How to Improve your Email Open Rates?

Does the email open rate of your company disappoint you? Are your emails are left unopened? All your email marketing campaigns can only be effective if they are responded at the first place.

Email marketing has evolved as the most affordable and efficient way to engage prospective customers. According to a survey, for every dollar spent on effective email marketing, brands make nearly $45 in sales, which smashes mobile marketing ($11 per dollar spent), display marketing ($20), search engine marketing ($23) and social media marketing ($13). Email marketing can serve as a virtual machine if done right.

Making money is obvious with email marketing, what good holds a list of subscribers if your customers don’t open your messages?? It’s high time that marketers rely upon email marketing with successful returns. They need to ensure that their messages are read and distributed. The focus needs to be put on 3 significant metrics open rates, click through rates and forwards.

Email open rates serve as an important aspect of email marketing. But what does it mean? The open rate for an email is a percentage of the number of recipients who opened up your email from a given list. It is an indicator signifying how many subscribers may actually care about your sent content.

Look out for 10 effective ways to keep your customers clicking!

Start with an Appealing Subject line

The first thing a customer comes across is the subject line. With an engaging subject line get visible. The subject has to be short, descriptive as well as catchy. The message should hold the customers desperate to open up the mail. Target an opening line, which gets the customer’s attention. Try using A/B testing to improve open rates.

Send out Personalized Emails

If you expect your recipients to open your mail, then quote them personally. Use the customer’s first name or write the entire message as if you are writing personally to them. Use a direct approach in conveying your message. It brings engagement and familiarity for your customers. It holds your reference for the customers in the future. Increase customer engagement by sending out emails on customer’s’ interest, ideas, needs or suggestions. Personalized messages are an instant attention grabber and trust builder.

Develop and Encourage Curiosity

Entice curiosity to a level where a customer can’t resist himself from opening your mail. Implement a catchy tone while interpreting your messages. Use a joke or fun or conversational subject line. Or start with a friendly gesture. Insert numbers to grab attention. Try using the open loop technique. According to this technique, you provide enough information to get your audience interested and compelled to click and read to close the loop. Get a significant increase in open rates with an open loop. But be alert with the subject line, it should not be too clickbaity. If your subject fails to compliment your content, you end up with a lot of unsubscribers.

Use Double Opt-In

How to Improve your Email Open Rates

It is the easiest way to get more people to open your emails. You get a quality list with an optimized size with double opt-in. In a survey based on double opt-ins, there is an increase of 74% in unique opens and 76% in total opens out of 35,000 email users. Double Opt-in is effective in avoiding spammers and bots too. As long as your offerings have potential value and your customers are seriously interested in your offerings, you don’t need a massive list. Just do not forget to appreciate your subscribers through rewards, as they covered a couple of loops for

Avoid Spam Filters

Spam filters have become more sophisticated in recent years creating the hindrance for your sent emails. And if your message ends up in the spam folder, your open rates will crash down. Try avoiding words such as “sale”, “buy”, “clearance”, “discount”, or “cash” to escape the spam filters. Use an IP address which not been recorded as spam address. Be sure that your sent email doesn’t read like a brochure and also limit the number of links included to keep messages safe. Make sure that all recipients have actually opted-in to receive your emails. Put an easy way for the subscribers to opt-out of your emails. Send the emails through verified domains.

Fragment your Lists

Your subscribers fulfill different categories, which mean they all have different interests and needs. Segmenting your email lists can get relevant customer attention. Ways to segment your subscribers include:

  • Demographic data: Gender; Where they live; Job title
  • Behavioral data: What they do with your product; What they buy; Free and paid users; When they last clicked on an email; When and how often they buy
  • Customer sign-up date: Consigned new users; Awarding your best customers
  • Customer email client’s data: If they’re browsing on mobile or desktop; When they say they want to receive emails

Amaze your Customer with Quality Content

If your emails are opened, you have won the half battle. Now it’s time for your content to win you the other half. The content constituting your email is very important for open rates because if your customers seem happy with your content, they will more likely open your emails in future. Moreover, they might even anticipate for your emails.If your content is interesting, informative and engaging then your emails have favorable chances of getting opened.  Sending emails should not be restricted just for the sake of sending, but should deliver real value. The higher value content your emails show, more subscribers will become loyal and trust your brand and the open rates will increase.

Maintain Fresh and Updated Lists

Do your subscribers still want to hear from you? In addition to getting high leads, it’s important to keep and maintain a fresh email list. They need to be periodically reviewed to cleanse and remove inactive subscribers or to avoid email bounce. An inactive follower with no engagement from past 6 months should be sent a last-ditch-effort email before they are unfriended. It is always necessary to maintain a clean and fresh list of updated data. A review has to be done periodically so as to get rid of absurd data and prevent hard bounce. Not only it will improve the open rates but cuts down the costs by ensuring that you don’t pay for your unsubscribers.

Be Mobile Optimized

If your organization’s email messages don’t read well on the mobile, you’re in deep trouble. On an average, 75% of smartphone owners use their phones to check email and mobiles now represent 51% of all email opens. When your emails are displayed well on mobile, you’ll ultimately improve your open rates, plus liable to enjoying higher engagement and more clicks on included links.

Run Split Tests

If the most of your content is the same for almost all your subscribers, you can run down several split tests to identify what resonates best with your audience and viewers.

First, ou can test several different mail-out times based on time of the day in PST, EST & GMT. Typically testing time could be  8am, 2pm and 6pm mail-out times for each timezone when most my broadcasts are active.

Second, test run can be checked for what CPUQs are getting opened the most and include that style in the subject lines more frequently.

The third thing to test is whether it’s best to have messages coming from you or the brand.

If you have another tip that belongs on this list? Share your best strategies for increasing open rates in the comments section below!

Author - Rachel Radmond
Rachel Radmond Author at Fortune Reuters Rachel Radmond, Sr. Business Development Manager, Fortune Reuters is driven by the passion to offer customer value beyond all. With her invaluable managerial experience of working for multinational companies she has gathered comprehensive knowledge and understanding of Enterprise-level companies that’s been instrumental in our growth as a global B2B contact data brand. Her market insights and how she beautifully correlates it with the need for fortune companies to procure data for multichannel campaigns has been the secret to her success.