Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to boost business growth, and it depends largely on whether your recipients open your emails. To ensure your email gets into the hands (and inboxes) of your audience and that they take the desired action, you should be increasing your email open rates. If you’re an affiliate marketer, e-commerce business owner, or just managing a newsletter, you know how important it is to increase your open rates. In this article we’ll show you how to increase your open rates and find success with your email marketing.
Why Open Rates Matter
There’s literally no point in going into strategies until you familiarize yourself with why open rates matter in the first place. If you’re seeing a good open rate, you know your subject line, sender name, and some timing is working to draw you in. Simply put, if people aren’t opening your emails, you’re missing out on valuable engagement and sales opportunities. On the flip side, if you can increase your open rates your content will get more people seeing, clicking through, and then taking the desired action; whether that be making a purchase, joining a service, or reading your latest blog post.
1. Craft Engaging Subject Lines
First comes the subject line readers see when your email hits their inbox. Get them right. The subject line of your email can be what makes the difference between someone opening what you have to say, or thanks, but no, we’re good. Here are some tips for writing compelling subject lines:
Be clear and concise: If your goal is to increase email open rates you need to make your subject line easy for people to glance at and easily digest at a glance. Make sure it’s fully visible on mobile devices, so keep it under 50 characters.
Create curiosity: Spark curiosity in your subject line and you’ll see opens increase. Use questions or teasers like “You won’t believe what we’ve got for you” or “Are you ready for this big reveal?”
Offer value: Tell your recipients what’s in it for them. “Get 20% off today only” or “Exclusive offer just for you” immediately grabs attention.
Personalize: If you have really great subject lines for your emails, chances are that people are more likely to open your emails if you send them personalized ones with their names. If you know what their name or where it is, use it. For example, “John, your special discount awaits!”
Avoid spammy words: Words like “free,” “guaranteed,” or “limited time offer” can trigger spam filters. To avoid getting your emails in the spam folder, make sure your subject lines remain true.
2. Optimize Your Send Time
Email marketing is all about timing. That is why sending your emails at the right time can have a dramatic impact on your open rates. Here’s how to optimize your send time:
Understand your audience: If you’re marketing to business users, you may have better luck emailing early in the morning or around lunchtime. If you’re hoping to target consumers, evenings and weekends may work better.
A/B test send times: Try A/B testing to see if your audience responds to emails at different times of the day. Both Mailchimp or Constant Contact can offer you the ability to test different times to send your email.
Consider time zones: Sending emails at the best times for both your audience as well as their respective time zones is important if you have a global audience. Depending on some regions, you don’t want to be sending emails at nights or extremely early mornings.
3. Create a Trustworthy Sender Name
The subject line isn’t the only thing that matters: your sender name is equally important. That is, if your recipients do not recognize the sender they will be reluctant to open your email. Make sure to maintain a strong, readable and regular sender name. Here’s how:
Use your brand name: If you are running a business, you should always use your company’s name as your sender name. If you’re sending newsletters, consider using a person’s name, like “John from [Your Company].”
Avoid generic sender names: Using “noreply@company.com” or something overly generic can hurt your open rates. You are more likely to open an email from someone with whom you are familiar and who you have been previously judged to be reliable or trustworthy.
Build brand recognition: The better people get to know you, the more likely they’ll actually open your emails because they’ve discovered that your content is good.
4. Secondly, You should Clean Your Email List Regularly.
Your email list is your lifeblood but if it’s cluttered with inactive or disengaged subscribers it can kill your results. Cleaning your email list on a regular basis allows you know with certainty what emails your subscribers are actually receiving and which emails aren’t. Here’s how:
Segment your list: You will segment your email list for different reasons like for interests, behaviors, or purchase history. This gives your email to be more relevant and will boost engagement.
Remove inactive subscribers: If you don’t hear from someone in the past few months, they probably should come off your list. Inactive contacts can hurt not only your open rates, but also your email deliverability.
Re-engage inactive subscribers: Rather than deleting your inactive subscribers right away, first send these inactive subscribers an engagement campaign to get them to return. Incentivize them or ask if they still want emails.
5. Ensure Mobile Optimization
Half of all emails are opened on mobile device, so mobile must be optimized for email. If your emails aren’t mobile friendly, your recipients will simply delete them before ever opening them. Here’s what you can do:
Responsive design: The responsive design of the email is used to adjust the page layout according to different screen sizes. That way your emails will appear great on both desktop and mobile devices.
Short and scannable content: Odds are, you’re only referencing it once, so make it easy to read on smaller screens. Make your email is more digestible with the help of bullet points, short paragraphs and clear headings.
Test across devices: Without testing your emails on various devices, you can’t be sure that they will load when sent like you want it to.
6. Use Preview Text Effectively
Your preview text (the snippit of text that shows up on the left side of your subject line in most inboxes) is key to your email open rate. It gives it some extra context, and can help recipients want to open the email. Here’s how to optimize preview text:
Complement your subject line: This is because your preview text should enhance on your subject line or add some additional piece of text to enrich your email content.
Keep it short: As with your subject line, your preview text should be short. Try to keep your link within 35 to 90 characters so that it displays fully in the inbox.
Create curiosity: With your preview text you will build on the curiosity created by your subject line. For example, if your subject line says, “Your exclusive offer is here,” your preview text could read, “Claim your discount before it expires!”
7. Using Run A/B Tests to Continuous Improvement
AB testing doesn’t end with the test winner; it continues to be a process so you genuinely know what’s working best for your audience. Through continuous campaigning optimization your emails are tested for different aspects such as subject lines, body and time of sending. Here’s how to conduct effective A/B testing:
Test one element at a time: Don’t try several elements at a time. For instance, suppose you want to focus on just one part of the subject line, to determine which change works better in increasing an elevated open rate.
Monitor your results: You need to see what works, and what doesn’t, in the information of the results of each test, as well as what results are similar to previous campaigns. This will give you the data you need to reposition yourself in time.
Conclusion
Making your email campaign worth it can be boiled down to understanding your audience and creating value in your emails. Following these strategies (here are a few): To create amazing subject lines, get the send time right, build trust in the sender name, clean up your email list, make sure it’s mobile optimized and test, test, test can greatly increase your chance that people will open and read your emails.
This is also a marathon and not a sprint, email is also read at work. Consistency and refinement of your strategies to reach the highest engagement and best general success rate of your email marketing campaigns will lead to long term results.
