed.

    So choosing the right web host is an important step in improving your site speed. What Say The Experts published an article recently outlining some possible hosts, their pros and cons. Also, if you’re a responsible business that’s trying to do your bit for sustainability, improving your site speed doesn’t have to be at the expense of the environment. Some web hosts offer eco-friendly web hosting, where servers are powered by 100% renewable energy.

    The choice is yours, but choose wisely!”

Filed Under: Web Design/Development

48 Professional Editors Explain How to Edit Videos Faster

by Chris Herbert | Last Updated May 27, 2021

how to edit videos faster

Ever get that feeling that your video edits take FOREVER. That you must be the slowest editor alive…that every deadline you’re set feels like doomsday?

While there’s no getting away from the fact that video editing is generally quite a brutal, time intensive process (just ask anyone that does it for a living – we salute you!), there ARE things that you can do to become more efficient and win back valuable time on each project. How do I know? Well it’s not because I’m some sort of super, duper video editor (I can’t edit for s***) or because I know of some magic The Best Professional Video Editing Software? (We Asked 116 Editors). It’s because we recently spoke to almost 50 professional editors and asked them to share their secrets on “how to edit video faster?” This article is the result of those insightful conversations.

So whether you’re a professional editor yourself or you just enjoy putting together your own videos for fun, check out these tips, put them into practice and start winning back some of your time today!

Looking for Fast(er) Editing Techniques + Tips: Here’s 48 of Them

how to make video editing faster

“How to make video editing faster?” A question that just about everyone that edits video regularly has had at some point. It’s a question that doesn’t have just a single answer, and not every answer will work for everyone. The following list is a great place to start. 48 time-saving tips from some really amazing professional editors. Have a read and then start implementing the ones that pique your interest. Before you know it, you’ll be well on your way to saving a bucket-load of that most precious of resources (Netflix time, obviously!).

  1. Use music as a tool when picking selects
  2. Better file organization – helps with finding what you need quicker
  3. Keyboard shortcut mapping/memorization
  4. Make multiple versions of timelines and projects
  5. Color label your clips
  6. Watch all of your footage before importing
  7. Learn how to create multi-camera sequences
  8. Subclipping – it’s like magic!
  9. Do the edit mentally first
  10. Use keyframeable audio “rubber bands”
  11. Make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve
  12. Find your story
  13. Categorise your select sequences
  14. Use a proxy workflow
  15. Use the extend clip tool
  16. Make a radio cut first
  17. Organization, organization, organization
  18. Always come prepared
  19. Categorise all of your footage BEFORE you start
  20. Use the Match Frame feature
  21. Have patience
  22. Use the Hover Scrub feature
  23. Use workspaces
  24. Rematch all of the footage near the end of an edit
  25. Don’t work too hard
  26. Talk to other editors + crew/staff
  27. Create audio palettes by sub-clipping music and sfx tracks
  28. Split edit (AKA J Cuts & L Cuts)
  29. Create an assembly cut
  30. Sleep on it
  31. Make sure to think about backup and storage solutions
  32. Walk away (even if just for 10 minutes)
  33. Edit from sequences, not clips
  34. Story blocking
  35. Find your own, unique edit groove
  36. Create a soundbed and use it to guide your story
  37. Archive and library clips
  38. Skin tone as a basic step for color correction
  39. Pay attention to speech rhythm and mannerisms
  40. Map out your project on a whiteboard
  41. Use markers
  42. Use b-roll effectively
  43. Pull your selects the right way
  44. Sound syncing
  45. Start with sound first
  46. Nested sequence
  47. Name file by year-month-day
  48. Make sure you label your clips

Other Articles You May Find Useful:

  • The Best Professional Video Editing Software? (We Asked 116 Editors)
  • All Video Editing Resources

What the Experts Said: Time-Saving Tips Explained

We asked each of the editors we spoke to share a single tip/trick/hack that they’ve personally used to become more time efficient with their video editing. Everything that was shared with us is shown below. If you’ve become a bit obsessed with how to edit videos faster, this will be priceless! I mean these folks combined have hundreds of years of editing experience, and must have edited like a bazillion hours of video. So what are you waiting for…go learn something.

Use the filters below to skip to a specific tip.

{"filter_mode":"masonry"}
  • All
  • Always Come Prepared
  • Archive and Library Clips
  • Backup & Storage Solutions
  • Better File Organization
  • Categorise All Your Footage
  • Categorise Your Select Sequences
  • Color Label Your Clips
  • Create a Radio Cut
  • Create a Soundbed & Use It to Guide Your Story
  • Create an Assembly Cut
  • Create Audio Palettes by Sub-clipping Music and SFX Tracks
  • Do The Edit Mentally First
  • Don’t Work Too Hard
  • Edit from Sequences Not Clips
  • Extend Clip Tool
  • Find Your Edit Groove
  • Find Your Story
  • Have Patience
  • Hover Scrub
  • Keyboard Shortcut Mapping
  • Keyframable Audio "Rubber Bands"
  • Learn Multi-Camera Sequences
  • Map Out Project on a Whiteboard
  • Match Frame
  • Multiple Versions of Timelines & Projects
  • Music as a Tool When Picking Selects
  • Name Files By Year-Month-Day
  • Nested Sequences
  • Organization
  • Proxy Workflows
  • Pulling Selects
  • Rewatch All Footage Near the End
  • Skin Tone as a Basic Step for Colour Correction
  • Sleep On It
  • Sound Syncing
  • Speech Rhythm and Mannerisms
  • Split Edit AKA J Cut & L Cuts
  • Start with Sound First
  • Story Blocking
  • Subclipping - It's Like Magic
  • Talk to Other Editors
  • The Importance of Clip Labeling
  • Understand What You're Trying to Achieve
  • Use B-roll Effectively
  • Use Markers
  • Use Workspaces
  • Walk Away
  • Watch All Footage Before Importing

Chris Kronus

Passionate about narrative story-telling, Chris has edited for organizations and brands including Amazon, National Geographic, Vice, and CBS. He has been recognized by the Emmys for his work on SHOWTIME and NBC. Originally from California, he now resides in Brooklyn.
www.chriskronus.com

  • Utilizing Music as a Tool When Picking Selects

    – “In editing, it’s important to be as efficient as possible, while still staying true to the feel of the project.

    When editing a montage, for example, I start with the common first step of analyzing the footage and pulling selects of what I think will make the final cut. What I’ve found really helps this process is simultaneously playing the project’s score in the background while I search. This helps me get into the full mindset of the piece and pick out selects that I might have otherwise overlooked, but that fit with the music and vision. This small tip has helped immensely when cutting music videos, highlight reels, or sizzles.”

Elias Goldman

Elias Goldman is self staring filmmaker who mainly focuses on editing. Although he mainly edits narrative work, he also works on music videos, movie trailers, and cooperate work. After studying filmmaking for 2 years in NY at Ithaca College he left school and is now living in Los Angeles working as a freelancer.
https://www.burningharborfilms.com/

  • Better File Organization

    – “Although it takes some time, properly organizing your footage will help speed along the editing process. Before importing your footage and audio it’s very important to name everything. I have illustrated my personal technique below: (- is used to indicate a folder)

    -Project Name:
    -Scene 1 (Scene’s Location)
    -Footage:
    1.A.1 [Scene 1A Take 1]
    -Audio
    1.A.1
    -Project file
    -Music

    After importing the folders into your editing software, create a “Merged” folder inside of each Scene’s folder to put the clips into after you merge them with your audio. This will allow you to find exactly what you’re looking for much quicker.”

James Curry

Active in production and post production for over 25 years. Avid ACI and Apple ACT. Educated at Full Sail, AFI and VCFA. MFA in Film. Work ranges from trailers, promos, epk's, commercials, music videos, and broadcast for NBC, FOX and ABC, to documentary work for Prince, LaFace and Virgin.
https://vimeo.com/editrite

  • Keyboard Shortcut Mapping/Memorization

    – “When editing, any time you can turn a repetitive mouse-based task into one that is input via the keyboard you are shaving seconds off both the physical and mental work needed to do so, and furthermore are imbedding a reflex into your workflow.

    The earlier you take note of an editing app’s keyboard shortcut equivalent to the mouse-based task(s) you initially (or habitually) are using the most during the midst of your cutting, the better. Whether that means customization or memorization on your part in order to incorporate that shortcut so that it becomes reflexive, unconscious and second-nature, this is the point where you will not only become faster at the task at hand, but smarter as well.

    This has the added benefit of now being able to free up mental space for achieving a creative state where things begin to just flow.”

Dan Monro

I've been in the business for 30 years, editing for 25. I've used all major NLEs, edited online and machine to machine. I'm known for my speed...
https://dmonro95df.myportfolio.com/

  • Make Multiple Versions of Timelines & Projects

    – “One key to speed is to be able to get back to a previous version of an edit quickly – without hitting undo 99 times. I duplicate my timeline every time I make a major change. Even a minor change might warrant a new version if it involves a lot of steps, like intensive trimming. Don’t depend on UNDO! I treat UNDO as a “Whoops, didn’t mean to hit that button” NOT as a “Well, that didn’t work. Let’s see if I can get back where I was. Command-z, Command-z, Command-z, etc.”

    The method I use is personal, but it works for me. If I’m switching out a soundbite, or replacing a few shots, I go from “V01.1” to “V01.2”. If I’m re-arranging the flow of the narrative I go from “V01.1” to “V02.1”. Remember those leading zeroes; they are a must when sorting alphabetically. I don’t use them on the ‘dot’ version number because I don’t want to ever go more than 9 versions of ‘minor’ changes. By that time its become a very different timeline, so move on by a whole number.

    AND LABEL IT! Every NLE has comments now, so use ’em. My “V01.1” timeline probably has a comment like “Before new footage” or “before Narration revisions”. “V02.1” is currently called “New Direction after Producer notes” or something.

    Lastly, I keep a “Superseded” bin in my sequences bin. The older version goes in there. There is only one “current” sequence at any given time. Likewise, there is only one “current” project at the finder level.

    I make a copy of my project at the end of every day, so I can always get back to “Where we left it last Tuesday, before what’s his name messed it up”. If I do serious re-organization of my project, or especially if I delete a lot of un-needed footage, I make a copy first. To leave a comment on a project in your finder, put it in a sub-folder named “Before_Bad_Things_Happened” or whatever.

    Last tidbit: Leave breadcrumbs. I do a lot of photo treatments. At the end of the project the producer will need to know what each source is. I always leave the photo (disabled) on the layer underneath the rendered graphic. That way I always have a quick way back to the original source. Do this with anything you mix down, music, SFX, titles, overlays, etc.

    It always takes less time to call up an old sequence than it does to re-build!”

Whitley Harris

Whitley Harris is a Video Editor at PeopleTV, Meredith Co. A publicly held media and marketing service on the pulse of pop culture and entertainment. Whitley edits raw video for multiple TV shows on the PeopleTV platform. Whitley has previously worked for NFL Films where he has won two Emmy Awards for the popular HBO show, Hard Knocks.
http://agchronicles.com

  • Color Label Your Clips

    – “We all know at least 1 to 60 people who have a really messy room, car, workspace etc. But they know exactly where everything is. We know this as organized chaos. Sometimes we let our minds escape us and we can’t quite remember where we put things. We look and look and the moment we take the time to actually get up to find where it is, it’s usually right under us.

    The same can be said with video editing. One of the biggest problems I had when I first started editing was finding exactly where a particular clip was. I would spend minutes looking for the correct clip only to find out that it was exactly where my marker was. This played a huge part in why it would take me forever to finish a simple project. So if you are a beginner editor or have been in the game for a while now, hopefully my tips will help your workflow become a much faster one. Or just make you enjoy editing a little more than you have been.

    I think one of the most helpful things any editor can do is COLOR LABEL their clips. Whenever I begin a project one of the first things I do is identify my media by color. For instance, I would import whatever media it is that I need to import and any other type of assets such as SFX, LOWER THIRDS, MUSIC, etc and label them each by a specific color. So my Music will be green, my SFX yellow, Drone footage blue and so on.

    There are two things that come out of this. 1) It makes your timeline look freaking boss! 2) It makes life enjoyable looking at your timeline and knowing exactly what and where your clips are. This will definitely shave off a bunch of time when working. So if you are looking to replace a particular clip/sound with a better one, just look at your timeline and voilà.

    What goes hand in hand with COLOR LABELING is putting your clips on different tracks and keeping your audio staggered (if any) – this way it makes your project a lot more pleasing to your eye and you actually know when a song is coming to an end. To a random person it will look very chaotic and unorganized. But to you it will be your messy room, car, or workspace where you will know exactly where everything is and have to ability the find the shot you wanted to swap out a lot faster.”

Yosef Montgomery

I began directing and editing music videos for local musicians, and eventually discovered other projects in the multimedia field. I connected with a few film companies and helped them film live events, shoot music videos, develop recap videos, make commercials, and help with other video projects.
Sefprostudio.com

  • Watch All Footage Before Importing

    – “One useful strategy that helped me become a more efficient editor was watching all footage before importing it into the editing software. When I was taught this technique in my early days of editing, I instantly saw the difference of how much time was saved. Before I would tire myself out when opening a new project, but by doing this I already have an idea of what clips need to be in the intro, designated B-roll, and deleted scenes. Also, quickly skim through footage, and don’t get stuck nit-picking when you don’t need to. It helps the stress levels ?”

Rivka Cohen

A freelance videographer and filmmaker based in Boston,Massachusetts with experience working worldwide in commercials
rikareviva.com

  • Sound Syncing

    – “I would say what has sped up my process most when editing for video is sound syncing. Add two audio clips together, select both, right click, and click synchronize!”

Cassandra Tyler

Storytelling is my passion. Combining cinematic visuals with dynamic designs, I tell great stories.
cassandratylerfilms.com

  • Learn How to Create Multi-Camera Sequences

    – “If you’re editing footage from a shoot where multiple cameras captured the same scene, creating a multi-camera sequence is an absolute must. This syncs all video and audio into one clip, which you can then use to edit. It saves a ton of time. You can easily switch camera angles on a clip without having to dig back through footage, and you can even perform cuts, as the footage plays out in real time. Multi-camera editing is great for interviews, live events, films, weddings, etc.

    Most often, I use it on interview footage, because I work on a lot of narrative content. One fun example sticks out in my mind. A couple years ago, I edited an ad for Skittles, that was featured on ESPN. In the beginning of the video, you can see the camera angle change:

    There’s a few ways to accomplish creating a multi-camera sequence, depending on your software. Here are some guides for setting it up:

    • Avid
    • Premiere
    • Final Cut X

    I can talk a little more about setting this up in Premiere, since that is the edit software I use most often. First, select multiple files or folders in the project window you want to synchronize, right click and select “create multi-camera source sequence.” There are several options for synchronizing those assets: In Points, Out Points, Timecode, Sound Timecode and Audio.

    In Points and Out Points will synchronize based on the points you mark on the clip. Timecode and Sound Timecode will synchronize the clips based on the timecode of course, which should be time of day timecode if it was recorded with the intention of syncing up. Audio will synchronize by evaluating the audio waveform of the files and matching them. It’s nice if you can’t use any of the other methods, but it takes longer to process.

    Once you’ve chosen how to synchronize, you have the option to move the synchronized assets into a new folder and enumerate the different camera angles. You can also adjust audio assignments and offset preferences. When finished, the new multi-camera clip should now appear in the project window. Double-click on it and you can view it in the source window, with all the different camera angles.

    If you put the multi-camera clip in the timeline, you can easily change its camera angle by selecting the camera you’d like in the source window. You can also set up keyboard shortcuts to cut to cameras. I have my shortcuts set to numbers, so if I play the multi-camera clip on the timeline and tap 1 or 2 while it’s playing, the clip will cut to camera angle 1 or 2 in real time.

    Once you learn this technique, it’s a huge time-saver!”

Ethan Saltzberg

Ethan Saltzberg is a freelance video and film editor in Chicago, IL. He has experience in all areas of post-production and is deeply passionate about the power of visual content to tell stories and make an impact. He received a film degree from Northwestern University.
www.ethansaltzberg.com

  • Subclipping – It’s Like Magic

    – “When dealing with large amounts of footage, such as hours of B-roll or long interviews without a transcription, I find subclipping to be the absolute best way not to get lost!

    For interviews, I single out specific soundbites or a longer statement on a specific topic, make the subclip, and label it with either the exact phrase or the topic that was discussed. For B-roll, I will create separate folders/bins based on things like location or actions, then label what happens and if any subjects were in the shot (with their names). This way, further down the line, I can do a global search based on any of these keywords and I’ll see all the shots pertaining to exactly what I want – it’s like magic! You can even label them up front with words like “Good” or “Okay” to make it easy to find the best quality footage for the project, especially if the same thing was shot multiple times.

    Yes, this process is tedious and takes some time, but it’s so worth it…and if another editor has to take over the project from you later, they will thank you a hundred times for not having to watch all the footage again!”

Adam Taylor

Multi-skilled video editor, audio editor, graphic designer, motion designer, director, camera operator, compositor and all round pleasant chap! Worked in broadcast news, corporates, animation and for the past 13 yrs in commercials. Coprolitic Buffing a speciality!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-taylor-7b2b4714

  • Do The Edit Mentally First

    – “hmmm…how to edit faster? Intriguing question for which everyone will have a different answer. For me, its “Use your brain”! In other words, it’s all down to having a non-linear mindset and being able to do the edit in your head before you even reach for the mouse/pen/jog wheel.

    Its a technique I taught myself decades ago whilst editing broadcast news shows where time was a very precious commodity. I developed the ability to watch the fast rewind images coming off the betacam tape deck, having been handed it by the cameraman straight off a job. By the time the tape was back at the head, I already knew what shots I had to work with and had assembled a rough cut in my head. It worked too – never missed a deadline in over 5 years cutting news!

    Nowadays it’s so easy, as digital tapes tend to break up more and it’s more difficult to view in fffw/rwnd….and most stuff is recorded to hard drives, which makes rewind redundant.

    Still, the basic idea remains.

    Load the images into your mind, do the edit mentally, and importantly, trust your mental gut. You should have a rough edit in your head pretty damn quick.

    Then start to do the edit for real. If it’s working you’ll know very quickly, if it’s not, then change it. Don’t waste time agonising over the exact frame…you should know it when you see it, and if you need to tweak things, you can come back later to finesse them.

    Get the rough cut finished quickly, then you can use the remaining time to make it brilliant. Spend too much time on the rough and you get less for polishing time.”

Dan Fisher

Ever since I shot my first kung-fu video in high school my career path was obvious. After receiving a BS degree from R.I.T I moved to NYC were I had the fortune of editing television promos for the Syfy Channel. A perfect match! From there, my clientele expanded to include USA, HBO, Spike, Food Network, Sundance, IFC, WeTV, History Channel, LMN, FYI and IGN. Sme hightlights...an award-winning long form docudrama 'In Search of the Mole People', various music videos including DMX and the latest Type-O-Negative.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danmedia/

  • Keyframable Audio “Rubber Bands”

    – “I’ve found that many networks prefer as much of a polished audio mix as possible. Before a professional mix that is. I’ve learned to love the keyframable audio “rubber bands” for raising and lowering shifts in volume. i.e. lower the music during this poorly recorded bite. Also, map a 1 key shortcut to make the audio tracks larger and smaller, so you have more control over smaller adjustments. Also map a waveform shortcut in order to have a quick visual of the peaks and valleys of your audio.”

Jordan Dinchev

UK based video editor and visual effects artist. Professional experience ranging from commercial/branded, promotions, narrative, documentary, broadcast, music videos and visual effects.
jordandinchev.com

  • Understand What You’re Trying to Achieve

    – “Imagine that you are editing a project, it can be a big commercial or something you have shot. After you watch a rough cut of what you have made, you realise that you are way off course and the video does not match your vision. Somewhere on the way you got lost.

    On my first big project for a music video, I was editing for two days and the video was supposed to be cheery and show that everyone is having a good time. After watching a rough cut of the video, the director and I realised that the original cheery feel that we aimed for, was completely missing. I ended up right where I started and had to completely re-edit the whole video.

    The important thing to remember is that, whenever you start a project, make sure that you have all the necessary tools to keep you on track towards your vision without any bumps. Reference videos, mood boards, scripts, storyboards and even music can be powerful navigators through the jungle of footage during editing.”

Lauren Pushkin

I have been an editor for 18 years and a director for around 15. I have worked across all genres from documentaries, to drama, music videos and most recently branded content for high end brands such as L'Oreal, Unilever, The Body Shop, Pizza Hut and Dove. For me storytelling is the key in every genre. Without a story you have nothing. The editor's job is to find the story and make it sing.
www.laurenpushkin.co.uk

  • Find Your Story

    – “I think that the most important thing to do in any edit, whether it is a 30″ commercial or 60′ documentary, is find your story. Forget about music, making it looks pretty, effects, everything else – this all comes later.

    You have to make sure you have the best story from your footage, even if this is different to what the story was meant to be, or scripted to be. You need to use your creativity and skill to find what you have within the footage you have. You may need to watch your footage again and again before starting. I normally put everything on my timeline, then keep shortening it and shortening it until I get to roughly the right length. Oftentimes I go back to what I have discarded and bring bits back in. But because I have watched my footage so many times, it becomes catalogued in my head.

    The story normally comes from the synch. Many times I have had to edit one minute synch videos where a person tells you about themselves. Even in this one minute, you need a beginning, a middle and an end. Your person needs to have an arc, something needs to happen, something needs to be revealed, whether that is shocking, emotional or endearing, your audience must feel that connection with them, and believe in them. When your story comes to life, try and think of one sentence that defines it. This will help you when moving onto the next steps, which is adding colour and music. For instance “What happens when expectation becomes reality” or “No matter what the inhabitants do, the town remains cold and empty.”

    Once you have your story, then you can start using music and pasting. Now the story makes sense to you, you know what you are trying to tell and why you are doing what you are doing. You will be able to pick music and colour that enhances your story. For instance, if we took example number two above, our music would be sparse and ethereal, our cutaways would reflect the emptiness too. We would slow our pace right down and have lots of breathing room between synch points. If you do not think you have the footage to paint your story, then you need to use archive or similar, but you will always find a way to make it work once you have a powerful story.

    This method will stop you wasting time, because everything is clear to you. You will feel passionate too about your edit and be able to defend why you are doing what you are doing if silly changes should arise.”

Ashley White

I'm Ashley, I have been editing now for over 8 years. I've managed to work on a lot of films, each one very different with its individual complexities.
www.ashedits.com

  • Categorise Your Select Sequences

    – “If you have a large project which you’re working on, I tend to find it really beneficial to not only sit down with all the rushes and make selects, but to also make multiple sequences into categories in relation to the rushes.

    Most clients, directors or producers will eventually sit with you to give feedback on the edit. Majority of the time they will ask to swap shots to something else. For example they might say things like “Is there a shot of moving traffic”. Rather than scrubbing through a long timeline of selects. It’s super helpful to have a sequence of just shots of traffic for example. If you do this with your rushes at the beginning, it will not only save yourself time, it will save everyone else’s time. Really helps for those tight deadlines.”

    Example Screengrab:

  • Categorise Your Select Sequences

Richard Amor Allan

Freelance editor since 1993, teaching editing since 1996. Doesn't see much daylight.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rgallan/

  • Utilising a Proxy Workflow

    – “Large files can really slow your workstation down, regardless of the application that you’re using, so familiarising yourself with the proxy workflow for your software is a big step to speeding up your editing. If you’re ever finding that your machine is struggling to keep up, then using proxies is for you!

    Proxy files are lower resolution ‘stand-in’ files for you to construct your edit with, and because they are lower resolution they require less processor power. Most NLE applications will feature a function to create proxy files from your high-res original footage, and to seamlessly connect the two.

    Do your assembly editing and rough cutting using the proxy files, get yourself as close to picture lock as you’re comfortable, and then reconnect your timeline to your original files and voila, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time and frustration!”

Alvaro del Val

Alvaro del Val is an award-winning editor based in New York City. He has been editing all around the world for sixteen years. Born in Bilbao, Spain, he made Madrid and Dubai his home before making it to NYC in 2015. Since then, he has been awarded five Cannes Lions and two nominations for best editing in the AICE Awards, winning in 2017 for Volvo S90, Song Of The Open Road. Alvaro is a storyteller who believes emotion is the key to any visual piece.
www.alvarodelval.com

  • Use the Extend Clip Tool

    – “The editing technique I want to talk about is the Extend Clip tool, that you have in both Avid and Premiere editing software. This tool is one of the most underused functions by editors and one I use the most; I would say I use it constantly and helps me save a lot of time and also be really precise when I want to change the length of a clip. When added to your keyboard settings and once you incorporate it mentally as a way to extend and cut clips, it becomes a key tool forever.

    Basically, this function allows you to extend the tail or the head of a clip to wherever your playhead (blue timeline position indicator) is. So instead of going back to the edge of the clip and pull (In Premiere) or open the trim mode (In Avid), you just use a hit of the extend button and boom, the length changes! The beautiful thing is that you can extend as many tracks as you want at the same time. So if you are at the end of an edit, and you have multiple video tracks and audio tracks and you need an extra second, you can select all those tracks and set an OUT point and hit extend. All of them will be extended at the same time; if they have enough footage, of course. If not, they will just go as long as they can.

    And the same thing if you want to make all those tracks shorter. You will set an IN point and you’ll “extend” the void at the end of the sequence. You’ll extend the black area without footage, and therefore cutting the end of those tracks to the desired point.

    I really recommend trying this, as it’s easier to understand how it works when you do it yourself.

    I feel this function is better developed for Avid, as the same tool is used for extending head or tail. It just depends if you mark an IN point or an OUT point. If you set the in point it will extend the clip towards the in point, if you set the out point it will extend the clip to the out point. But you can use the extend also to trim between clips and to cut them, extending the void you have around the clips.

    You can find the shortcut in the Command Palette under the Trim menu. I put the extend edit on “F4” but you can put it anywhere it works best for you. If you have never used it, it may take a little bit of time to incorporate into your daily editing, but once you do it, you won’t be able to live without it.

    In Premiere, you’ll have a function to extend the head, and another for the tail, which will require having 2 buttons on your keyboard to work around it. Or you have the just general extend one, but it makes you select the edge of the clip to use it, so it doesn’t save you much time.

    So this function is more recommended for Avid users, and I encourage everybody to try it. Because once you understand how it fully works, it will make you a much, much faster (and precise) editor.”

Luc Tousignant

Luc graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a BA in Cinema Arts & Sciences, with a focus on post production. Since then he has been working in TV Development, cutting pilots and presentations. He has also gained TV credits working on varies Documentaries, Reality TV Shows, and creating graphic content.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7345486/

  • Create a Radio Cut

    – “My advice is predominantly for newer editors as this is a mistake I made a lot in my earlier years. When I would work on my first pass, I would always try and make the edit as perfect as possible, which is fine, but the method I used to do so was slow and impractical for a fast paced work environment. I would spend hours trying to make sure each cut, shot, and cue was as perfect as I could make it, with the stress of the rest of my unfinished timeline looming over me. But as my career progressed and my deadlines got tighter, I needed to pick up my work pace.

    The best advice I was given was to just get the first cut done, make your decisions fast and don’t worry about perfection. It sounds obvious to professionals, but when you’re starting off and trying to make an impression, it’s so easy to get caught up in this. But the reality is, once the full timeline is laid out, it’s so much easier to swap out for better shots, or fix your pacing, or change the music. Without the stress of trying to finish the cut, you’ll be able to make better decisions. As you practice faster decision making, you’ll also notice your instincts sharpen and a lot of times the first thing you do is the best, because you weren’t victim to overthinking (It’ll change a thousand times, ultimately ending up close to your first cut after notes anyways).

    One of the best techniques for learning how to sharpen your instincts (especially in doc editing) is creating a radio cut. Meaning, focus on the timing of the audio in the timeline more then the picture, if you can’t find the right shot or the right sound up, or the right piece of connective interview, slate it and move on. Once you have a solid edit with most of the audio lined up, it’s much easier to go back through it, adding shots and graphics to make the piece all come together. In the end it’s called a rough cut for a reason, and you’ll notice your speed at which you can get edits done increase dramatically.”

James England

A London based freelance video editor, James works primarily in short form with a variety of work behind him including commercials, branded content, documentary, and corporate. A Director, Shooter and Editor he has excellent knowledge of different workflows and technical ability able to take an idea from concept to finish.
www.jameswengland.com

  • Organization, Organization, Organization

    – My biggest thing in an edit is organisation. I’m a big believer that a tidy project is half the battle especially on tight turn around edits. There’s a couple of reasons why this is my go to tip.

    1. It’s something that applies to any NLE so no matter what side you’re on, whether it’s Avid, Premiere or even Da Vinci it’s super handy, plus most NLE’s allow you to bin, which means if you’re someone that goes between programs often, having the same structure can really help to hold some uniformity.

    2. Speaking of uniformity, I like to bin all my projects the same, which means I always start working from the same template. So whether you’re a beginner to industry pro, you could navigate your way around the project. It should be foolproof and cater for all types of projects; there’s nothing worse than opening up someone else’s project and spending half the day trying to work out where everything is.

    3. A client attend can get pretty embarrassing and time-consuming when the client wants you to pull up that specific take of that small section that they’re not sure when in the day it was shot. Their vague guidelines along with a messy project can be a nightmare for trying to track down specifics. With a well-organised project you’ll know where everything is without hesitation making it much easier to appear slick and smooth in front of anyone watching.

    4. You’re on the 6th version of an edit, you’re unsure what has and hasn’t been done and the first three versions have become a distant memory, you’re scouring hundred of emails on the same chain and you’re out of luck. Part of an organised project is sequences, having a clear naming convention and knowing when to duplicate is key. Personally anytime feedback is given I like to duplicate my sequence add a version number, that way when the client wants to revert back to a previous edit you know precisely where it is.

    5. Lastly, it takes no time. I keep my own template on my Google Drive so I can download it whenever and start working with it. Saving me time and settling my OCD tendencies to rest when it comes to work.”

Brendan Amoruso

Brendan is a Video editor in NYC, he is the senior editor at UK based advertising agency The Mighty Shed. His editing repertoire includes documentary, commercials and original storytelling for international brands. He can be found under a mountain of action figures and vintage movie posters.
www.vimeo.com/user35427922

  • Always Come Prepared

    – “Editing in various locations for diverse media companies can be demanding, especially when the environment does not have the typical set up for an editor. The last thing you want to worry about on the first day of a long project is having to reorganize the system made available to you in haste, all while under a tight deadline.

    In my ten years of editing, I have been in spacious editing bays, cramped up in green rooms and lastly the ever popular open air office. None of these had the comfort and security of my editing suite I used personally. Many clients who use freelance editors do not keep their editing machines up to date, so before I could even start cutting i would have to learn unfamiliar FTP, reset my hotkeys, install updated software and acquaint myself with dozens of new codecs all on the fly. This usually took place while a director or producer is rattling off project specs and expecting you to give a first round by 2pm.

    Video editing setup

    In order to prevent future nightmares on site I began to remember one of my favorite motto’s I learned from my time in boy scouts “BE PREPARED.” I decided to make a check list of provisions to streamline my editing to be effective and fool proof under any circumstance.

    Firstly I arrive with my own high speed external hard drive, not only to back-up the days work, but also to edit the project off of. More often than not you are handed a slim drive of raw footage and told to get started, and as non-cumbersome as “pocket” drives are, they can easily crash and may have unrelated files taking up space. You also do not want to unload raw footage on your desktop, as this will eat up valuable computer processing power. Bringing your own empty drive with your personal storage settings allows you to log project footage, access backups and create an archive you are accustomed to accessing on a daily basis. I have several thunderbolt 3 G-Drives on call for any given project, ranging from 4 to 12 terabytes, I stick to this brand but there are plenty of other quality drives to choose from.

    G-DRIVE with Thunderbolt

    Secondly, I bring my my own customized hotkey settings to upload onto the editing program I will be using that day. Whether it is FCPX or Premier, I have a command set for both and keep the data handy on my hard drive. This helps shave off time setting the keyboard to your liking. Don’t forgot to remove your key set at the end of your session, especially if you are sharing the machine with other editors. Another option is to bring a portable control panel. I recommend X-Keys from P.I. engineering, with 68 programmable keys complete with jog and shuttle wheel, the Xk-68 allows portable plug and play into the editing program and makes you feel right at home with your custom commands.

    X-Keys Xk-68

    Lastly, I make sure to bring along my editing software plug-ins. These span from fonts, 3d LUTS, transitions, titles, generators, audio and video codecs. You may show up to a project and find that the software only has the basics, this can feel limiting when you are working on promos and high energy pieces that require a large library of effects at hand. I play with these tools on a trial and error basis beforehand, finding which effects, color grade, typography etc would be best suited for each particular project’s needs. I stress again that the trial and error with these effects is of the utmost importance, because if memorized, they can provide instant solutions in the editing process rather than cycling through effects until one seems right.

    video formats codecs

    Once your project is completed, the last hurdle is rendering. This can become an issue if the client’s specifications include obscure video formatting. This is not a problem you want to deal with when you’re at the end of the day looking to export your master. To counter this, I bring a variety of video codecs to load onto adobe’s media encoder, never relying on what I may believe is already loaded onto the machine. I keep tabs on what are the popular codecs for broadcast, sports, digital etc, and download them to my collection.

    With the above at my disposal, i edit coolheaded and confident. Not even the most absurd request could derail my workflow, as I have all the tools necessary to handle it.”

Sean Lander

Editor with over 30 years' experience. Credits in award winning Feature Films, Documentaries and Television.
www.rednail.com.au

  • Categorise All Your Footage Before You Start

    – “Most inexperienced editors will want to get to cutting straight away, but if you want to go fast you are much better spending the time to not only view ALL your footage but categorise it as well. Not just clips either. You can with NLEs like AVID, DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro create sub-clips or with Final Cut Pro use Keywords. (more powerful)

    Once finished you will have a greater understanding of the palette you have to paint your story, plus everything you need should be at your fingertips. As the old saying goes: Editing 10% cutting 90% looking for stuff. The more you can reduce that 90%, the faster you’ll be. Plus you will be spending more time in the “edit zone” which is critically important to telling a good story.

    For me this is why I always choose Final Cut Pro X to edit. It has the best tools to keep you in the edit zone while getting out of the way when all you want to do is cut.”

Benjamin Oliver

I am a versatile producer, director, and editor with over fifteen years of experience in production and post-production capacities. I’ve created everything from documentaries and commercials, to training videos, web content, and feature films. Not a moment goes by when Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator is not open on my computer. I love being part of the creative process — whatever stage it’s in — and helping clients produce on-time, on-budget, and excellent work.
http://www.benjaminolivercreative.com/

  • Use the Match Frame Feature

    – “The moment a friend told me all about “Match Frame”, my life as an editor improved. Match frame, which should be a function on every major video editing platform out there, simply brings the frame you have your playhead on into the preview monitor, so you can easily search around that area.

    It’s great for, perhaps, finding audio you have lost sync on, or, to listen to what your interview subject or actor says after, or before that line.

    Match frame. Learn about it, and use it. It’s awesome.”

Alden Morgan

I work with many different studios, agencies and companies to create original video content. I've been doing it for close to 20 years and I've gotten pretty good at it.
aldenmorgan.com

  • Have Patience

    – “Out of all of the editors I’ve worked with during my career, the best were the ones that knew how to effectively manage their temperament and emotions during a stressful job that had a tight deadline. Let’s face it, if you’re going to make a career out of video editing, you’re going to work on some projects that are going to be very stressful and not very fun. These jobs will test you in ways that you won’t see coming, so remind yourself of a few things that you know will happen before you start.

    For example, there will always be a deadline, there will always be changes, there will always be changes that you don’t agree with and there will always be last minute changes. These are things that are out of your control and are part of the job. If you think you’re going to edit something, send out the first cut and instantly receive praise on your great work, ending the job in one round, you are mistaken.

    If you remember that the first cut is always the cut that gets changed the most, regardless of how much time and effort you put into it, you’ll be ready to tackle the next round. If you remember that a last minute change could come in 10 minutes before a deadline, you’ll be ready to make that deadline. To be a fast and efficient video editor, you have to have the temperament to focus on doing just that. Patience and editing go hand in hand.”

Jordan Schmelzer

Jordan is a video editor with a passion for music and creative advertising. His resume includes working with brands like Express, Chipotle, and White Castle to name a few. He has won several awards, including two Emmy's. Jordan is also an Adobe Certified Expert in Premiere Pro.
https://jordanschmelzer.com/

  • Hover Scrub

    – “In most editing software, you can scrub through the thumbnails in your clip browser, sometimes called “hover scrub” or “skim media.” As you scrub a preview of the clip, use shortcuts to set your ‘in’ and ‘out’ points and then use the ‘insert’ shortcut to automatically place in your timeline. This allows you to very rapidly look through your footage, make selects, and then drop them to your timeline without opening each clip in your source monitor. This technique is similar to “three-point editing,” but is especially good for making b-roll selects.”

Richard Kronenberg

Richard Kronenberg is an Emmy Award winning editor with over 20 years' experience. He currently cuts field packages for “The Rachael Ray Show
https://vimeo.com/user10270119

  • Use Workspaces

    – “Using workspaces is my most valued technique for editing faster. I’m constantly amazed that all editors don’t do this.

    Workspaces are different window arrangements and timeline views configured for different tasks. So, for basic cut and dissolve editing, you’d have a workspace with the standard source and record windows and a medium size timeline. When you were doing complex video effects, you’d have a workspace with a large single record window and a small timeline. When doing your audio mix, you’d have a workspace with the timeline tracks really big to see the waveforms and a small record window. For even more speed, these workspaces can be matched to different buttons.

    Workspaces Make Editing Videos Faster

    (Click to Enlarge)

    Set up Workspaces

    (Click to Enlarge)

    Use Workspaces

    (Click to Enlarge)

    It takes a little time to set up the workspaces initially, but the increase in efficiency is enormous. You’re no longer consuming time clicking on menus, dragging window corners to make them larger or smaller, or pulling on tiny track panels trying to resize them. Now, that’s all done with the push of a button.

    I value the psychological as much as the technical benefit of this tip. When you’re editing on a deadline, those bins, tools and effect panels are opening and closing at breakneck speed. Sometimes you look up from the keyboard and find a big abstract painting looking back at you. You’re at a loss as to where anything is anymore, which can be quite disconcerting, especially with a client four feet behind you. It’s very reassuring to hit that one button and have everything look familiar again. I liken it to that nice feeling of coming home to a clean house and knowing everything is in its proper place, easy to find and ready to use.”

Tony Schubert

Tony Schubert is a freelance video editor who has worked on a variety of commercials, web content and short films. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
https://vimeo.com/tonyschubert

  • Rewatching All Footage Near the End of the Edit

    – “While its obviously important to thoroughly view every bit of footage at the beginning of a project, I find that rewatching all the footage near the very end is also helpful. It may sound tedious and time-consuming, but many times I end up finding a great piece of footage after rewatching my video clips.

    Sometimes my feelings about a particular shot or scene has changed over the course of editing a video. Maybe a few things in the edit aren’t totally working. Instead of moving all the clips around again, I can solve a problem by bringing in a shot that I initially overlooked or dismissed. I have occasionally found some of my best video footage near the end of a project. That means I can quickly improve a shot or scene by using something I already have, instead of looking for archival or newly shot footage.

    However, even if that newly discovered footage doesn’t work with my edit, then maybe it has forced me to think about the project in a new way that leads to an even better solution.”

Rahim Mastafa

A professional freelance Avid editor with nearly 20 years' experience in broadcast TV
www.linkedin.com/in/rahim-mastafa-1b648720/

  • Talk to Other Editors + Crew/Staff

    – “Editing can be lonely work sometimes, in the sense that we don’t tend to work with other editors whilst we are working. We may be on our own or with an edit producer, but one of the best things you can do to help speed up your workflow is to talk to other editors about how they work and share tips and tricks.

    For instance, I edited in a certain way for years until I worked with a producer who was an editor. He pointed out that I could do something a lot fast using a short cut I had no idea about. I have used it ever since and can’t even remember how I used to do it!

    The same goes for speaking to other staff or team members, from edit assistants to online editors and tech guys who check your edits. They can teach you so much! You will have a more thorough knowledge of the entire process and it will save confusion.

    So, as they say, it’s good to talk!”

Lizi Hesling

I'm a freelance documentary editor. I've been editing for nearly 20 years, but have only recently made it my main thing. I moved to London in 2016 to take an MA in film editing. Since then I've been concentrating on long-form, gaining my first feature and my first broadcast credit.
www.lizihesling.com

  • Don’t Work Too Hard!

    – “I don’t think many people would argue with the fact that working in production isn’t very good for your health. As an editor, you’re often expected to work very long days, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s done quite a few all-nighters just to get something finished. This is not only very bad for your eyes and your back (get a standing desk – it really does help), it’s also bad for your brain.

    Editing is very cerebral, but when you’re tired, your brain stops working and everything just becomes impossibly hard. That’s why I think one of the most important things you need to learn to not only remain efficient as an editor, but also to avoid burn out and survive in the industry, is how to control your hours, get sufficient rest, and basically not work too hard!

    So, make sure you take a proper lunch break and go home on time at the end of the day. And make sure you go on holiday at least once a year. I know this isn’t always possible and you may not be able to do this until you’re well established, but fight for it before you dig yourself into a hole. Don’t let “them” bully you into staying until 10pm every night, because it really doesn’t do anyone any favours!”

Alfredo Bergna

Alfredo Bergna is a Manhattan based Avid Editor and Sound Designer with over 15 years of experience cutting Documentaries, Reality Series, Movie Trailers, Promos and Launching Campaigns for VH-1, MTV, Bravo, WeTV, BBC, Discovery, Nickelodeon, Oxygen, A&E, Animal Planet and others.
https://alfredobergna.net

  • Create Audio Palettes by Sub-clipping Music and SFX Tracks

    – “Even to the most seasoned editor, searching for music and sound effects on a new library can be a time-consuming task that’s rarely accounted for when deadlines are tight.

    A habit that has saved me precious time is, creating a full sequence sub-clip of the entire music and sound effects tracks of the first 3 or 4 episodes of a series, with tracks that have been already approved by producers and network execs.

    It’s also very convenient for when you’re working with a producer in the room, as you can quickly offer them track options by just scrolling through these sequences, and if they like it and music recycling is allowed, you can just copy and paste the already mixed track to your new scene, or use that track to quickly access the bin where that style of music is stored.

    Same goes for sound effect combos you’ve created early and want to use again (ex. reverse cymbal to boom, rise to splash, etc…). Instead of searching again for the individual elements to compose the same combo, you can just keep them already edited and mixed in your handy dandy “s.f.x. palette” sequence and just copy and paste it to your new scene. It’s not only a time efficient habit, but it also allows to keep a continuity of sound across all episodes.

    Once you’ve gotten the groove of it, you can save yourself at least 2 to 3 hours a day of music and s.f.x. searching.”

Nigel G Honey

Certified AVID Instructor. Nigel has 20 years' experience as a Film Editor in the United Kingdom with his edited work screened at Berlin, BAFTA, Cannes, Edinburgh and Raindance Film Festivals. Nigel is also one of only Three Certified Avid Media Composer / Symphony Instructors in Scotland, trained at Pinewood Studios.
www.nghavidtraining.co.uk

  • Split Edit AKA J Cut & L Cuts

    – “When editing a Documentary or Drama, many 1st time editors cut both pictures and sound at the same point. This technique is very boring and doesn’t create drama or impact.

    So what editors do is split the Video and Audio, so either the Audio precedes the Video, for example a Train coming, we hear the train pick up speed in the audio and then we see the train, thus giving the viewer the intensity or hearing a train but until the editor or director decides, we do not cut to it in picture. Thus creating a L Cut or Split Edit.

    Or we continue the Audio or an Interview, but see what the person is talking about rather than seeing the person being interviewed in vision we can therefore split the edit and roll back the next shot into the previous shot.

    How is this done? Well in Avid and Premiere, which is what I usually use, we can lock the audio tracks and then DE Link the Video from the audio, thus allowing the editor to do a dual roller trim with the video either extending into the previous shot or extending the audio into the next shot.”

Nate McCallister

Two time Emmy award-winning video editor and producer. More than anything, someone who likes to fix things and is always looking for make things faster and better.
www.natemccallister.com

  • Create an Assembly Cut

    – “Some stories are created on the page by the writers, others are created afterwards in the edit room. Assembly cuts can help you craft a better story out of both.

    The assembly cut is a sequence of all the major clips of your project, normally limited to 150% of the final projects total length. Building and watching this sequence can help you find the natural story and pacing of your project. This cut is an editors tool, not something that needs to be shared with the folks outside the editorial team.

    Creating the assembly cut should be a tool and not a painstaking process. If you have an outline use it, if not, build it chronologically based on the order it was shot. Don’t include every take, but make sure to include the best visuals and dialog that you hope make it in the final film. Don’t get fancy with music or effects, straight cuts and jump cuts are fine at this stage.

    After creating the assembly cut, watch it and take notes. Does a natural story exist, does the order of events make sense, what additions or cuts or rearrangements could have the biggest impact? Now that you have built the foundation, let the edit begin.”

Owen Miller

Full-time agency video editor and animator operating out of Boston's South End
https://www.linkedin.com/in/millerowenw/

  • Sleep On It

    – “It’s one thing to be handed a video storyboard or EDL from client and to piece together a timeline using that as a guide. But in my experience editing in a marketing agency, about half the time you’re handed projects where you’re not so lucky. Ultimately, that means you have to fallback on your own creative cognition to form some idea of a narrative using the 5 minutes of interview footage and 3+ hours of B-roll footage they handed off to you for editing (or something like that).

    So that means you get to play the role of creative director and editor at once! Oh, and they expect a finished product from you by the end of the week too. Fun fun fun!

    Ideally, you’d want to plan out your edit before you execute. But inevitably, when time is of the essence, you’ll get started on jamming all that footage onto your sequence at once in the hopes that a story will reveal itself in due time. Before you know it, 9AM has turned to 6PM (or later) and you’re still stressed that you haven’t found that cohesive storyline, so you try and force one out.

    Don’t.

    Step back from your desk, pack your things, head home, and sleep on it. Seriously.

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked longer than I should have trying to painstakingly bust a rough cut out, only to come back to work the next morning and realize that what I spent working 3 additional hours on looks less than stellar. It’s so important to let your mind have the time to relax and recharge so you can return to your desk fully energized and with a clear head. If your mind feels like mush staring at your screen, it’s a safe bet that your video is going to come out the same way. Take yourself home, or any place outside of your office, and that will allot you the headspace to better reflect on what you can add to your video and what you can do without. You’ll be thinking and working far more proficiently the next morning, ready to bring your new ideas to the table to produce a final video of a much higher quality.”

Daniel Charlton

Daniel Charlton has worked closely with editors over the past 15 years to design custom post-production work flows suitable for all levels of editing. Specialising in backup solutions and file delivery, his expertise in this field is sought over nationally (Australian Based) and resides at Pro AV Solutions.
https://www.proavexpress.com.au/

  • Backup & Storage Solutions are Important Too

    – “As important as any edit is, key things to take into account prior to even accepting the job is how you plan to manage, backup and deliver your end result, as these cost time and money. You need to factor this into whatever you quote for the job or have in your overall project.

    Key Questions to Ask Yourself/Client Before the Job Starts

    • What format of footage are you working with?
    • How much space will this take up? (Then add 25% as you know it will go over and you need to leave plenty of free space on the drive while working)
    • How demanding is this footage on your computer, can your system handle it?
    • Who is responsible for backing up the raw footage and trans-coded footage?
    • How long do you need to keep the footage for after the project is done?

    All of the above are important to ask, as it can have huge cost and time implications to your project.

    For Lower Budget Projects

    Having two copies^ of a project on separate drives is usually enough to keep you safe from disaster.
    ^ 2 copies means separate locations of the same data backed up daily in the event one drive fails or is lost/stolen. Don’t be fooled having one on your desk in a basic RAID 1 setup, as this will often not fix all your problems in the event of failure.

    For Larger Budget Projects

    You need to consider drive speed, like a 4 bay or larger RAID Box running in RAID 5 for both speed of accessing media, as well as well redundancy in the event of a failure. You will still also need to consider having 2 or more copies of this, with one off site at all times. This can be a requirement for insurance on a project and can be quite costly if you need to purchase additional space and a cheap WD Mybook drive just isn’t going to cut it. Depending on the size of the project this can run into the 1000’s or even 10’s of 1000’s if its a big project when you add up all the drive needs suitable to the project.

    When It Comes Time to Deliver the Project

    Take into account how they want this and all the time it takes to create these deliverables as this can often add upto days of time. Then get it off your system and back into the clients responsibility to look after longer term.

    Basically, just cover yourself and make sure you’re not out of pocket for your time or having to buy additional gear to get one project done.”

Ben Hawkins

12 years of cinematography, editing and motion graphics. 8 years of it being 'good'
https://vimeo.com/benhawkins

  • Walk Away

    – “So, now you that you have quickly edited your piece, here is my one final bit of advice. When you are editing a piece that you watched 50, 100 or maybe 1000 times from concept to completion. It can really start to become an annoying blur.

    You heard the music over and over, you seen the scenes and the graphic packages too many times to count and now you just want it gone. Or you have a quick turnaround and need it gone right now.

    Even if you have had a producer watch though it and give it the okay. Before you finally hit that export button one final time, get up, walk away. Even if you can only allow for ten mins. Mentally prepare yourself to really give it your clearest set of eyes. Just one last time.

    I have had many edits where the fatigue sets in and then when I look back at it, after it’s gone live, I will find something that seemed out of place or an obvious oversight that should have been fixed.”

Jason Sedmak

High-level, award-winning, professional technician for over two decades, Jason has edited and supervised commercials, industrials, web videos, tv shows, documentaries and features. He has consulted numerous productions, prior to and during production, and has immense experience in Post-Production environments, both big and small.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-sedmak-31617560/

  • Edit from Sequences Not Clips

    – “This may seem like a no-brainer and obvious (especially now that waveform syncing is the norm), but I’m surprised how often I come across editors who don’t use sequencing as their first and most essential way to organize footage and edit from. When you’re staring down thousands of nameless files straight off of camera cards, this is the very first thing you should do. Once these string-outs are built, you can split them down into smaller sub-sequences with a bit more organization (like by scene or content) in bins. An editor can churn through and get an overview of footage a million times faster with these string outs than he/she could ever do hunting and pecking clip by clip. If it’s a series of clips of performances, I’ll frequently make even shorter sequences from ‘action’ to ‘cut’ so that I can watch (or show my clients) the performances back-to-back to help pick the best takes. Works great with b-roll, too!”

Brendan Walsh

I have been filming and editing stories for over a decade for companies such as Microsoft, Dr. Scholls, CheapTickets, Kelloggs, Abbott, International Delight, Nutanix, Lightspeed Ventures, and more, and my career has brought me to Brazil, Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, Nassau Bahamas, New York City, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Uganda, Rwanda, Los Angeles, and my beautiful hometown of Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey.
www.oakleafmedia.com

  • Story Blocking

    – “This practice is a major part of the screenwriting process, where writers will “block” the story on index cards by writing out the main beats of the script. There are lots of ways to block a story, but it’s a great start to simply know your beginning, middle, and end. My editing work is primarily short documentary, and I find that a version of this works great for me. I use the text tool to create visual “blocks,” my version of index cards, right on my timeline. These text blocks will contain the major story beats of the piece. It helps me to keep track of certain character’s story arcs, and helps me to visualize projects that have to be cut to a certain length.

    Much like an animatic from a storyboard, story blocks can give you a foundation to build from on complex projects. I find it particularly useful in doc settings where the production team may have wandered down some paths with no main story objective.”

Alexander Pastrana

Video producer/editor working out in LA. Worked in commercial, corporate, sports and social content.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexpastrana199

  • Find Your Edit Groove

    – “What I mean by this is find out what edit technique works for you. Is it editing with just your keyboard, never really utilizing the mouse? Or is it vice versa? Or a mix of both? For me it’s a mix of both with left hand consistently on the keyboard, while my right drives the project forward with the mouse. This is what makes me the most efficient editor in my career. It’s important to not let anyone tell you that you should only use the keyboard because it’s faster. You have to use what works for you. SPEED IS NOT EVERYTHING. Efficiency and thoroughness matters much more.

    I’ve never been the quickest editor, however, that has never hampered my career. I’ve done international and national TV spots, minidocs and viral videos, all with the mentality of being thorough and efficient. All of which I can attribute to my edit groove. Once you find that, you’ll find the rest of the techniques and story telling ability will start to come, but first you have to be comfortable with your edit style. ”

Jaclyn Cataldi

Jaclyn is a NYC based video and motion graphics editor. She first started off at CBS, where she primarily worked on branded content, commercials and promos. She now is an editor for Eleven Seven Music, with a focus on music videos and sizzle reels.
https://vimeo.com/jaclyncataldi

  • Create a Soundbed & Use It to Guide Your Story

    – “What makes a solid edit has everything to do with its finesse and pacing, and this is all seen in an editor’s use of shot selection, transitional elements and musicality. What I have learned, although all of these things are important, is that proper use of sound design can be the difference between a good cut and a great cut. The first thing I always do when starting to build out a sequence is create a soundbed, and I have found that this, at times, has directly impacted my storyline before even piecing it together. Everyone knows that starting off with any kind of audio sets the overall tone for a piece, but it’s also about not letting that audio just fade into the background. Knowing how to utilize the beat and fluctuation of a song can bring your edit to life and impact your story as a whole.

    My background is mainly in short-form projects, like commercials and sizzle reels, so what I have been taught is to emphasize the intricacies of a song that would otherwise go unnoticed. In this case, a strong sense of musicality drives the message home. However, when working on a longer piece with a larger storyline, I still choose to map out the first minute to minute and a half with music when first jumping into a sequence. If I use more than one song, I focus on making seamless transitions between them while keeping both the build and crescendo in. Even if a particular song choice doesn’t end up making it into the final product, I believe this first step is imperative to the storytelling process. Especially when working on projects that rely heavily on dialogue and interviews, your soundbed can be an amazing guide for the pace of your story and can actually speed up your workflow.

    For example, if you are making a documentary and are building your story through a series of interviews, you might reach a point where you are stuck figuring out how to transition between topics. Some great inspiration for that transition can happen if soundbites are used during the build of a song, and then cut out at its lull or peak. Because it’s harder for the viewer to process information that is fed through a constant stream, utilizing these moments in your soundbed creates an opportunity for the audience to reset and prepare for the next bit of information. It also might help the editor reconsider the order of their story, because the soundbite before a music break always comes off that much more powerful.

    You’re probably wondering how this can possibly speed up your workflow. For me, it truly does help to see a mixed musicbed laid out on a sequence before any cutting begins. It gives me an idea of how much time there is to fill, and where big moments or reveals should be brought in. Sometimes, starting with those big moments and then working around them can eliminate excess information and tailor your story right from the get-go. But regardless of how you choose to build your edit, never underestimate the power of sound design! Every story has a soundtrack, and focusing on that from the start has definitely worked to my benefit when on tight deadlines, and hopefully it can for you as well.”

Silvia Biagioni

I am a London based video editor and filmmaker with extensive experience in broadcast and online productions, participatory documentaries, mixed formats, and archive footage research. I have cut films for the BBC, ITV, Vice News, and ARTE, as well as several independent productions, creative agencies, and NGOs.
www.silbia.it

  • Archive and Library Clips

    – “As a factual video editor, I have worked a lot with film archives and user-generated content, and that’s how I fell in love with archives. In fact, despite often presenting an extra layer of difficulty in post-production and clearance, archives are a great tool to navigate other times and places, offering a variety of perspectives and feelings that we cannot always find in production footage. So here a few basic tips to help you organise your film archives in your edit.

    Research and Watch Your Archives Before You Start

    From a creative perspective, my best advice is to look at film archives as a key element for your film; go beyond the temptation of using them just as b-roll or coverage, and always to try to use their full potential in terms of narration. Give the archive the possibility to expand, or to move the story forward on its own. To do that, I often research and watch as much archive as possible before I start the edit, so that I am able to identify and create the right opportunities for it while I structure the story.

    Keep a Record of All Your Sources

    Keeping track of all the archive clips that have been imported into your editing project is of paramount importance, not just for clearance, but for the edit too. It’s awful to realise after picture lock that a clip can’t be used – and it’s even worse if that clip has a central role in one of your sequences. On feature docs, and generally on more structured projects, you will be working with an archive producer in charge of research and clearance – a key figure in managing all the archives – but even in this case, it is up to the editor / edit assistant to make sure that all the new archive in the project has been flagged to the archive producer (who often works across a multitude of productions, and is not sitting with you 24/7).

    To keep track of all sources, it’s very useful to have each clip identified with a unique number (which should obviously be embedded in the clip’s name or metadata, therefore accessible from your editing system), pointing to a database where all the source / clearance / technical information are stored. Through this unique number, you should be able to identify clip name, clip provider, clearance status (and sometimes clearance costs, if relevant to you), resolution, framerate, other tech specs, master/screener. In this way, not only you, but every new person approaching the timeline should be able to know the exact status of each archive clip of the film. This can be done on an excel document, or any other sort of database. Most structured workflows use database systems such as Filemaker Pro, but that’s not the case of most of smaller productions.

    Make a List of What is in the Timeline

    As your timeline is taking shape and getting closer to picture lock, it’s time to review and make a list of all the archive clips that have been used. I usually do that on an excel sheet, but you can also use EDLs or XMLs, and some specific software to generate the spreadsheets from there. You can then hand the list over to your archive producer, who will take care of clearance and costs at his end. I think it’s good practice to update the list at each new significant cut; as you get closer to picture lock, you’ll also need to allow enough time for your masters to be digitalised (sometimes) and delivered to your office – and be aware that might take from a few minutes to several weeks.

    Tips

    If you want to simplify your archive workflow (or to optimise your costs), it’s common practice to use archive footage from one single source or provider – but obviously that will limit your choice, and you’ll have to do with what’s available there.

    Also, be aware that many clips that are available on the internet, and seem to be royalty free, might still require clearance. It’s always a good idea to investigate each single clip you are using, especially if your project is for broadcast, commercial, or theatrical distribution.”

Roberto Sommella

Self-taught Italian filmmaker and video editor living in London.
http://www.robertosommella.com/portfolio/

  • Skin Tone as a Basic Step for Colour Correction

    – “Maybe many of you already knew, but I was quite amazed when I discovered that – surprise, surprise – there are no “white skin” or “black skin” people, but only “mid-tone grey” people! The thing is that gives skin its colour is actually the blood that flows underneath it. This simplifies a lot our job when we want to give a decent, human, consistent look to our subjects’ faces. All you have to do is use the skin tone line on your Vectorscope as a reference.

    Skin tone line

    This isn’t a tutorial on how to do this, as there are plenty of them online, some of which very interesting: they will teach you how a Caucasian male skin falls within around 70% of Luma, a bit more for women, around 45% for Hispanic and so on; that they all have a different amount of saturation; that cropping your area of interest (a face for example) could make your life easy – even though life is not always easy, as we know, and that’s when you will go into masking, tracking and refining.

    But that’s my point and advice. Before masking, tracking or using very complex pre-made effects or LUTs, we shouldn’t forget to make the simple, basic steps that can improve both your workflow and your final results. What I mean is that we live in a time where so much knowledge and information is available, that we get carried away by the enormous amount of creative tools at hand, and we forget the humility of going back and starting to learn the basics again.

    Go and look for those tutorials. Before wandering through the Web in the search for the perfect cinematic LUT, I encourage you to start by exercising your eye through skin tone colour correction. It achieves unexpectedly astonishing results and it’s the perfect gym for our eyes, which are so easily tricked by all those colours and lights on our screens.”

Phillip Raupach

Phillip earned his BA in Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts (BECA) from San Francisco State University in 2014. He enjoys video editing, 3D animation, and photography. He one day wants to make science fiction films for a living.
phillipraupach.com

  • Speech Rhythm and Mannerisms

    – “Everyone has a rhythm to their speech, and editing different parts of an interview together can sometimes interrupt that. The majority of the interview will probably be behind b-roll. When you’ve got them saying just what you need, go back and take some time to just listen to (don’t watch) some of the raw footage of their interview. Pay attention to how they speak. You’ll pick up rhythms they use that make them sound different from others. Notice any verbal mannerisms that are unique to them. Now you can go back to your audio edits and get the spacing between their words (or lack thereof) right without any guesswork.”

Shawn Curley

Shawn Curley began his editing journey in New England and currently resides in Studio City with his bearded terrier Wiz. He enjoys hikes, seeing old movies at the New Beverly Cinema and is an active member of LA Improv community.
https://www.shawncurley.com

  • Map Out Your Project on a Whiteboard

    – “We’ve all been there before – a blank page, a void canvas… an empty timeline with a thousand hours of raw footage and little instruction from your boss other than “Make it good, I’ll know what I hate when I see your first cut.” The sweat drips with every tick, there are infinite possibilities good, bad and nowhere in between, so where to begin? Here’s the secret, turn off your computer. That’s right, i’m telling you that the best way to begin an edit is outside of your timeline and away from your fancy equipment. Crazy, right? Does this sound like a provocative LinkedIn article written by someone that wants attention? Great, because that’s what I wanted and I made it so by mapping out the blueprints for this article on a whiteboard and guess what? You can apply this same method to your editing projects to save time, stress and add a little dash of fun.

    I love white boards. Several of them take up a significant chunk of real estate in my home and it’s my go to tool when starting a project. Using a whiteboard is a therapeutic way to organize your thoughts and a creative route to figuring out what you want. The best part? There’s no right or wrong way of doing it. The act of physically drawing out your thoughts on a big open space is beneficial enough to ease the stress that will accompany sub clip orientation later on. Remember to stay as simple as possible, you’re only building a skeleton to support your creative process. Begin by drawing a line on the whiteboard that represents your timeline from beginning to end. Off to the side write down your goals, the specific beats and essential ingredients you must include. Next, fill that timeline with those delicious essentials. For example, if you feel like a section of your timeline should involve a voice over make a mark and label “VO”. You don’t have to know what the VO is going to be and you can add further details at later time. Continue to add marks on this physical timeline for music, sub clips or whatever your project entails with goals in mind. The purpose of a map is to guide you and by creating a loose visual, you’ll make the editing process smoother, faster and more efficient. Elementary, my dear Watson.

    A brain is a lot like a computer and when you’re bogged down with stress and racing thoughts in the midst of a heavy project you’ll be able to turn to a simplistic guide outside of your editing software. Pictures came long before words and in many ways the method that i’m promoting was one of the first forms of storytelling. Neanderthals didn’t have Adobe Premiere, they had a cave wall and that worked for them just fine.”

Anna McCarty

I’m a video producer and editor with 10 years of experience. In my own time, I like to create stories that relate to people. I currently work with Full Sail University, where I produce videos for education, marketing, and social media.
http://annachristine.com

  • Use Markers

    – “So much of being an effective video editor stems from organization. You have to begin with organized files. Then, you organize your content and your clips in your project. And then once you’ve organized your thoughts three times over, you can finally organize all the components into a story.

    One of my favorite organization techniques is using markers. They’re versatile and colorful to boot! Here are a few ways I’ve used them in my own work.

    1-3 Different uses for Markers

    To label content and quotes (Markers on a video track)

    Did someone say something that resonated with the focus of the story? Add a marker to the clip and make note of a quote or the topic they’re discussing. I use this all the time when I’m cutting down interviews; it helps me categorize and sort similar content before I jump into crafting the story.

    To time music (Markers on an audio track)

    Sometimes I’m tasked to cut together a sizzle reel, or something with a lot of energy and little dialogue. In these instances, I like to mark out my music. I have my marker tied to a hotkey, so I can listen to my audio track and tap the markers to the beat. Doing this gives me several options where an edit may be more impactful because it’s timed with a sonic event.

    To note feedback and to-dos (Markers on a timeline)

    I also like to use markers to make notes for editing tasks on a sequence. Does this clip need color correction? Mark it. Do I need to tighten up that section about how quantum physics is actually a lot simpler than most people think? Mark it. I’ll wait to use these markers when my video is close to completion. It’s especially helpful when I’ve received feedback, it’s a good way to keep track of what still needs to be done.

    Markers Panel

    To navigate a complex project (Markers on a timeline and using the marker panel)

    If I’m working on a longer project, I’ll sometimes use markers to indicate the beginning of a new scene, or topic (in addition to all my notes on content). Then I use the markers panel to see all my markers at a glance. Clicking on one of the markers in the panel will take me to where it exists on my timeline. This can be a life saver in complex projects.

    Navigating Markers Panel

    To categorize and filter (More with the marker panel)

    I try to think a few steps ahead and assign each marker color to a specific purpose. Once my project is all marked up, I can sort by color label in the markers panel. So all my feedback notes are red, I can filter only the red markers to review those notes. If all my favorite interview quotes are teal, then I can sort to see only those.”

Peter Kelly

Peter has been editing TV series for 15+ years, having worked on long & short form, scripted and unscripted projects. He once ran the post production department for 3 digital channels before regaining his senses and returning to editing.
https://peterkellymedia.weebly.com/editor

  • Use B-roll Effectively

    – “Video is a visual medium, and while that might seem like a painfully obvious statement it is one that far too many people forget when they get into the grind of actually making videos. The key thing with any video is to show as much as possible and then tell what you need to.

    When you’ve got a “talking head” interview the best way to make the project more dynamic is to add B-roll. My general approach is to make a rough cut of the interview with just the interview footage first. Once you’re comfortable that the sequence says what you need said in the most concise possible way, save it and then start laying in your B-roll. If you start working with b-roll footage before this point, you could be wasting your time. Until you have a good grasp on the entire segment, matching b-roll to interview doesn’t really make sense from a productivity standpoint. If that section of the interview ends up getting cut, then any time matching b-roll was pointless. If you’re thinking, “Well, it only took me 5 seconds, so I didn’t lose that much time” remember over the course of a project those 5 seconds add up. If I waste 5 seconds out of every minute, that’s 5 minutes wasted in an hour and 40 minutes in an 8 hour day. When you’re chasing a deadline, it’s things like this can make or break your project.

    Once you do start laying in b-roll, I encourage you to put it on its own video track. If the interview footage is on Video Track 1, put it on Video Track 2. Being able to look at your timeline and knowing what’s b-roll without having to play it back is handy, so make it a habit. From there, you now have the fun task of finding/placing all the b-roll shots. I tend to start with the key moments. If I know the interviewee said X and I have footage of X, I pop it in place so that I don’t mistakenly use it elsewhere. Of course, the beauty of non-linear editing means you can shift shots easily later, but it becomes a pain if you or worse, your producer decides they really like it where it is and now you’re stuck trying to find something that works that you may or may not have.

    With the key bits now done, next up are the cut points you need to cover. Unless it’s a stylistic choice, you’re gonna want to cover all your jump cuts. When you are placing the b-roll, make sure you’ve got a least a couple of frames before or after any cut. You want to avoid picture cuts on the same frame as the audio, as it can draw attention to itself which defeats your goal of smoothing things out.

    Once that’s done, you’re gonna want to fill in the rest of the sequence. Your content is going to dictate things, a particularly emotional statement might be better served by staying on the interviewee but generally, you want the same amount of b-roll throughout. As a viewer, I don’t like to see all the b-roll in the first 15 seconds of a two-minute interview. This also helps make the shots that are covering edit points seem less like they are shots that are they just to cover edit points. Part of editing is doing stuff you have to do to make the project work, but another part is making it look like it was all creative choices.

    When you are choosing b-roll, the ideal stuff has movement in it. Either something within the frame is moving or the shot itself is moving. This goes back to the idea that video is a visual medium, so as much as you can, use the medium. If your b-roll is completely static, consider adding movement to it by having it scale up or down in size. By that I mean, add a keyframe to the first frame of the shot and the last frame, then adjust the scale and position of it at least one. Photos are the most common item that requires this treatment, and a simple five percent change in size over a few seconds can make a world of difference in the production value of your piece.

    Once you’ve gotten all the b-roll in place, go back over the entire interview and cut the dialogue down. If the person talking isn’t on camera for an “Umm” or an “ahh”, or they’ve paused for a couple of seconds mid-sentence, take it out. You want to be aware of their speech patterns and respect those, but generally, if the viewer is looking at b-roll, any dialogue they hear should be free of any verbal missteps.

    When you’re editing, part of your job is to make every person seen and heard look good. That means using the medium you’re working in, keeping things as visually interesting as possible and using whatever footage you have to enhance the points they’re making.”

Jeff Wixon

I am a professional freelance Video Editor based in London with over 10 years' experience. I work across a diverse range of formats including broadcast, brand films, trailers, promos, mood films, live events, documentaries, online media and motion graphics.
https://www.jeffwixon.com/

  • Pull Your Selects the Right Way

    – “Every editor has their own preferences, their own way of working. Some ways that work well for some don’t always work well for others. Some people will find this tip useful which is great, others may just think it’s gibberish. Workflows will always differ depending on the style and format of edit you’re working on, i.e broadcast, web & social media, advertising, DOOH, live events, short-form or long-form etc. For me I don’t think there’s one right way of doing something; it’s what ever works for you and makes you a better, faster editor. There are so many different ways of doing things that ultimately give you the same result, you just need to find what works for you and mould it into your workflow.

    One of the most important parts of my workflow is pulling selects – this is something that can speed up your edit dramatically. I work on a lot of different short form content for big brands and agencies including commercials, brand films, social films, sizzle reels, mini docs, live events and much more. Live events are where my selects reels are crucial.

    The live event jobs I work on result in receiving the rushes immediately after the event has taken place (when I say live events I’m not literally cutting live, that’s another skill altogether). I am required to be onsite to ingest and turn around an edit in a ridiculously short amount of time. This obviously varies on each job depending on the format you’re working on, but an average would be approx a 2 hour turnaround for a 2-3 minute film. That would be to ingest maybe up to 4-5 hours of rushes, choose your selects, create your narrative and build your edit all ready for client review in 2 hours. I do like a challenge, but I also like to create a film worthy of an audience and 2 hours simply isn’t enough time to craft a masterpiece, but with my selects reel at my side I will do the best I can and deliver a film within that deadline.

    So here’s my simple workflow. Once I’ve ingested all the rushes I drag each folder in number order onto a timeline. This is my raw rushes timeline. It’s important for me to keep the raw timeline in the same order of when it’s been shot, obviously time of day timecoded footage is a big help here. The raw timeline is somewhere you can keep going back to throughout your editing process, it’s somewhere you can go to if say the director or client suddenly appears and demands to see a specific shot. Having a raw timeline with all the rushes is a huge life saver. As long as it’s organised you should be able to find the requested shot quickly and pull it up in the monitor to playback. Although on the odd occasion you will need a little direction from the director or cameraman to give you a rough time of when this specific shot was captured.

    So I now have my raw timeline, I begin to scrub through and begin pulling my A-roll selects. A-roll selects is the main footage, usually interviews that will make up the narrative for the film. With my raw clips on video layer 1 I pull my selects up onto video layer 2, here I can now clearly see where I’ve pulled selects from my raw timeline, I can clearly see if I’ve missed anything and easily go between each select. Once I’ve been through all the A-roll, I will copy all of the clips which are now on video layer 2 to a new timeline named ‘A-Roll Selects reel’. I then move on to pulling the B-roll selects. B-roll is the alternative footage, GVs, shots of the event that I will use to intercut with the main footage from my A-Roll selects reel. Same thing again, but instead I pull my clips up onto video layer 3 this time to keep the B-roll separate from the A-roll on Layer 2. Once I’ve been through all the rushes I’ll copy all the B-roll selects on to a new timeline named ‘B-roll selects reel’. It’s important for me to go through the A-roll first so you can start to piece the narrative together in your head. This makes it much easier when you’re pulling selects from your B-roll, as you’ll have a better idea of what B-roll clips will fit with the A-roll that you’ve selected.

    Now I have my selects, it’s time to start building the edit. I have 2 ways of working here, depending on the editing software I am using. One way is something called ‘Pancake Editing’ which is one of my favourites. It’s very simple, you just stack your timelines on top of each other. I’m a visual person, and like to be able to see all my clips clearly on the timeline. But not only that, stacking timelines gives you instant access to your select reels you’ve created. Just drag and drop. Alternatively I can just paste all the selects onto my main edit, keeping them toward the end of the timeline. If you’re working on a laptop with limited screen space this would be your best option. From there I can quickly access and place the selects into the edit. I only have a 2 hour window for creating this edit so I need to be quick, first putting together the narrative or a sound bed as some call it, then choosing the B-roll, so I need my selects within easy reach. Shots don’t always work as well as you’d imagined when you first pulled your selects, so I may be constantly dragging and dropping different B-roll shots in and out of the edit. I find a lot of the time you don’t really know how your edit’s going to go until you start editing something. Best thing to do is just start picking out shots from your selects and throw them onto your main edit. Play around with the shots, see what works, what doesn’t and the creative juices eventually begin to flow. Or if you’re super lucky, just follow the script if you have one! 🙂

    Using this simple workflow of pulling selects and keeping them within easy access enables me to create a decent 2-3 minute edit in the average 2 hour time frame.

    So my three top tips for a fast edit would be:

    1. Have an organised raw timeline of all your footage
    2. Pull your A-roll selects before your B-roll
    3. Have your selects within easy access, then just start editing and trust that the shots will come together”

Matt Volpe

I'm an award winning Senior Writer Producer Editor in Creative Marketing. From ideating shoot concepts, to editing show clips and original shoot footage, I strive to create amazing looking and sounding trailers / launch campaigns for television. Presently at HBO.
http://mattvolpe.org/new-page

  • Start with Sound First

    – “If your idea is editing a musically driven piece, then starting with sound (music) is ideal. If your idea is editing a narrative piece that tells a story (i.e. trailer) then best approach is to first make a road map of all compelling soundbites and scenes that help shape that story. Meanwhile, help craft the story along with music and sound design. Once you have a solid map, you have a solid running time, then it makes it a lot more productive and enjoyable to add the “icing on the cake” and paint it with visuals. Sound is, after all, a major component to any promo, trailer, show, film.”

Julian Alleyne

First fell into editing from watching my dad edit wedding videos. When I was younger I would go with my friends and film and skateboard videos. After going to college for film I started working in the news.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-alleyne-b9279487/

  • Nested Sequences

    – “Have you ever had so many layers on your timeline that you have to keep scrolling all the way to the top and have to keep minimizing and maximizing your screen? Well fear no more, Nesting is here! The power of nesting your sequences is a great tool to use when wanting to cut down visual on how your projects look and sometimes can improve performance on your editing system. Let’s walk through this with a few steps.

    1) Make a new sequence. Put the following elements you want to have on your timeline.

    Nested Sequence timeline

    2) Let’s say you want to add a graphic with a few layers. Do your edit as you would (add dissolves, crops, etc)

    Video editing - Add a graphic with a few layers

    3) Once finished right click on sequence (#protip always good to label sequences) and add to bin. Some edit systems may see different commands.

    Add to bin - Label Sequences

    4) Drag in the sequence labeled and put it on your timeline. Just like that you cut down on having to have multiple layers. You can add movement to your nested sequence!

    Nested Sequence

    Using nested sequences you can minimize the amount layers and have a less cluttered timeline, saving you lots of time!”

Mike Eddy

Mike Eddy is an Apple Certified Final Cut Pro X Trainer and has been a Century College Filmmaking & Video Production instructor since 2007. He was nominated for the 2017-2018, MN State, Board of Trustees, Excellence in Teaching Award.
https://vimeo.com/mikeeddy

  • Name Files By Year-Month-Day

    – “Nothing slows down editing more than not being able to find a file! Make sure you come up with a consistent system for organizing client files that works for you. Here is a tip: most folders list files alphabetically. So, if you want to organize you files by date, use the method of naming files by Year-Month-Day. Example: 2019-03-09. This is alphabetical, but chronological at the same time. Struggling to find a particular file when you are in the editing suite while the client is watching the time tick away can give you a real panic attack. Don’t be that guy.”

kasumi

Kasumi is an experimental filmmaker, video artist, musician, producer and published author. Her work explores the fundamental conventions embedded in imagery and contemporary insights into the formation of memory -- the ways our expectations shape our memories, and the ways our memories shape our expectations.
http://www.kasumifilms.com/

  • The Importance of Clip Labeling

    – “Let me just start by mentioning that one of my films, Shockwaves, was created from over 25,000 out of about 300,000 separate unrelated shots, clips and samples – most of them public domain – all kept in a gargantuan folder in my raided 20TB Drobo. I use and reuse these materials in different ways for different projects, and constantly add new ones. Therefore, the biggest challenge for me is actually finding the clip I want for a specific purpose without killing my flow state.

    Needless to say, it was always a nightmare to find what I needed in that colossal junk drawer of media until I became more vigilant about labeling, and that means using key words, meta data, and simply naming the clip itself with words or phrases. Whether it’s a color, an object, an action, an emotion, a symbol, a line of dialog, etc., unless you have a photographic memory or are a master at free-association, clip labeling is essential.”

Filed Under: Video Editing

How to Increase Email Open Rate: 42 Expert Tips

by Chris Herbert | Last Updated May 25, 2021

How to Improve Email Open Rate

Email marketing may well be one of the most effective marketing channels in terms of starting a conversation with your audience, but if no one opens your emails, you may as well be talking to yourself! And that’s not going to get you anywhere in a hurry…

That’s right. We’re talking open rates in this article. Just about every email marketing service nowadays lets you track the open rates of the campaigns you send out, which is pretty cool. What’s not so cool is when that magical number won’t seem to budge, or worse still, when it plunges lower and lower, campaign after campaign, and you can’t help but think “what did I do?!” But fear not. You’re not alone and it’s nothing personal, but you probably do need to start doing things a little differently.

So what do you need to change? I talked to a few people who know a thing or two about email marketing, and asked them each to run me through one thing you can do to get more opens. The result…40 tips to help you increase your email open rates from some of the most respected email marketing pros in the world.

Don’t waste another second. Scroll down the page and take advantage of the expert advice. Don’t try everything at once, but do take action and implement some of these ideas before you hit “send” on your next mailout. You’ve worked hard to build your list, now you need to take care of it.

We want to hear about your results and whether these tips helped you better your email open rates in the comments section at the end of this article!

40 Tips to Increase Open Rate

 

Improve Your Email Open Rate: 40 Brilliant Tips

“How to increase your open rate”…that’s a search you’ll never have to do again! Here’s a quickfire overview of all of the tips that were shared with us in the making of this article. There’s no magic email open rate formula unfortunately, so try a few of these tips and see what works for your list.

  1. Incorporate video into your emails
  2. Surprise your email subscribers by pulling them out of their comfort zone
  3. Make sure you’re using fresh subject lines – overuse will be your downfall
  4. A/B test to find what your list reacts best to
  5. Have a list hygiene strategy
  6. Have a coherent plan, set simple goals + measure
  7. Make sure you’re using the right benchmarks
  8. Set up BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification)
  9. Use song, book + film titles in the subject line
  10. Make sure your previous email was awesome
  11. Keep the subject line short
  12. Personalize the first sentence of your email
  13. Really understand your target audience
  14. Make sure your emails are mobile friendly
  15. Re-humanize your email communications through video (record rather than write)
  16. Keep your email lists dynamic
  17. Use geolocation to target your audience
  18. Be relevant
  19. Get the timing right (+ we’re not referring to time of day)
  20. Properly segment your email list
  21. Use personalization within the email subject line
  22. Explain “what’s in it for the reader?”
  23. Add emojis
  24. Write engaging content
  25. Sort out email authentication before anything else
  26. Get their attention with emotional triggers
  27. Develop a strong welcome series
  28. Find the perfect sending frequency
  29. Avoid “spammy” words in the subject line
  30. Use the subject line and preheader combination
  31. Write outrageous subject lines
  32. Focus on building positive engagement
  33. Figure out where the reader is in their customer journey
  34. Pique interest with a touch of curiosity + a question mark in the subject line
  35. Test short text-only emails
  36. Harness schadenfreude in your subject line
  37. Give each subscriber what they want, when they want it
  38. Develop a brand persona
  39. Write your subject line to one person, and answer their needs
  40. Try alternating friendly from

Other Articles You May Find Useful:

  • 89 Effective Cold Email Subject Lines
  • Best Email Marketing Software for Small Business? 104 Pros Vote
  • How to Improve Email Deliverability Rates: Expert Advice + Strategies
  • Best Email Marketing Books: What Do The Pros Recommend You Read?
  • How to Build an Email List: 75 Experts Share Their Secrets
  • All Email Marketing Resources

What the Experts Said: Email Open Rate Tips Explained

Below you’ll find each of the open rate tips explained in more detail, by the email marketing pros that were kind enough to share them with us. There’s tons of actionable advice, and plenty of “outside the box” thinking and ideas that should get you on the right track to an ever improving email open rate.

Use the filters below to skip to the tips you’re most interested in!

{"filter_mode":"masonry"}
  • All
  • “Spammy” Words
  • A Touch of Curiosity
  • A/B Testing
  • Add Emojis
  • Alternating Friendly From
  • Be Relevant
  • Brand Persona
  • Email Authentication
  • Emotional Triggers
  • Engaging Content
  • Focus on Positive Engagement
  • Get the Timing Right
  • Harness Schadenfreude
  • Have a Coherent Plan
  • Incorporate Video
  • Keep Your Lists Dynamic
  • Know Your Audience
  • List Hygiene
  • Make Sure Your Previous Email was Awesome
  • Mobile Friendly
  • Outrageous Subject Lines
  • Personalization within the Subject Line
  • Personalize & Answer Their Needs
  • Personalize First Sentence of Your Email
  • Re-Humanize Your Email Through Video
  • Segment Your Email List
  • Sending Frequency
  • Set up BIMI
  • Short Subject Lines
  • Short Text-Only Emails
  • Song - Film - Book Titles in Subject Lines
  • Strong Welcome Series
  • Subject Line & Preheader Combination
  • Subject Line Freshness
  • Surprise Your Subscribers
  • Two Benchmarks You NEED to Use
  • Use Geolocation
  • What They Want - When They Want It
  • What’s in it for the Customer?
  • Where are They in Their Customer Journey?
Pieterjan Decoster
Pieterjan Decoster is the owner of email agency Saluton, where they help ecommerce brands grow their business by designing and building effective, automated email programs that engage prospects and (re-) activate customers.
https://www.salutonagency.com

  • Find the Perfect Sending Frequency

    – “Like in every relationship, there needs to be a balance between together-time and me-time. If you are sending too many emails to your subscribers, they get annoyed, stop opening them and eventually, break up.

    Try some A/B testing to find your sweet spot. Split your database in 2 segments and increase or decrease the sending frequency in one of them. Don’t change the sending frequency of the other segment. After a while, look at the email open rates and click rates. Is there a difference?”

Melanie Diehl
Melanie is an award winning email marketing expert who creates campaigns that deliver results for her clients.
http://melaniediehl.com

  • Incorporate Video

    – “Across all industries, average email open rates hover around 18%. And while that’s better than average organic reach on social media marketing, you want to see that number of emails opened rise! After all, if your emails aren’t getting opened, they’re not getting read and your CTA’s aren’t delivering the results you need.

    There are a number of tactics that can increase your open rates. One of those is VIDEO, the reigning king of digital content marketing. Studies show that using the word “video” in your subject line can increase email open rates by as much as 18% and your CTR (click through rate) by as much as 65%! That’s significant. It can also build loyalty and reduce unsubscribes.

    In this real-life example, you can see Diane’s campaign results. Diane is an esthetician who always has a great open rate averaging at 25%. In her industry the average open rate is 12%. She had been experimenting with some Facebook livestreaming on her business page and decided to include it in her general monthly email. This email campaign performed even better than usual with an open rate of 45%, almost double her average. And we didn’t even use video in the main subject line, but in the pre-header text. And it still worked like a charm. Take a look at the click report: 73% of the clicks were to the video.

    email with video subject line

    What video should you include in your email campaign? Anything on your YouTube channel is great. Or maybe it’s simply content from someone else that your readers will find valuable. As long as the video content is true to your company’s message and brand, and relevant to your readers, you should be golden.”

Joshua Zelman
Joshua has spent over thirteen years in the digital marketing space, with a large focus on helping many Fortune 500 retailers create and improve their email marketing programs, as well as establishing an omni-channel focus.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-zelman-aa577b2/

  • Personalization within the Email Subject Line

    – “Simple can sometimes be most effective. Calling a customer by name may seem very basic, however in recent testing, we have seen over a 5% lift in unique email open rates when simply calling a customer by first name within the subject line. Now, like most things, this should not be over used. Companies have a tendency to find something that works and use it till it doesn’t. One of the keys to keep a tactic effective is to use it wisely. So for example – if you as a business coupon 3 times a week and one of those coupons is your big kahuna, use it then. Maximize it’s effectiveness by combining it with other proven tactics. Remember the old adage “That’s my name, don’t wear it out”.

    Piggy backing on this simple concept, personalization, when done smartly can be hugely effective in the email subject line. Find the data points that make sense for your customers and your business. “You have 73 points till your next reward!”; “15 days till your anniversary”; “We held on to your size 32 jeans”. Customers like to hear about themselves, it sparks interest, it shows a known connection. So whether simple like calling them by name or complex like telling them it is time to buy their 11th product; show your customers you know them.”

Gina Ramsey
Gina Ramsey has been a leader in digital marketing since 2006. She is a thought leader in website design, social media strategy, SEO, PPC and email marketing campaigns.
http://www.pinkdogdigital.com

  • Properly Segment Your Email List

    – “Why should someone open your email? If you don’t segment your list they may not. Properly segmented email lists result in a higher open rate, lower unsubscribe rate and higher conversion rates.

    Email List Segmentation Results

    Don’t just send a blast out to everyone on your list. Make sure you segment your lists by interest area and send interesting and relevant content to them. Did you meet them at a networking event? Did they fill out a contact form on your website? Did you capture them through a piece of premium content they downloaded? Did they subscribe to your newsletter? Do you give them the option on your lead capture form to select the lists they would like to be a part of? Does their location make a difference? Have they attended an event that you sponsored? Did they purchase something online? Or did they abandon a product? Make sure you are properly segmenting into their interest areas, not the ones you wish to promote.

    Curated and segmented lists will result in higher success rates for all of your email marketing campaigns.”

Matthew Hunt
Founder at AutomationWolf.com and has 12 years in experience running digital marketing agencies. Now helping coaches, agencies, and consultants automate their prospecting through cold email and AI-assisted technology.
AutomationWolf.com

  • Personalize the First Sentence of Your Email

    – “One of the most important things to do when sending cold emails is to personalize the first line. That is the snippet that shows up as a preview in most email clients. Everyone always talks about the subject line, but that first line is uber important too. People are going to judge whether they want to open your email based on the subject line and snippet of the first sentence.

    Usually, the best thing to do in that first line is to genuinely compliment the prospect. DO NOT tell them what they are doing wrong. No one wants to hear that and that can be really off-putting on an initial outreach email. Find something specific you can compliment them on by looking at their site, bio and LinkedIn profile.

    An example could be:

    6 years in the biz. Good stuff! I see you are a soccer athlete and attribute some of your successes from sports. Totally think that is true too.

    or

    5 years in the biz. Amazing stuff! I like how you grouped all your webinars on one page so people can binge watch all your content. Super smart!

    This way your 1:Many emails feel like it’s a 1:1 email.

    It’s not hard to do this and any great SDR or VA can handle this.

    Taking the 60 seconds to write a personalized line is important and it will dramatically give you much larger email open rates. Right now our average open rate is 70% on cold emails.

    Most tools like Lemlist and Mailshake will allow you to upload a personalized line via a CSV file so it’s easy to do.

    Like all automation, if you feed the tool garbage you’ll get garbage.

    If you feed the automation tools good data and information, you’ll get great results.”

Jason Jacobs
Founder, AJE Digital - Specializing in professional digital marketing services for small & local businesses.
http://www.ajedigital.com

  • Write Engaging Content

    – “Most experts will recommend strong, engaging subject lines to increase email open rates. They will likely also suggest emphasizing a sense of urgency, testing days & times, and personalization. These are all fantastic ideas that are crucial to generating more “opens”.

    While the ideas I mentioned are important, the content of the email itself cannot be overlooked. You may wonder how improving the content will impact email open rates considering that those who don’t open the email will never see the content.

    I personally believe that a strong product will sell itself. Meaning, readers will continue to open your emails and share them with others if the content is worthwhile. I make it a habit to “flag” or mark important emails as “unread” in order to return to them later on at a more convenient time. I do this regardless of when the email arrived or what the subject line is. I know which emails I find important and that I want to read them because the content is valuable.

    Many marketers can suggest the best time to send out an email, or create catchy subject lines. Creating valuable content, however, requires a lot more work. Ask yourself what information you find valuable and survey others in your network as well. Map out your next 4-6 emails and plan articles, videos, case studies and other content to guarantee your readers are receiving quality emails each time you press “send.””

Linda Lovero-Waterhouse
Linda Waterhouse is an award-winning digital marketing strategist who helps businesses gain clarity, take action and increase their revenue. Her current focus is teaching LinkedIn for branding and generating leads. In 2018 Linda was named a NJ Leading Women Entrepreneur Brand Builder.
http://www.lindawaterhouse.com

  • Add Emojis

    – “One of the best ways to get your subject line noticed in a crowded inbox is to use emojis. While once they might have been thought of as “unprofessional”, they are getting more acceptance as people realize that a picture attracts people’s attention and conveys a lot of meaning. Emojis can illustrate your topic, catch attention to email subject line and increase your email open rates. However, you have to look at your own specific audience to make the final decision about whether to use emojis or not.

    Two of my favorite places to find emojis are emojipedia.org and getemoji.com. There are also apps like HipMoji (for pop culture) and Big Emoji Keyboard. Big Emoji Keyboard actually lets you create your own emojis!

    Research has shown that emojis in email subjects can increase open rates by up to 60%. But remember they are not the end all be all. Emojis can either make a good subject line better, or make a bad subject line worse. Do some A/B testing to see how your audience responds to emojis.

    Emojis look different on different email clients and on different operating systems, so try them out to make sure the emojis you pick look the way you expect. I’ve been surprised a few times!

    Searching for emojis can be fun, but distracting. Remember to not spend so much time searching for the perfect emoji that you don’t have time to spend writing your actual message.”

Rachel Baines
Experienced email marketing manager with background in professional services and publishing. Passionate about what makes email great and how to better use an often over relied upon channel. I'm also partial to cake, horror movies and rock and roll music.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelbaines89

  • Write Your Subject Line to One Person and Answer Their Needs

    – “Ensuring you really understand your audience when you first segment your list by dynamically segmenting them based on their wants and needs, skills, pain points and demographics will allow you to identify exactly what your email communication can answer for them. Utilising dynamic content in your subject lines alongside personalisation will really ensure the email speaks to that specific person and help with the ambition to market to an audience of one.

    This is only really possible with good quality data, so a secondary tip is to ensure that you really understand how to capture the data you need to make your email marketing efforts really stand out, by providing tangible and genuinely useful content to each person on your list.”

Vincent Tobiaz
Former Email Developer for the rewards programs of Verizon, AT&T, Citigroup, AARP, Wells Fargo, Rakuten, Fridays, & CEO at SEO Smooth
https://www.seosmooth.com/our-team

  • Test Short Text-Only Emails

    – “When my full-time Email Developing came to an end, the Gmail Inbox Category Tabs started rolling out. As we were emailing lists of 2-5 million people in massive B2C markets, open rates dropped double-digit percentages as the new tabs were implemented as the default setting for Gmail. Some of the craftier, and also personable marketing emails I’ve seen recently is only a few short sentences text emails with a link to a site or calendar. These pass by that Promotional category tab and right to the inbox, vastly increasing email open rates in the Gmail website & App.

    Another thing this does is makes the email quickly digestible, and not a drain on one’s time, which I feel in a world of web content and social media content bloat, is of value.”

Cheryl Russell
Over 25 years of marketing and communications experience with industry experience in technology, oil and gas, construction and real estate, law services, and a variety of small to mid-sized businesses.
http://dot2.studio

  • Make Sure Your Emails are Mobile Friendly

    – “We are all spending as much time on our mobile devices as we are sitting at a desk computer. When it comes to email, this is even more true. Make sure your emails are mobile friendly!

    A few tips on achieving a mobile friendly email:

    1. Know Your Email Service – if you are using a service, make sure they are mobile friendly. (Also make sure they can get past spam filters)
    2. Not All Images Will Show – Quite often viewers have images turned off on their mobile devices, so ensure all images have alt text.
    3. Watch Your Width – Mobile widths are about 320 px while desktops are 500 or more.
    4. Keep Them – Include relevant links for mobile users, especially phone numbers!
    5. Don’t Be Too Lengthy – Especially on a mobile device, many people just won’t read a lot. We have very short attention spans so don’t write a novel. If you do, make sure you get your point, and those links, across early!”
Paul Larsen
Paul Larsen has been neck-deep in digital marketing for over ten years. When he is not A/B testing and mapping out digital strategies, he can be found sweeping up glitter or stepping on his daughters' Barbie accessories. He enjoys both!
https://www.redolive.com/utah-email-marketing/

  • Avoid “Spammy” Words in the Subject Line

    – “An easy way to improve your email open rate is to avoid Spammy words in your subject line. Of course if you are sending an email about everyone’s favorite canned meat, by all means use all the spammy words… 😉

    What is a Spammy word? – A spammy word is a word or phrase that at worst can trigger the email provider to block the email and at best it makes the email recipient skip over or delete the email message entirely. It is best to avoid these words in your subject line all together.

    1. Free (especially FREE in all caps)
    2. Click Here
    3. Full Refund
    4. Limited Time Offer
    5. No Obligation
    6. You Are A Winner!
    7. Double Your
    8. Money Back
    9. Pre-approved
    10. Once in a Lifetime

    The above list is not exhaustive, but it is a good start. Happy Emailing!”

Lindsey Roberts
Lindsey is an IDM certified email marketer who is passionate about helping brands send better emails, and has been doing so for over 10 years. She's worked with organisations of all shapes and sizes, including brands such as Chanel and Adidas, and currently leads on all email marketing at Visualsoft.
http://linkedin.com/in/lindsey-roberts-25358823

  • Improve Your Open Rate with A/B Testing

    – “Open rate is probably one of the first metrics that comes to mind when looking at the success of an email campaign. Open rate can be a key indicator of how engaged your mailing list is. There’s no doubt it’s important – if subscribers don’t open your email, they won’t see your content and won’t take the action you want them to/convert. If your email open rates are decreasing, however, your concerns should be bigger than low conversion rates – ISPs monitor how recipients engage with your emails. Frequently sending to high volumes who delete without open could lead to you being placed in the spam folder. Doing this over a long period of time might eventually lead to high soft bounce rates, which might lead to you being blacklisted. I know that sounds scary and it is worst case scenario, but I have seen it happen in extreme cases over the years! This could be a whole article on it’s own, so for now, let’s focus just on improving email open rates.

    Even if you think your open rate is good, you don’t just want to maintain it – especially not as your list grows. You want to optimise it and get more people opening. More openers leads to more clickers/converters. It’s a no brainer! One tactic which can help improve your email open rates is to carry out A/B testing. A/B testing is setting up 2 versions of an email and sending version A to half of your list, and version B to the other half. Whichever has the best result – in this case, the email with the highest open rate – is deemed the winner. It’s a great way to get insight into what your subscribers respond well to.

    AB Testing to Improve Email Open Rate

    Carrying Out A/B Testing

    A/B testing should be easy enough to do in almost any Email Service Provider – most have specific functionality to allow you to carry it out. However, doing the odd A/B test on an email every now and then won’t help you out in the long run. You need a plan in place to get real results. Think about the different subject lines you’ve sent out in your emails historically. Which ones have seen better open rates? What types of subject line have you been sending? Have you ever done anything different that’s had any kind of impact on your open rate? Do you have any ideas of what does / doesn’t work for your subscribers that you can test? It’s surprising how often Marketers have an idea of what they think works, but when it’s tested, they’re proven wrong! Some things you can carry out subject line testing on could include:

    • length
    • action focused language
    • using key words
    • using words with different connotations i.e. clearance / sale / outlet
    • instilling urgency
    • using brand names
    • using emojis
    • using personalisation
    • questions
    • statements
    • intriguing language
    • using discounts
    • using numbers

    Once you’ve decided on which tests are your priority, it’s time to create your testing plan.

    Creating a Testing Plan

    Having a plan is important, and will help you when it comes to analysing results. I’d recommend carrying out repeat tests on each variable in order to verify results – the result of one test alone won’t be significant as a number of other things could have impacted the results, such as the specific offer of that email, as well as the time of day and when in the month it was sent. This could mean that in one month, all of your A/B tests are on the same variable. Then, you have more data to see if your results have been significant.

    Create your plan in a spreadsheet format with a sending schedule and detail on the test variable. It might look something like this:

    Creating a Testing Plan

    (Click to Enlarge)

    You can use this to ensure that you’re keeping your plan on track, as well as recording your results. Any learnings can be carried forward into the next month. For example, if you find that using personalisation significantly improves your open rate, when you move onto your next test, you can use personalisation if appropriate.

    You might find that some tests don’t have any statistically significant results. For example, using emojis might not have any real impact on your email open rates. That’s good insight too – all of the results help you build up a picture of what your subscribers do and don’t engage with. You may decide to repeat the test, to see if the results are still not verifiable, or move onto another metric to test.

    Other Variants to Test

    You can test variants other than the subject line in order to help improve email open rates, too.

    • from name, for example using Sophie @ BrandName vs Brandname
    • day of the week
    • send time

    You can move on to testing elements of the content of your email if you want to optimise other metrics, such as your click rates and conversion rates. There are so many things you can test, here are just a few examples for inspiration:

    • Calls to Action: colour, wording, placement, number of
    • Imagery: size, layout, image types (i.e. model shots vs product-only shots)
    • Products: placement, showing the price, size of image
    • Length: Long emails with lots of content vs shorter emails with fewer calls to action

    It’s important to only test one thing at a time, though, otherwise, you won’t be able to determine which variant has actually made the difference to your results. Another key thing to remember is that every mailing list is different, so what works for Brand A won’t necessarily work for you. I carried out some testing for a leading financial services provider in the UK and found that Monday mornings at 9am were the best time for them to send their campaigns; their email open rates went from 17% to 25% after a three month testing plan. This wouldn’t be the same for brands even in the same sector. Only testing can prove it!

    Your Action Plan:

    1. Review previous email campaigns, to get an idea of what you think does/doesn’t work
    2. Create your testing plan
    3. Monitor your results
    4. Repeat tests to verify your results, especially if you send regularly and at different times/days. Just because you think something works, doesn’t mean it does – test everything!
    5. Never stop testing – continually optimise your results as your mailing list will always be changing”
Jordie van Rijn
Jordie van Rijn is an email marketing expert and founder of emailvendorselection.com
https://www.emailvendorselection.com

  • Make Sure Your Previous Email was Awesome

    – “The open rate of your email is heavily dependent on what the recipient is expecting to find in there.

    Think about the emails you open each and every time. What do they have in common?

    Even better, don’t think, do it literally. Go through your inbox and find the emails that you open every time. What do they have in common?

    Most likely the content is pretty darn interesting (to you) or even indispensable. That makes those emails valuable. That makes it worth your time.

    So shake off all the subject line anxiety and go for value…because you’re worth it.

    PS: Feel free to forget about individual open rates as a measure of success as well. You aren’t running a engagement popularity contest. A more nuanced way is to look at the email open reach, which defines the part of your audience that has been active over a period of time.”

Jerome Benanti
Accomplished online marketing professional with 10+ Years in Email Marketing. Award-winning background and demonstrated excellence in propelling multi-million dollar projects and improved conversions. Proficient in strategizing as well as execution. Extensive experience in online marketing and strategic email marketing management.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromebenanti/

  • Develop a Brand Persona

    – “Developing your brand’s persona is the first and foremost action that one should take before even thinking about writing your first subject line. The brand’s persona lays the foundation work for how you will talk to your subscribers, segment your lists, develop your creative and plan your subject line tests.

    A few companies that have created best in class personas are: Starbucks, Samsung and T-Mobile. If you think about it, each one does something really well. Take Starbucks for example, their brand persona is, coffee, fun and customer service and they remain at the epicenter of everything they put out. All of the Starbucks’ subject lines follow suit, making the email STANDOUT and creating an urge for the reader to want to open. Not to mention they also do a really good job of defining what you are about to get into when opening the email.

    In my 10 years of email marketing experience, when starting to work on a brand, I develop personas by partnering with my clients to answer the following three questions:

    1. What tone of voice do you want to use in emails (fun, exciting, sad, serious?)
    2. How many streams of emails do you want to develop? Will we be creating a newsletter, a promotional stream? If different streams will exist, subject line plans for each stream need to be mapped out
    3. How often will we be communicating? Daily, Weekly, Bi-Weekly? These details also need to be carved out in the brand persona planning stage

    Once the above questions are answered, everything gets laid out on an email marketing calendar and the process of creating the subject lines can begin. Still taking Starbucks for example, they would have answered the above three brand persona questions as:

    1. The tone of voice for the Starbucks brand is Coffee Lovers, Customer Service and Fun
    2. Different streams of emails will be created around promotions, a rewards program and company news
    3. Multiple communications to different segments delivered daily

    And then they would have taken all of this and put together a marketing calendar. So take July 12th for example, Starbucks wants to announce to the entire customer base that a new brand of coffee is coming out. Taking the above three foundational brand persona traits, Starbucks can then create the following subject line test:

    A) COFFEE ADDICTS: Boy have we got news for you!

    Vs.

    B) Today’s news for you!”

Daniel Miller
For the past 9 years I've worked for one of the world's leading email marketing companies, helping businesses of all sizes get results with email.
https://www.benchmarkemail.com

  • What’s in it for the Customer?

    – “When writing a subject line we need to ask ourselves,”What’s in it for the subscriber?” Leading the subject line with the answer to this question will increase your open rate immediately. Here are some examples:

    Instead of, “Signup to our Webinar and Learn to Code”
    Try, “Learn to Code. Signup to our Webinar”

    Instead of, “Spend over $100 to get 50% Off”
    Try, “Get 50% Off When you Spend Over $100”

    Instead of, “Donate to our Charity to Save Lives”
    Try, “Save Lives by Donating to Our Charity”

    There are two main reasons why this strategy works.

    1. No one wants to do work, period. In the examples above, the first subject lines focus on the work the subscriber has to do to achieve what’s in it for them. Since we don’t care to do work, when reading these subject lines, we are likely to just gloss over them as we already have enough work on our plates. So placing the benefit first gives more of a chance for the subscriber to stop and think about the cost/benefit of the offer at hand.
    2. As humans, we don’t like it when things are taken away from us. When you set the benefit first, we get a sense of being closer to getting it, all we have to do is… Click/Signup/Donate/etc. Because we see and clearly understand the benefit at hand, we are more likely to do the work, as we don’t want this offer to slip out of our hands.

    At Benchmark Email we have conducted A/B tests with this strategy and have seen email open rates increased by over 20%!”

Bennett Lafferty
Bennett has been in Email Marketing for the last 10+ years and currently runs a consulting business that helps companies improve their Email Marketing Programs.
https://www.inbox-integrity.com/

  • Try Alternating Friendly From

    – “The Friendly From is such a cornerstone of brand identity that people often overlook it as something that can be optimized. This is an easy mistake to make, but don’t do it – there is a great opportunity here!

    Think about this: when a new email hits your inbox, where are you looking first? For most people, it’s the Friendly From.

    Like so many other things email marketing and consumer behavior related, this involves human psychology: differing from the norm, in this case a standard FF, often creates significant changes in behavior.

    Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes for a moment. Say your favorite brand always uses their company name as the Friendly From. You’ve grown accustomed to seeing this in your inbox. Now think about what would happen if they changed it.

    Old: Casamigos Tequila
    New: George Clooney, Co-Founder

    This example might be a bit exaggerated, but you get the point. There’s a good chance this new FF would pique your interest enough to generate an open that otherwise might not have happened.

    Alternate Friendly From Examples:

    • Name @ Company
    • Name & Title
    • Company Department
    • Brand Persona
    • Email Content Description, i.e. Deals @ Company

    These can range from playful, to informative to serious – however they should generally align with your email content. Keep in mind, just like other tricks of the trade, frequency of use will be a large determining factor in its success. And above all, always make sure to test before rolling out changes to your full list. As stated above, differing from the norm can produce some significant changes, but not always for the best!”

Simon O'Day
Based in Melbourne, Australia and since 1999 working across customer experience, cross channel and marketing automation in software and services. Working with brands such as Qantas, news Corp and many others and companies such as Responsys, Emma and The Lumery.
http://www.thelumery.com

  • Where are They in Their Customer Journey?

    – “After 20 years of working with clients across the email channel I struggle to keep this to just one answer!

    But, if pressed I think you have to change your entire mindset of email. Talk to your customers about their primary need and where they are in their customer journey and not in a promotional or impersonal way. It is fact that emails related to customer actions destroy the open, click and engagement of any other type of email. When you build this into even a simple matrix of engagement and against activity you win every time.

    • Dormant: Reactivate with an offer
    • Active: Focus on loyalty
    • Purchase: Focus on post purchase value
    • One Time Purchaser: Incentive for repeat”
Tim Watson
Tim’s an email marketing consultant and international speaker who’s presented at conferences in over half a dozen countries. Working with email volumes of up to 90 million/month, his advice is based on answers from extensive analysis and practical testing.
https://www.zettasphere.com

  • Pique Interest with a Touch of Curiosity – and a Question Mark

    – “Great subject lines are very much like great headlines, whether that’s a headline for a webpage or print publication. Magazine front covers and newspapers can be a good source of inspiration for headlines.

    Where headlines and subject lines differ is that with subject lines, a little more curiosity can work wonders.

    The easiest way to achieve this is by posing a question in the subject line. Here’s some examples of real campaign subject lines with high performance:

    • We Have a Winner! Is It You?
    • Want to coin it this year? Copy this man
    • £5 off your next order, [first name]? We’ve just added something special to our sale
    • How Good Is Your Gut Instinct?

    It’s not just about asking any question though. It must be the right question.

    As Bob Bly, author of The Copywriter’s handbook, nicely said “a good question is one the reader can empathise with or would like to see answered”.

    Subject line questions work because they hold the promise of an answer. Pose a question in the subject line that the reader has a burning desire to have answered and the email open will follow.

    A perfect example is the line above “We Have a Winner! Is It You?”. That subject line could have been a simple statement “We Have a Winner!”. With the risk the readers thinks ‘so what?’ and passes it over.

    Adding “Is it You?”, means it’s talking about the most important person, the reader, and makes the reader consider if it is indeed them.

    The question is like an itch, it’s human nature to need to scratch it. They are hard to ignore.

    People love quizzes for a good reason. The question mark is a challenge to the reader – do you know the answer?

    Be open not closed.

    It’s best to avoid asking closed questions. You know, those questions that have a yes or no answer. Such as “Are you hungry?”. Whereas an open question requires a thoughtful answer, contrast “What for you makes a meal tasty?”

    If you do use a closed question, make it one that the reader is going to read with an affirmative nod. A question that your reader will want to say yes to.

    In the earlier example “Want to coin it this year? Copy this man” has a closed question that is likely to be answered with yes. It sets up the second part, “Copy this man”, as the promise and curiosity driver.

    What about this?

    If you’re struggling to find a good question that is open and can’t be answered easily without opening the email, then the word “this” is your solution.

    MarketingExperiments ran a split test of these lines:

    • Quarterbacks aren’t the only changes being tested in Denver
    • A scientific way to increase your conversions
    • Do your landing pages pass this test?
    • [Optimization Summit] 3 Days to a Better Website ($300 Off Coupon Inside!)
    • Learn 3 tips that made that made 10,000 landing pages extremely successful

    The winner had a 126% click uplift against the weakest performer. Which one was it?

    The one with the question of course, “Do your landing pages pass this test?”

    The word ‘this’ sets up the tease. ‘This’ refers to what’s in the email body, you must open to find out the answer.

    Let’s see how else it’s used with further examples from high performing real subject lines:

    • Do you agree with this?
    • What’s wrong with this picture?
    • Could this crazy estate agent improve your copy?

    Follow Through and Deliver

    Once the question is setup, make sure your email answers the question! If the question is not answered and the subject line was an empty promise, you’ll damage the relationship. A cheated reader is one less likely to open your next email.

    In Cialdini’ bestseller “Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion”, one of his six principles is that of consistency.

    With a good answer, not only does the reader continue nodding in agreement, but due to our natural tendency to be consistent with earlier actions, they are compelled into clicking through. Anything else would be inconsistent with their thought pattern.

    Now, there is only one question left.

    What question will pique your audience’s interest?”

Vanessa Lanham-Day
Vanesa’s business is On Track Marketing, where she delivers intensive business growth mentoring programmes to business owners, as well as leading her Mastermind group. Vanessa describes herself as being all about ‘Inspiring and empowering business owners to fulfil their marketing and business growth potential’.
http://www.on-track-marketing.co.uk

  • Use Song, Film & Book Titles in the Email Subject Line

    – “It’s all very well being told that your subject line needs to be ‘interesting’ – what if your bones are telling you that you couldn’t recognise an interesting headline, even if it assaulted you on a dark night…then you’ve got a problem. The ‘film, book and song title’ trick is a great get-out-of-jail-free card, and you can use and expand on it super creatively in your email copy. It almost gives you permission to add personality to your message.

    For example …

    • ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to!!’ – a great intro to any subject you feel strongly about.
    • ‘Great Expectations!’, or ‘When Dickens wrote Great Expectations’ he wasn’t kidding … could be the lead into anything awesome you want to announce
    • ‘It’s been a hard day’s night round here’ – could be the intro to the launch of something new
    • Why being ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’is important to us … an email about customer service
    • Don’t be ‘Gone with the wind’ – could the the precusror to something with limited availability
    • Talk about ‘Top Gun’ – Tom Cruise would be up for this! – Could launch your exclusive VIP deal

    Best advice – just have fun with it!!”

Jenny Lassi
As a seasoned digital marketing professional and Digital Marketing Strategist for Infinity Direct, I have a passion for solving business problems with technology. My other passions are martech stack consulting and expanding agency capabilities through strategic partnerships.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-lassi-781925/

  • Email Authentication Before Anything Else

    – “All of your efforts for sender awareness, awesome subject line, eye-catching creative, responsive design, and amazing copy are for nothing if your email bounces or gets routed to a spam folder and no one knows it’s there to open it. The good news is that you DO have control over a lot of why an email gets bounced (rejected), quarantined (allowed in but not routed to inbox/spam folder) or routed to a spam or junk folder.

    Authentication between your Sender Email address domain and the email service provider (ESP) sending an email on behalf of your domain is the #1 step before you ever send out an email. You will need all 3 forms of authentication: DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.

    A quick way to check is to send yourself an email from your ESP and when you receive it, view the source and read the header. To view the source, you can right click on the email (if using Outlook):

    Sender Email Authentication

    What you’re looking for is that each form of authentication shows it passing like:

    Sender Email Authentication 2

    If you don’t get a pass for each form of authentication, you can use an inspector tool to help you diagnose what needs to change:

    DKIM Inspector: https://dmarcian.com/dkim-inspector/

    SPF Inspector: https://dmarcian.com/spf-survey/

    DMARC Inspector: https://dmarcian.com/dmarc-inspector/

    Whenever there is an issue with bounces, low open rates or emails not passing spam filters, authentication is always the first thing to address. Most of the time, if you passed all at one point, but over time you see a decline in email open rates or hearing reports of people not receiving your email, something changed. Most likely the SPF record, as IT teams will edit this record the most to add/remove include statements or IP addresses as your MarTech stack changes company-wide.”

Diana Conner
Diana is an email consultant, speaker, and the director of email marketing for Bulldog Media Group. She enjoys being a keen orchestrator of the email marketing symphony.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dianaconner18

  • Keep the Subject Line Short

    – “The best way to increase email open rates of your reader’s emails is to focus on the subject line. An open rate hinges on having a spectacular subject line. Be clever but not sneaky. Grab attention but don’t shout. Remember: people need to open your emails for them to have an impact. Without an opened email, customers cannot see the content or offer, let alone engage or convert. Yes, targeting and other factors matter, like getting into the inbox in the first place. However, none are as fundamentally important as the subject line. We’ll assume you are targeting a subset of your audience, with an appropriate frequency, that is engaging so your deliverability rates should be high and the next hurdle is to get them to open among all the other emails in their inbox.

    Keep your subject line short: between 6-10 words should do it. Over 50% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. iPhones show about 35-38 characters in portrait mode, and Galaxy phones show roughly 33 characters in portrait mode. Make sure your subscribers who will open your email on their mobile device can read the entire subject line. Using 3-5 words is also ideal.

    The average office worker gets 121 emails a day. That doesn’t even account for their personal mailbox. So how else can you stand out in the crowd? What helps or hinders an open line? Turns out, there are special keywords that can help increase or decrease opens. Words that decrease tend to be spam triggers. It turns out that numbers help lift email open rates as well. Including just one number can give your open rates a boost. Emojis are giving over 50% boost to email open rates for most brands using them. Just make sure to test rendering across multiple devices to ensure they convert correctly. Also, writing in title case can help set your email apart from others in the inbox. Sense of urgency? Exclusivity? All great strategies to help position your email as one they simply must open for more details.

    Testing is the best way to see what engages best with your audience. Doing A/B tests to see what converts or how your users interact. Perhaps posing a question instead of a “last chance” message resonates more. Maybe putting a 24 hour only message sparks a lift in email open rates. Most ESPs have the capability to identify a test winner and then send that message to the rest of the audience. Once you’ve tested a few times, you may have an idea of how to better “speak” to the customers. Always remember to keep testing because as new users filter in and old ones fade out, your list is continually changing and therefore what resonates with them will also. Happy mailing!”

Rasmus Houlind
Rasmus Houlind is a thought leader within Omnichannel Marketing. With experience from several major agencies, he knows what it takes to succeed in marketing. He's also the author of the book 'Make It All About Me'.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/houlind

  • Get the Timing Right

    – “Look it’s really simple – it’s a matter of getting the timing right. The timing for each individual recipient that is – not in terms of “time of day” or most optimal send out time for a campaign. Instead of focusing on the email (which can also lead to many great ideas by the way) then focus on the occasion for doing so. If you can determine the timing for this occasion per customer by either a simple set of rules based on data, then setup an automated communication flow that times the send out according to this.

    Let me give an example. A Nordic sporting goods retailer sends out a lot of email campaigns – as retailers normally do. Some of their products however, require replenishment after having been used a certain amount of times. Running shoes are one such example. If running shoes get much more than one year old (or have run approximately 1000 km), they need to be replaced in order to prevent knee injuries.

    The sporting goods retailer set up one such flow with the purpose of helping their customers replace running shoes in due time. A simple rule was set up that every day it sent out an email for customers that had purchased running shoes exactly one year ago. Open rates were 3x and conversion rates were 3x when compared to normal email campaigns. And it works every day… Oh… And running shoes are not the only product that wears out by the way.”

Ben Harrington
An ex full mix marketer, focusing on what I love (Email Marketing). With over 12 years' email marketing experience working for businesses big and small in a variety of industries.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/harringtonben/

  • Use Geolocation to Target Your Audience

    – “When it comes to open rates, there isn’t a one size fits all approach, it all depends on the message you’re trying to get across and of course your relationship with your audience.

    My bit of advice is aimed at businesses who run events, in the hospitality sector or just those who need subscribers to visit a certain location.

    And here it is, a drum roll please…

    Use Geolocation to target those subscribers. Of course, this will depend on the data you hold, but if you have an event in London, why would you target subscribers in Scotland? I have worked for plenty of events, shops, restaurants, etc that had been targeting anyone and everyone. They generally saw a decline in open rates soon after because subscribers were just not interested, and as we all know, personalisation is key.

    Instead, target those in the surrounding areas. It’s easy to do, segment your data, personalise your subject line with the location added and away you go.

    For example, I worked with a restaurant chain that had locations throughout Europe and in the Middle East. When it came to marketing to their Dubai based restaurant, they targeted the whole of the Middle East and because of this they had relatively low open rates that were slowly decreasing each time. Having looked at the data they held, I instantly saw a quick win and brought in geolocation targeting. As you would expect, the open rate increased from 8% to 30% over a three month period sending one email per month, using the tactic I shared above.

    Not only will you not be annoying those who can’t attend, but you will increase engagement for those you have targeted.”

Simon Washbrook
Simon is the Founder & CEO of popcorn, and has over 20 years' experience specialising in Email Marketing and as a Marketing Generalist. He has recently launched a new and really easy to use Sales & Marketing platform that tells you when your customers are ready to buy and why.
https://www.popcorn.email

  • Keep Your Lists Dynamic

    – “When it comes to improving your email open rates, you can spend all the time in the world perfecting your subject lines, finding the optimal broadcast time and improving your server reputation, but if you’re not sending it to contacts that are in a buying cycle, then you’re wasting your time!

    Now, most good Email Marketers will invest a good chunk of time at the start of a campaign to get the right contacts and segment them into carefully targeted lists. But what happens to these contacts after you have started emailing them and their preferences change, so they no longer fit into the original group? Are you writing them off and just waiting for them to unsubscribe?

    Of course not. Your data is one of the most valuable assets in your company. Which is why you should always look at your contact lists as being dynamic rather than static.

    Let’s imagine one of your contacts, has been identified as a ‘hot prospect’ in your initial segmenting exercise. But ‘stuff’ has happened in their business since then, and although they are technically still a ’hot prospect’, what you are marketing to them is no longer a priority until they have sorted the ‘stuff’ out, which in reality may take some months to happen. So, if you continue to bombard them with ‘hot prospects’ messaging, your emails are eventually going to become just another piece of SPAM in their inbox. Which is the last thing you want as they are still a valuable prospect and you have spent a lot of time and effort carefully positioning your brand ready for the sale.

    Whereas, if you had been continually scoring your contacts’ engagement across both email and your website, you would have identified the fact that they were achieving low scores and that you should move them down a gear into a nurturing campaign, where you would maintain low levels of communication. Then setup a trigger that moves them back into the original sales funnel when they start to re-engage with either your emails or start visiting your website again.

    Keep Your Lists Dynamic

    If you wanted to get really smart, you could combine a series of triggers. So that if a contact went on to visit your website, they would set off a series of specific sales emails related to the page they had visited, ‘Tag’ them as being interested in the topic, send yourself a notification that it had happened, so that you could give them a call. Then automatically move them back into the original ‘Hot Prospects’ campaign to continue the targeted messaging.

    By doing this, not only do you protect your brand from being perceived as a SPAMMER, but you prolong the life of a contact and increase the number of people that make a purchase as a result of your email campaigns. Which is a win for you and for your contacts, as they will value your brand even more for sharing relevant information with them, when they need it.”

Pat Marcello
Pat Marcello is the President and SEO manager of MagnaSites.com, a full-service digital marketing company with the primary emphasis on building killer websites and making them SEO friendly.
https://MagnaSites.com

  • Write Outrageous Subject Lines

    – “The best way to get your emails read is by writing something great. I’m not talking about good writing. I’m talking about LOL funny or outrageous. I once got an email with the subject line: “Baboon Ass for Breakfast.” Would you open that one? Oh, heck yeah. The email went on to describe a hot sauce that the writer had eaten on his eggs that day — called “Baboon Ass” — along with a connected sales pitch that was clever and fun to read.

    The whole deal is being able to write funny. If you can’t… Don’t. You’ll just come off looking stupid. If you can, you’ll get the highest open rates in history. People love funny cat videos and will not only open, but also read emails attached to funny subject lines.

    With that bit of advice, comes a caveat. If you want to write a crazy subject line, be sure it complies with CAN-SPAM act of 2003, your subject line has to reflect what your message is about. So, if you’re going to write something wild, you’d better be able to back it up with a story. Don’t just write something for effect and let it lay. After all, who needs an $11K fine for EACH email you sent? Not me, brothers and sisters. Whole lotta nope.

    But a good story sells, anyway, right? If you can tell a good story, with humor, you’ll not only get better open rates, you’ll also make more sales.”

Kelly Dedman
Kelly is an email marketing pioneer, having worked in email marketing since the industry’s inception. In 2001, Kelly conducted an extensive RFP vendor evaluation and selection process with the first gen of Email Service Providers. Since then, he has worked with hundreds of companies to develop effective email, database marketing and messaging programs.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellydedman/

  • Know Your Target Audience

    – “Understand the various cohorts, or naturally-occurring segments, that comprise your audience. Perform regular testing of subject lines and content themes in order to understand what resonates with each group of your customers. Transform this testing methodology into a list of keywords and messaging tactics that perform well with each group. At the time of deployment, customize a subject line that will appeal to each cohort rather than sending the same subject line to your entire entire list.

    Make it personal. The more you can personalize the subject line – including the customer’s first name or city name, for example (if appropriate to the email content) – the more success you may have at competing for the customer’s attention.

    Finally, never lose sight of what your customers expected to receive when they originally signed up and stay true to your brand promise.”

Saul Gowens
Founder of Websand, a data driven email platform, helping e-commerce businesses retain and love their customers.
https://www.websand.co.uk/

  • Have a Coherent Plan, Set Some Simple Goals + Measure Them

    – “Your plan should be data driven, by that I mean segmented by the behaviour of your audience. Separating your current customers, previous customers, and prospects. (see screenshot below)

    Segmented by the Behaviour of Your Audience

    Break things up to be more relevant. Separate your prospect conversion programme, your customer engagement programme, and retention programme from your ‘normal traditional email campaigns’. If are in ecommerce and you don’t have these in programmes in place, you are missing a massive opportunity, so make that step one of your plan.

    Email marketing should be a constantly evolving and improving process. If you keep repeating the same boring stuff to the same boring people it should not be a surprise when your email open rates drop and unsubscribes increase.

    Keep it relevant and please, please don’t over send. Email marketing is one of the few direct channels you have with your audience – remember you are sending messages to people not inboxes. So don’t abuse your email channel, be respectful, honour your plan, and you’ll do great.”

Kate Barrett
Kate Barrett is the founder of eFocus Marketing – a specialist email marketing agency providing consultancy, management and training to companies around the world. With over 13 years’ experience, Kate has helped a large range of companies (including M&S, Argos, TUI, QVC, and Adidas, among others) develop comprehensive strategies to target subscribers more intelligently and increase their results. Kate is also the author of the book ‘E-telligence: email marketing isn’t dead, the way you’re using it is’.
http://e-focusmarketing.com

  • What They Want, When They Want It

    – “There are lots of tweaks and changes you can make to adjust and optimise your subject lines and make them more relevant, enticing and encourage the reader to actually open the email and see all the great content you have inside.

    Doing so will improve your email open rates by learning what techniques, formats, wording and styles resonate with your audience, and what doesn’t.

    But, in the long term, the most important and effective way to improve your email open rates overall is to make sure that your subscribers…

    1. Understand and trust that it is you who is sending emails to them
    2. Expect to receive the content you’re sending and when you’re sending it
    3. Want to receive emails from you because they’re relevant, interesting, helpful and/or inspiring

    To meet these needs, you need to start right at the beginning…

    At eFocus Marketing, whenever we have a client who is seeing poor email open rates or increasing negative engagement such as complaint rates, outside of running tests on individual subject lines such as the elements mentioned above, as well as message timing, cadence, frequency, and of course the offers contained therein (we have a great split test planner to download here to help you create tests that actually get results!), the first place we start is to analyse the sign-up process.

    It’s the entry point to your programme and the first impression the subscriber gets, so it has to be good if you want to lay the groundwork for an engaged email audience who WANT to open your emails.

    Here are the main 5 areas we focus on to do exactly that…

    1) Ensure You Properly Set Expectations on Sign Up

    Be as explicit as you can and tell the subscriber how often they’ll receive emails from you (and for GDPR compliance of course, how they can unsubscribe), make it clear they are actually signing up for your emails* and specify what kinds of messages they’ll receive from you.

    Again for GDPR, you need positive consent and it needs to be unbundled; meaning they can sign up to different marketing channels separately, consent is not combined with accepting T&C’s for example and individual company opt ins are separate etc.

    Email Sign Up
    Email Sign Up 2

    2) Make Your Sign Up Compelling!

    It’s really important to clearly explain what’s in it for them to join your programme – why should they give you their email address, but also, why should they be interested in reading your emails going forward?

    You need to really understand your audience to create a content marketing and contact strategy that works for them – what is it that they want from you? Offers? Inspiration? Exclusive content or access to content other people don’t get?

    Know what they desire and tell them that’s what they’re going to receive! No one wants to sign up for a newsletter – what they want is the tips, tricks and exclusive content you’re going to send them, or the discounts and access to online sales 24 hours before everyone else (for example).

    Also consider incentivising the opt in to give an extra reason to sign up now – will they also get a bonus such as an extra discount or a free download for signing up? This can be particularly useful for retailers to not only gain an opt in, but give an extra push towards making a purchase straight away too.

    Compelling Email Opt In
    Compelling Email Opt In 2

    3) Offer Them a Choice

    Subscribers want to be in control of what they receive and when, and by letting them do this they are more likely to interact with the messages you send. This could be based on their current interests, needs, life situation or other factors; something that brings your content into their real world to create a better connection to their day-to-day lives.

    For example, if you have a child who is a boy, you are more likely to interact with content aimed at boys than girls; yes on some occasions you may be looking for a gift for a girl and of course there is always a place in your strategy for inspiration outside of specified interests. But on the whole, delivering relevant content based on their personal situation (interests, needs and wants) is going to see higher engagement and conversion rates.

    Take a look at the two examples below – the first simply asks the subscriber to choose whether they are male or female. The second goes into a bit more detail, asking their areas of interest and what they’re next project will be. Both of these are examples of these businesses collecting what I would consider to be business critical information to allow them to start personalising and targeting their messaging from the very first message. They don’t collect too much, but just enough to achieve this.

    Then through tracking and progressive profiling, they can collect more information to continue to improve this targeting capability as the relationship progresses, further increasing the relevancy of their communications.

    Profiling Email Subscribers at Signup
    Profiling Email Subscribers at Signup 2

    4) Go Beyond the Sign-Up Form

    The first impressions aren’t solely created on the sign-up form – don’t forget to consider your confirmation thank you page and subsequent welcome and on-boarding process emails to further set expectations, build a relationship and engender trust in your brand and products/services.

    Your thank you page should confirm the action they’ve just taken and prompt them to look out for your first email in their inbox, as well as lead them to the next step you want them to take in their journey with you. This will be different depending on your business type; for example, a content provider may want to direct them to additional resources, popular or new blog posts to read or videos to watch, whereas a retailer may want to encourage them to explore key product categories, suggested products or continue on to turn their email subscription into a full account sign up.

    All of these onward actions will also start to give you behavioural data that you can use to target and personalise the subsequent emails and content they will receive in the on-boarding process.

    The on-boarding process will involve an email or series of emails that are sent within the first 30 days after sign-up, after the welcome email and can be used to further build the relationship with the subscriber, highlight key features, products or services and encourage them to take actions over this period of time without overwhelming them all in one email.

    Initial Emails 1

    5) Deliver!

    Making sure you actually deliver based on what they signed up to is critical to ensure you keep your email open rates high.

    You need to truly understand your audience’s needs and expectations and send the right message, to the right person, at the right time based on what they’ve asked you for, their behaviour and their purchase history.

    Whenever you can, try to go above and beyond to delight and surprise them – use the information you gather wisely and you can even use the technology available to predict what they may want in the future before they even know themselves!

    Deliver on Your Promises
    Deliver on Your Promises 2

    Follow these tips to get you started and work to create a strategy that adapts with and meets the needs of your subscribers – that’s how you create increases in your open rate that last!”

Kath Pay
Kath is recognised as a leading international email marketing thought leader. She devotes her time to developlng customer-centric ecommerce journeys using a holistic, multi-channel approach. With a wealth of knowledge gained from being an industry veteran of 20 years, Kath is an author, blogger, expert contributor, international conference speaker, and trainer.
https://www.holisticemailmarketing.com

  • Get Their Attention with Emotional Triggers

    – “Human Beings are emotional creatures and although we like to think that we make decisions mindfully, more often than not, we make decisions emotionally. Therefore, use emotions to gain your subscriber’s attention. These are innately customer-centric and can generate a lovely uplift in response. Emotional themes such as fascination, curiosity, anxiety, intimacy, guilt, safety, encouragement, exclusivity, urgency, gratification, gratitude, achievement and challenge can be used to speak to their needs.

    Here are some examples of subject lines that call upon emotions to get attention:

    Emotion Fueled Subject Lines

    Using Persado’s AI-powered emotional themes, eDataSource’s (https://edatasource.com) Subject Line Advisor has combined emotional themes with read rates, allowing you to see the success or impact of the emotions used. Note, the below is just an example, and will be different according to brands, products and subscribers. The larger the circle, the more frequently the emotional theme is used. The higher the circle is placed, the higher the read rate/open rate.

    Emotional Insights Open rate

    (Click Image to Enlarge)

    So next time you’re writing a subject line – try adding a bit of emotion to it!”

Komal Helyer
With 20 years of email and digital experience, Komal. VP of Marketing, brings to Pure360 a deep understanding of marketing strategy, marketers' needs and how that translates into use of marketing technology. She has worked with many global leading brands including HSBC, Black & Decker, Carphone Warehouse and Screwfix.
https://www.pure360.com

  • Develop a Strong Welcome Series

    – “What is your email strategy if not a way to build a relationship with your customer? Your emails are conversations with the people that are interested in hearing from your brand, and an email open is the proof that the customer is listening and paying attention. You wouldn’t start a relationship with someone without introducing yourself, making that connection from the beginning, and the person you were talking to certainly wouldn’t be paying you attention if you forgot to do this at beginning. So why should your email strategy be any different? The best, and really only in my opinion, way to start building a strong relationship between you and your customer is through a welcome email. By not sending this most important email in your whole email strategy you are missing out on ensuring your email open rates/engagement remain high.

    Welcome emails drive over 4x higher open rates than your BAU campaigns and they deliver over 5x Click Rate. This is the time your audience are the most engaged with you. It is your opportunity to take advantage of this early period of high engagement to find out more about your audience and help them learn more about your brand.

    If you are already implementing a welcome email, how about a welcome series that seeks to support a business challenge – be it to reinforce your why, reduce churn or to educate the consumer on how to work with your company. Many eCommerce brands use the welcome series to nudge consumers into repeat customers, knowing that if you buy a certain number of times at the beginning of the relationship you are more likely to remain loyal to the brand.

    Done well, the lifetime value of the customer will far outweigh the upfront effort. As it is in person, you never get a second chance to make a first impression!”

Mike Welthy
Mike Welthy is an email marketing consultant based in New York City, specializing in the strategy and development of dynamically generated marketing campaigns that effectively target subscribers and customers in order to impact engagement in the publishing, health & wellness, and entertainment industries.
http://www.impactengagement.com

  • Using Subject Line and Preheader Combination

    – “Every company has a story to tell. There are a multitude of aspects to consider when designing and building your email campaigns — Sender Name, Subject Lines, image to copy ratio, dynamic content, and many more. Each of these can have a major impact on the success or failure of your strategy, and not all have the same impact. To create a more engaging message that will increase conversions and generate greater ROI, you will need to go beyond these basics and incorporate additional tactics and a sound strategy to stand out in a crowded inbox.

    One of these tactics is to start customizing the Preheader in your email campaigns. The Preheader, simply put, is used to control the preview text just below the Subject Line, which appears in the inbox. The original purpose was to provide a summary of the content within the email, so the reader could quickly determine its relevance. With the rapid growth of mobile device usage, now the primary method for checking email, the form and function of the Preheader is more prominent. As more and more people began to use the Preheader as a creative email marketing tactic, its utilization began to take on many forms.

    Most Email Service Providers (ESP) have now integrated the Preheader as part of a normal email campaign setup, which can also be customized much like the Sender Name and Subject Line. This makes the configuration process simple and straightforward. Alternatively, the Preheader can be constructed using HTML and CSS within the actual body of the email, and can be formatted to be “visible” or “hidden.” However, Preheaders work very, very differently, since they always display content, whether you create it or omit it.

    First, here are some general rules and guidelines about Preheaders:

    • They can be configured in the email message as a combination of HTML, CSS and text
    • They can be configured as an email campaign setting or field in many ESP’s
    • If not configured, email clients will automatically show and autoformat the first text that appears (alt text, URLs, unsubscribe copy, etc)
    • The total number of characters displayed varies, depending on the email client
    • The total number of characters displayed can be for the Subject Line and Preheader combined, depending on the email client
    • They can be hidden entirely in the inbox or preview pane, depending on the email client

    Second, here are some common mistakes and things to avoid:

    • Omitting the Preheader completely, leaving what shows completely up to chance
    • Duplicating the Subject Line, in part or exactly
    • Displaying unsubscribe text or URLs
    • Displaying “View in browser”, image alt text, or default text
    • Lengthy text that will be arbitrarily truncated depending on the email client
    • No clear purpose or context related to the Subject Line or email

    When asked “What’s the first thing you look at when deciding whether to open an email?”, a Litmus-Fluent survey discovered that the Preheader accounted for 24% of responses (Sender Name accounting for 42% and Subject Line accounting for the remaining 34%). That means when combined with the Subject Line, this block of text accounts for close to 60% of the reason someone decides to open your email, delete it, or mark it as SPAM.

    The utilization of a Preheader, as a marketing tactic in you email campaigns, can single-handedly increase open rates by up to 7%. But, when combined with the Subject Line, it goes beyond just increasing your email open rates, influencing overall engagement and conversions.

    Crafting an effective Subject Line and Preheader strategy requires identifying the role and responsibility of each, individually and collectively. There are several ways Preheaders work in conjunction with Subject Lines, complementing each other to communicate your story:

    • Build on your Subject Line: Let the Subject Line focus on grabbing the reader’s attention, allowing the Preheader to provide additional context, clarity, and reinforcement.
      Subject Line: Beach, please.
      Preheader: Meet the JT Beach Jogger. Crisp, lightweight, and built for lazy days and epic adventures.
    • Create Urgency with Offers & Promotions: Use discounts and promo codes as a teaser, or add time-sensitive offers too good to pass up.
      Subject Line: 3 great brands—and savings all around!
      Preheader: 35% off at Banana Republic & Gap; 30% off at Old Navy.
    • Personalize: Treat it as you would the Subject Line, including profile or demographic data specific to the reader’s past interactions.
      Subject Line: Get rewarded for your time
      Preheader: Mike – based on your e-rewards, you’re invited to take our survey
    • Increase Awareness: Increase brand awareness, share your tagline, or communicate your value proposition.
      Subject Line: How to tap into the hidden job market
      Preheader: The Ladders – Career advice to speed up your job hunt”
Irina Akelyeva
I help small and medium businesses increase revenue from email marketing. I believe in being data-driven and I see email as one of the most efficient channels to build communication with your prospects and clients.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akelyeva/

  • Set up BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification)

    – “BIMI or Brand Indicators for Message Identification is a standard to verify information about your brand. The senders that use BIMI will appear in the inbox with the logo next to their messages.

    Set up BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification)

    Why BIMI Helps You to Improve Your Email Open Rate?

    1. It increases brand recognition
    2. It ensures brand authentication for your emails
    3. It makes your emails stand out in a crowded inbox

    It’s important to know that BIMI includes two parts: a record and a file (with your logo).

    RECORD:

    The TXT record that is placed in the DNS of the sending domain (for example default._bimi), this should contain the link to the image with the logo. Example of the record: v=BIMI1; l=https://www.example.com/images/logo.svg; For more information about BIMI record, please visit https://authindicators.github.io/rfc-brand-indicators-for-message-identification/#rfc.section.5

    FILE:

    Your file with the logo should have an SVG format and be an exact square.

    Before you start, you should keep in mind that you should:

    1. Have access to your sender domain name servers (DNS)
    2. Set up other authentication records (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) before BIMI
    3. You should have a good sender reputation

    Please note that if you use several sending domains or subdomains, then you should set up BIMI for each of them.

    At the moment this feature is only supported by Yahoo and AOL, however, GMAIL has recently joined the working group (according to postmaster.com). Microsoft will use their standard instead of BIMI; you can check beta testing here https://business.microsoft.com/.

    I would recommend this feature to all companies that have a significant part of their subscribers with Yahoo and AOL emails.”

John Scott
John Scott is Co-founder of Melbourne based email marketing specialists agency, The Orchard Agency. Since 2010, The Orchard Agency has built a foundation as one of Australia’s most experienced Lifecycle Marketing Agencies by developing tailored email marketing programs that deliver solutions based on three core principles: Growth, Conversion & Retention.
https://www.theorchardagency.com.au/about-us/

  • Have a List Hygiene Strategy

    – “The open rate of an email campaign is undoubtedly the most common benchmark with reference to email marketing success.

    However, if you find your open rates are on a downward trend, the first step is to take an in-depth look at your list hygiene practices.

    All email lists will degrade over time with regards to the contact’s interest, so it’s important to monitor who is actively engaging in your email campaigns and have a process to re-engage or remove them from your list.

    This practice is known as ‘list hygiene’ or ‘list cleansing’ and contributes to better deliverability and higher open rates. Removing inactive or non-interested contacts from your list means that your reports more accurately reflect the success of your email campaigns, as they are only based on contacts who still want to hear from you (not those who are no longer interested).Here’s a couple of tips to keep your list in great shape and maintain your (or improve!) open rates.

    1. Review email engagement rates and segment anyone who has not opened, clicked, or purchased from you within the last 12-24 months (this is dependent on factors such as your buying cycle and email frequency).
    2. Create an automated re-engagement email series that can be triggered after 12 months of inactivity to find out if there is a possibility to keep those contacts on your regular send list.
    3. In your re-engagement campaign give your contacts the option to hear from you less frequently, update their email, provide you with feedback or unsubscribe instantly.
    4. If your business is engaging with contacts via other channels such as over the phone or instore, have these in-actives flagged in your CRM so that your team can find out if they have the best email address for that contact and get them to provide the best one. It’s possible they have subscribed via an account that they no longer access to.
    5. Upon exiting the re-engagement series make an informed business decision about what to do with those contacts. While a simple ‘remove all’ approach can lead to an immediate improvement in open rates – it may not always be the right move. It is possible that there are some dormant ‘customers’ among the in-actives. Think about segmenting all contacts who are inactive for 12 months and only send them less frequent emails over the next 12 months. If at any stage they open an email they will automatically move into the main active segment again. After a further 12 months of no activity then you can determine that there have been 24 months of no-engagement and safely consider removing them from your email list.
    6. Just because your contacts are not reading your emails, it doesn’t mean that this email is no longer useful. You can set up retargeting campaigns on advertising platforms using your opt-in email addresses to try and re-engage them via other channels. Think about running a lead generation campaign to this ‘non-active’ email audience so they can update your list with their most recent contact details.

    So if your open rates are looking a little flat – take the focus off list size and place it on list quality. Having a highly engaged audience is the key to successful email marketing, so taking the time to implement general housekeeping rules around list hygiene can boost your open rates and deliver you a highly profitable channel.”

Javed S. Khan
A highly-rated international speaker and founder of Empression: a marketing services company that works with highly motivated entrepreneurs and organizations – developing and managing marketing programs with a purpose that catch people’s attention, and over the long-term generate results through awareness and support of sales.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/javedskhan/

  • Re-Humanize Your Email Communications Through Video

    – “Although emails & email subject lines can be made personalized and persuasive, there’s nothing like a real-time conversation leveraging a medium which covers all the critical non-verbal elements of communication, is the next best thing to being there in person, and helps you stand out, ultimately making you more memorable and relevant.

    The bottom line is people who use video as part of their email communications receive stronger results.

    • 81 per cent get more replies and responses
    • 87 per cent get more clicks in emails
    • 68 per cent get higher lead conversions
    • 90 per cent stay in touch more effectively
    • Adding video into email marketing campaigns has been shown to increase click-through rates by more than 96 per cent. Merely mentioning video in the subject line can boost email open rates by 19 per cent.

    Sources: bombbomb.com & Syndacast

    3 Ways to Use Video Communication in Your Email Messages

    1. Meeting Confirmations

    Sending a video email reminder about your meeting approximately an hour before the meeting time is a great way to create a starting point for a conversation and strong first impression. This is something you can even schedule ahead of time once you confirm the time and date of your meeting.

    2. Post-Meeting Thank-You

    Be sure to also send a video email message after the meeting to thank your client, prospect, lead or referral source for their time. Ideally, you should send the video about an hour after the meeting. There is no need to repeat what you spoke about since it will still be fresh in the individual’s mind, but touching upon next step actions is good idea to show the individual you were attentive and are on top of things!

    3. Meeting Follow-Ups

    About a week or so later, send a video email message along with some valuable content that may help your contact out.

    With these sure tactics, video communication is bound to help your business!

    What do you need to do to being using video as part of your email communications?

    What do you need to do to being using video as part of your email communications.
    First, consider investing in an email service provider that allows you to record personalized videos and include them as part of your email communications for both one-to-one and one-to-many. The software I would recommend is BombBomb.

    See the software in action by watching this brief video:

    It’s all truly about adding video as part of your email communication experience. Once you start, you won’t look back!”

Ryan Phelan
Ryan Phelan brings nearly two decades of worldwide online marketing and email experience, focusing on driving successful growth strategies for high growth SaaS software and online companies like Adestra, Responsys, BlueHornet, infoUSA, Sears and Acxiom.
http://www.originemail.com

  • Be Relevant

    – “HECK NO! THAT’S NOT GOING TO DRIVE ANYTHING LONG TERM!

    Simply put….be relevant.

    Yes, I know that this has been discussed, written, debated and demonstrated for years, but there’s a reason. Because it WORKS!

    As an example, let’s take Woot.com. Now, if you don’t know woot.com, they are an Amazon company that sells reconditioned stuff, and by stuff, I mean cool stuff. They have it all, but it changes all the time. Heck, many of the things inside and outside my home came from woot.

    Every morning, after grabbing my coffee, I sit down and look at their emails. Why you may ask? They’re consistent, relevant and of course FOMO, but the FOMO thing is driven from their relevancy.

    Now think about what you open all the time. You open it because you either like the brand, products, services or company. You must provide that to your subscribers. This one thing should consume your efforts. People open your emails because you have a strong brand and it’s your job to deliver on that. Otherwise, all you’re doing is chasing the vanishing revenue cause you’ve blasted your subscribers with things that don’t matter.

    Start small. Introduce relevancy slow so you can get used to it and test into what works. Try one thing..ONE THING that you can do to increase relevancy. Is it based on past-click, purchase, browse or something else. Work on that one thing. Then move on to the next. It becomes muscle memory.

    It becomes easier over time, but you just have to start…today…NOW!

    Listen, you can play all you want with the subject line, but what really moves the needle? Relevancy. Work on that and you will be a Rockstar.”

Ian Brodie
Ian Brodie works with consultants and coaches to help them get more clients through simpler, more effective marketing. He's the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller,
http://www.ianbrodie.com

  • Harness Schadenfreude in Your Subject Line

    – “Decades ago, legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga highlighted perhaps the most important and overlooked factor in getting people to pay attention to what you say: curiosity.

    You can promise all the value in the world in your email subject line, but if your subscribers think they’ve heard it before they won’t bother opening. You’ve got to add a touch of curiosity. A bit of intrigue as to what’s actually going to be in the email.

    That’s why buzzfeed-like headlines like “The top 10 holiday destinations in the world (you won’t believe #3)” are so effective. You can’t resist finding out what those top 10 destinations are, especially number 3. And that’s even if you never plan to leave your bedroom.

    And there’s a type of subject line I’ve found that builds every bit as much curiosity as the buzzfeed ones, but without being used anywhere near as much, nor coming across as quite so clickbaity.

    It’s invoking “schadenfreude” in your subject line.

    For those of us who didn’t major in either psychology or German, schadenfreude is the strange pleasure you get from learning about or witnessing the troubles and frustrations of others.

    We all have it (though most of us hate to admit it). We’re fascinated by other people’s problems or challenges.

    Can you imagine how popular The Avengers film series would have been had they coasted through all 4 films, defeating the villains without breaking a sweat?

    Not very.

    We like to see our heroes put through the wringer. To genuinely face defeat.

    We’re 99.9% sure they’ll win through in the end. But unless bad things happen to them on the way there’s no drama. No interest.

    And yet if you read most people’s emails what you tend to get is a catalogue of success after success.

    They did this, it was great. They did that, they crushed it. You too can learn from all their super successes.

    Bleugh. Not interesting at all.

    What we’re far more interested in is the mistakes they made. The problems they faced.

    And I don’t mean the fake mistakes that people tend to use when answering interview questions about their greatest weaknesses (or gurus use when trying to sound more human). “I worked too hard and burned myself out”. “I cared too much about my clients”.

    I mean real mistakes where you genuinely screwed up.

    Like the sales meeting I had where I was supposed to emerge with a $5m contract, but instead the client didn’t say a word all meeting. Or the email I sent out with a fantastic and creative subject line I was so proud of, that had the worst open rate I’d had in years.

    Tease those mistakes and problems in your subject lines.

    “My WORST sales meeting ever”. “My worst performing email EVER”.

    Both of those email subject lines were huge successes for me. Simple but irresistible.

    “Don’t make these 3 sales mistakes which nearly cost me my job”.

    I just made that one up on the spot right now, but even I want to know what those 3 mistakes were. That’s how compelling these types of subject line are.

    Of course, don’t overuse them.

    You can’t have every email be about a disaster that befell you or pretty soon people will either think you’re some kind of accident-prone idiot or that you’re making it up.

    And you have to show how you recovered from the mistake or what you learned from it (that your reader can learn too).

    And, of course, you have to have established your credibility before you talk about the mistakes you made, otherwise you’ll come across as a bit of a loser.

    But if you use them right, schadenfreude based subject lines can be hugely powerful. They invoke curiosity, they propel the reader into devouring your email content, and they show you’re human too, that you’re just like your reader.

    And since they involve honest disclosure of real mistakes you made or problems you had, most of your competitors won’t be brave enough to use them – and your emails will stand out a mile.

    So they’re not just a great way of increasing email open rates, they’re a great way of standing out, getting people to bond with you and take action on your recommendations.

    Try them!”

Ruben Zantingh
Ruben is an independent Online Marketing Strategist with over 15 years of experience on both client and agency side. He specializes in email marketing and has worked successfully for over 40 customers, ranging from small startups to big corporates.
http://www.marketingenzym.com

  • Surprise Your Email Subscribers

    – “Surprise your readers by pulling them out of their comfort zone. One of the best subject lines I’ve ever seen was “Do not read this message before 5 PM”. It was in the inbox before 1 PM… Who can control him/herself when reading this?

    For a campaign to structurally reduce traffic jams around the city of Rotterdam I sent out emails on the busiest days of the week, just before the first real problems would occur on the road. The subject line was: “Are you going to join the traffic jam within a few moments?”. By focusing on one specific moment, instead of “How to change your day to day behaviour”, and by mentioning a well known and upcoming frustration, we surprised people. With an average open rate of over 60% you could definitely say it was a success!

    Be careful though: do not use this tip for every email you send out, since the effect is likely to wear off if you do.”

Dave Littlechild
With a 20 year career spanning London, New York and Sydney, Dave has been at the forefront of digital marketing and ecommerce globally for the past 15 years. He presently takes the reigns of the global partnership team for Emarsys, enabling marketers around the world to deliver truly personalized interactions. Dave also works with industry bodies including the DMA's Email Council, The Email Experience Council of the US DMA, and the Data Protection Network in the UK.
http://www.emarsys.com

  • Focus on Positive Engagement

    – “I’m sure that everyone will agree if I say that if you’re not in the inbox, it’s incredibly difficult to get your emails opened, so all the good marketing tips on copy, layout etc are wasted if your email doesn’t get seen in the first place!

    Or are they…?

    As we now know, once you’ve gone through the right authentication and technical setup to ensure reputation on your sending IPs, the major driver for inbox placement across ISPs is continuous positive engagement with emails (opens/ adding to address books/ moving across tabs etc).

    So, whilst we can debate the value of measuring clicks vs opens as a better metric, the fact that Opens plays a significant part in influencing inbox placement via positive engagement, it shows that taking steps to improve it will have an overall uplift on your programs.

    If you’re not currently getting a high level of inbox placement, whilst positive engagement is not necessarily something you can fix in a single email, you need to focus on it across your entire email strategy.

    And with that in mind, every tip that you’ve seen here from the experts in this article should help to move the needle! The more positive engagement you get, the more likely that a larger percentage of future emails will go to inbox (gmail, outlook.com, yahoo! etc).

    Consider it like building momentum…it takes effort to cycle to the top of the hill…but once you’re there, you can coast down much faster than you cycled up there.

    And if you’ve taken on board all the great email marketing tips here, then naturally your email opens (and more importantly, engagement, clicks and conversions) will increase…and as your inbox placement increases, so the momentum we’ve just spoken about also increases!”

Dela Quist
Dela Quist, founder and CEO of leading email marketing agency Alchemy Worx, isn’t one to hold back. Passionate about email marketing, Dela has all the research and statistics at his fingertips to prove his arguments. Dela is an entertaining and convincing writer and speaker - well worth following.
https://touchstonetests.io/

  • Two Benchmarks You NEED to Use

    – “I have been involved in email marketing for almost 20 years and one of the most common questions I get from clients and conference attendees is what is the average open rate, or what open rate should I be aiming for. Google the phrase “open rate benchmarks” and you get 21,400,000 results so there is clearly a lot of demand for and plenty written about open rate benchmarks.

    Benchmarks however can be problematic and need to be used with caution. The first and biggest problem is that they represent an average, so even if your email open rates reach the benchmark, there will be many brands out there who are doing significantly better than you. Then there is the question of whether the benchmark relates to your industry or sector. How valuable can a benchmark largely consisting of B2B of senders if your company is B2C and vice versa.

    We decided to see if we could find benchmarks that could be applied to any brand by analysing the data within Touchstone, a Subject Line testing tool, that holds the results of over 1 million Subject Lines (SL’s) received by over 1 Trillion recipients. Touchstone contains open, click and delivery rate data on subject lines that have been sent across many sectors and industries and uses this data to predict how other subject lines will perform. So you find the best SL for your campaign without having to set up or send the test email.

    Findings

    When we crunched the data, two variables that met the requirement of being true of all industries and business types, but more importantly were directly actionable, really stood out. Segment size and Send frequency!

    Both might seem obvious, after all everyone knows that the more email you send, the lower your open rate will be and that highly targeted emails generate a higher open rate. But what we found in the data was truly surprising. The numbers were consistent across all business types.

    Send Frequency

    Open rate By Send Frequency

    The chart above shows you the impact of send frequency on email open rates. The orange line sloping downwards from left to right is the average open rate you can expect based on how many emails you send a month. On average you can expect an open rate of just under 18% if you send 1 email a month, just over 16% if you send one email a week and just over 12% if you send email out daily.

    The grey bars show the total number of senders that fall into each category, with the majority of senders operating at a send frequency of between 2 and 3 emails a week.

    Why these numbers are different from other benchmarks is simple, the trend is consistent whatever your open rate. If you ignore the actual numbers and focus on the relative difference between the email open rates you will see that the open rate for a monthly email is 10% greater than the open rate for a weekly email and 40% greater than a daily email. One email a week will get you a 10% higher open rate than 2 emails a week. We found this benchmark to be true across the board, so if you currently send 1 email a week and your average open rate is 11% and you want to up your frequency to 2 a week, you can expect your open rate to drop to 9.9%

    How to Use this Benchmark

    One of the challenges facing email marketers is managing the often-conflicting demands of the business. On the one hand stakeholders want you to make the numbers, particularly at the end of the quarter or year end, but at the same time your bonus or performance is measured often based on open rates. Armed with this benchmark you can not only argue for your open rate targets to be adjusted according to business-driven frequency increases; you also have the ammunition to push back if performance in terms of email open rates fall below the benchmark.

    Segment Size

    This chart shows the impact of segment size on email open rates.

    Open rate By Segment Size

    Once again, the line sloping downwards from left to right is the average open rate you can expect based on what percentage of the total list was mailed. On average you can expect an open rate of just under 18% if your segment is highly targeted – the email is sent to less than 1% of the list. At the other end of the scale, when emails are sent more than 50% of the list, that is pretty much everyone getting the same email, the average open rate you can expect falls to 11%. So, a highly targeted email will achieve an average open rate that is 60% higher than an email you send to the entire list. More interestingly, what this data also shows is there is very little to gain if your segment is greater than 10% of your list.

    That is right, any segment that is greater than 10% of your list in size will not perform much better than an email sent to everyone!

    How to Use this Benchmark

    Like the send frequency data, the segment size data is consistent whatever your average open rate. If your average open rate for emails sent to your entire list is 10% you should expect an average open rate of close to 17% for your highly targeted emails and vice versa. Your targets should reflect that.

    More importantly if you look at the coloured bars, blue for the total number of campaign orange for the send volume and yellow for total opens, something else becomes clear. While the vast majority (85%) of the email campaigns are targeted to 25% of the list, these campaigns were responsible for 48% of all opens.

    What this means for resource constrained marketers is this. When it comes to prioritizing your subject line tests a 10% improvement in your batch email open rates will deliver far more opens than a 50% improvement in targeted emails. No matter how tempting it is to use triggered and automated emails to improve your average open rate, do not lose site of that fact.

    Keep Testing and Optimizing

    Finally, no matter what benchmark you use, the only way to stop your open rate performance from dipping over time is to keep your subject lines FRESH! “Once and done” testing does not work. Our subject line tool Touchstone lets you test and optimize hundreds of iterations of your subject line in minutes. So, you can continue to edit and improve every single email you send before goes out.”

Ian Deshays
Ian is a marketing automation specialist who has worked with many of the world’s largest organisations, helping them make the most out of their CRM, loyalty and marketing cloud platforms. His thing? Highly personalised lifecycle marketing.
https://www.alchemyworx.com

  • Subject Line Freshness is the Key

    – “Subject lines… the easiest thing to write, the hardest thing to get right. There is just no single best practice, rule or tactic that works every time.

    Emojis and symbols might produce killer email open rates one week, but that doesn’t mean every subsequent send should be jam-packed with ☀☀☀ and ☺☺☺. You have to keep your email subscribers on their toes.

    The key is freshness in moderation. But how fresh and how much moderation?

    “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often”
    Winston Churchill

    Email Marketers are Not Using Fresh Subject Lines

    Team Alchemy Worx analyzed data within subject line testing tool, Touchstone.

    Touchstone contains open, click and delivery rate data on subject lines from over 1 million subject lines sent over 1 trillion times across various sectors and industries. It uses this data to predict how other subject lines will perform, so marketers can find simulate tests and find the best subject line for their email campaign. In this case, the team used the wealth of data contained within Touchstone to identify how many subject lines could be classed as fresh, and how many were stale – fresh being a subject line that contained at least one word the sender had never used before.

    You might think that with such a conservative definition for freshness, most marketing emails would be classified as ‘fresh’. But as the pie chart shows, less than a third were classified as fresh.

    Freshness of Email Subject Lines

    Fresh Subject Lines Boost Click Rates

    So what effect does freshness have on open and click rates? The results are below:

    Fresh Subject Lines Boost Click Rates

    While we only see a modest increase in email open rates when using fresh words, we see a significant lift – 34% – in the unique click rate. So what’s happening?

    Using fresh subject lines triggers an entirely different subset of subscribers to open your emails – “Oh, this doesn’t look like the weekly newsletter I usually ignore”. And since first-time openers and long term inactives are more likely to click than regular openers, the click rate goes up.

    This also explains why the open rate does not increase as much as the click rate. Fewer regulars opened the email, but more irregulars did. And since irregular subscribers are more likely to convert following an open, the click rate is improved.

    Freshness is About More Than Vocabulary

    But it’s not just the words themselves that contribute to freshness and variety. The way the message is presented is just as important. These are called tactics. Look at these two subject lines about a re-brand:

    • Celebrate our new look with a 10% saving on Apple, Sony & Coke
    • We’ve changed – take a look!

    They are different because they use different tactics. The first is a long, specific, multi proposition with a discount and brands. The second is short and intriguing.

    It’s a common goal of A/B split testing to identify the tactic that works best. We have found this often only tells you which tactic worked best for that email campaign and that attempts to repeat it offer diminishing gains.

    Here are the last two years’ of Alchemy Worx emails broken down by 15 common tactics.

    15 Common Email Subject Line Tactics

    With one or two exceptions there aren’t significant differences between the tactics. That’s because there is no single tactic that works all the time. It’s the change in approach that yields results and naturally these even out over time. And when you do find big differences, think of them as opportunities – so we should probably use symbols a little more and not worry about personalization!

    Use Tactics to Write More Varied Subject Lines

    So, even though there is no golden tactic that works every time, the tactics themselves provide a structured framework for writing varied and fresh subject lines. Take the 4 subject lines below for the same re-brand e-shot and 10% discount:

    • Enjoy a 10% discount and check out our new look
    • Get a 10% saving and see our new website
    • Save 10% and take a peek at our new brand
    • Here’s a 10% off code to celebrate our latest refresh

    The only changes here are to the vocabulary. Here are 15 different ways to write this same message using some of the most common subject line tactics:

    Short – Under 60 characters including spaces (keep it concise)

    • Celebrate our new look with a 10% saving

    Long – Over 80 characters including spaces (you can add more personality and detail)

    • Help us celebrate our brand new look and enjoy 10% off as a thank you for your support

    Single Proposition – Mention only one part of the content of the email

    • Check out our new look!

    Multi Proposition – See our new look, have 10% off and check out our hilarious new blog post and video

    • Check out our new look!

    Brands – Use brand names in your subject line (if appropriate to you)

    • See our new look and enjoy 10% off Apple, Sony, Coke and more

    Symbols – Use symbols (if appropriate)

    • Celebrate our new look with a 10% saving ☺

    Promotional – Get the promotion in, preferably up front

    • Enjoy a 10% discount and check out our new look

    Personalization – Use personalization (name, product, location, etc)

    • ##name## see our new look and have 10% off

    Question – Use a question, preferably open (i.e. the answer can’t be yes or no)

    • We’ve got a new look so what will your celebratory gift be?

    Urgency – Add urgency with a specific time or limited time message

    • See our new look now and enjoy 10% off today

    CTA – Add prompts and imperatives to do something

    • Open up, check out our new look and claim your 10% discount

    Benefit – Say how your customer will benefit from the content of the email

    • See our new look, get 10% off and get your new look for less

    Negative – Phrase in a negative way or use a negative emotion (loss v gain)

    • We’ve changed but hurry or you’ll lose your 10% discount

    Intrigue – Don’t give away the content of the email, make them open to find out

    • Look – we’ve changed!

    Specific (no reflection) – Say what’s in the email or be clear about the content

    • We’ve got a new look and you’ve got a 10% discount

    For each tactic, there will be many different ways to convey the message and still remain within the style of the tactic. You can play with the word order, change the tense or use a thesaurus to find different ways to say the same thing. You can also combine tactics. Here, small tweaks and additions to multi-tactic subject lines make subtle but noticeable differences:

    Short + Single + Brands + Question + Urgency + Benefit

    • Do you want to look sharp in Armani today?

    Short + Single + Brands + Question + Urgency + Benefit + Negative

    • Don’t you want to look sharp in Armani today?

    Long + Single + Promotional + Personalization + Negative + Intrigue

    • Dan, bet you never thought you’d see these five huge brands with a 10% discount

    Long + Promotional + Personalization + Negative + Intrigue + Brands + Multi

    • Dan, bet you never thought you’d see Armani, D&G and Channel with a 10% discount

    Again, it’s important to remember that the tactics are being used as a framework to write varied and interesting subject lines, not to find which tactic works best for you. All of these tactics will work for you at some point, just as all of them will fail at some point. Once you are comfortable with the tactics, then writing 10, 20 even 30 fresh subject lines on the same topic should become 2nd nature. And it’s that variety that is the key to a subject line strategy that embraces constant, strategic change.

    Finally, once you settle on a particular tactic for the next mailing, make sure to test your options using Touchstone. It will instantly identify the best performing subject line, saving you valuable time and resource in your quest to boost engagement and maximize revenue.”

Is Email Open Rate the Best Metric to Measure Success?

Open Rates a Good Measure for Success?

We’ve talked A LOT in this article about improving your email open rates (that was kind of the point after all…), but is it a metric you should pay much attention to? I know that many people do get very hung up on it. A couple of the experts we spoke to talked about how open rate has its shortcomings, and that there are other stats that are a better indicator of success in many cases. Read more about these thoughts here…

Christopher Marriott
Chris is a recognized expert in the process of connecting leading brands with the right marketing technology partners and platforms. Prior to founding Marketing Democracy as a consultancy focused exclusively on the ESP vendor selection process, Chris led the Global Digital and Email Agency Services team at Acxiom, building it into one of the industry’s top services providers.
http://www.marketing-democracy.com
  • Should You Be Focusing on Clicks vs. Opens? – “I realize that this article is about improving your email open rates, and there’s tons of great advice from really smart people. But I like to play the contrarian, and instead I would ask you if you should really focus on email open rates at all? What do open rates represent to you? Are they a proxy for engagement with your brand? If you answered “yes” to that question, then you need to ask your self if opens are truly the best measure of engagement with your email campaigns. Let’s start with understanding the limitations of email marketing statistics as they relate to open rate:

    1. Not Every Open is Captured
      Email marketing systems rely on the images in a campaign being downloaded to trigger the email being recorded as ‘opened’. Outlook has images turned off as a default setting and if a recipient reads the email without downloading the images, or just absorbs it in the viewing pane, the system will record it as unopened. Users of other clients may turn off images, also suppressing recorded email open rates.
    2. Not Every Open is a Good Thing
      a) Mobile and tablet browsers have the images turned on by default, and an email that is only selected with the intention of deleting it is likely to be recorded as ‘opened’. In other words, a false positive.
      b) Other people may open an email with the only intent being to unsubscribe.

    So where does that leave you? If your attention is fully focused on increasing your email open rates, you have to be satisfied with the knowledge that you will always be using incomplete or flawed data. If you really want to accurately measure engagement, I propose that a click through to the website is the type of subscriber engagement that leads to what you really want from that person–a transaction.

    The Engagement Path

    Real engagement tends to happen in sequence:

    1. Brand Impression – I see the email in my inbox and note the sender. Can’t be measured other than as a total of emails delivered followed by guesswork.
    2. Brand Awareness – I open an email and scan its content. Can be measured, but not accurately (see above).
    3. Action – I open AND click through from an email to the brand web site or landing page. This can be measured with precise accuracy and is a strong indicator of my near-term intent to engage/transact.

    In short, clicks provide the most accuracy and value, which is why you might want to optimize to clicks rather than opens.”

Skip Fidura
Skip Fidura is a consumer centric digital marketer with over 20 years' experience on the client, agency and provider sides. Working for dotmailer, OgilvyOne and Acxiom Digital, he has helped B2B and B2C brands like BT, Fred Perry, Paul Smith, DHL and Copa Airlines have real conversations with every customer.
http://www.skipfidura.live

  • The Pitfalls of Email Open Rates

    – “Open rate is always the wrong metric because open rate is always wrong. Don’t misunderstand, the open rate on any given campaign can be useful for indicating if something significant has gone wrong. Think of it as the check engine light of your email marketing. When a client team tells me that they get measured on their program’s open rate and that their bonus depends on it, I cannot decide if I should feel bad for them because their bosses don’t get it or if I should envy the way they were able to ensure they all get a good bonus. The simple answer to getting a better open rate is to only send emails to people who open You want to get a great open rate, just send to your mother.

    Sorry, rant over. Let’s break down a little more logically. David Ogilvy famously said, “We sell or else.” This brings up the first problem with looking at email open rates; they do not generate revenue. In twenty years in email marketing, I have only ever had one client that made money from opens (a publisher that sold ad space in the email). For that client we would work very hard and spare no expense to maximize email open rates. I have seen some brilliantly targeted email campaigns with an absolutely perfect subject line that generated very low open rates. How do I know the segmentation and subject line was so good? Because the open to click and the click to conversion rates were both in the high 90’s. In other words, people self-identified if the offer was for them based on the subject line; those that were interested opened, clicked and bought straight away. Those that were not interested, did not waste time “checking out the offer.”

    The second problem is looking at rates. Percentages are very useful for comparing the results of different email marketing campaigns, especially if they went to different sized audiences. Using them as a measure however, can lead to very bad decision making. Which would you rather have: a 50% open rate on a campaign that went to 100 people or a 10% open rate on a campaign that went to a 1,000? If your bonus depended on it you would lean towards the 50%. The stakeholders in your organization however would go for the 10% almost every time.”

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