Want to increase your email open rates?
Your email marketing campaigns can only be effective if your emails are getting opened. Standing out in your audience’s inboxes and getting your email opened is a challenging task which most marketers are struggling with.
Imagine the hours spent in writing a compelling email copy and sending them to your email list. Later on, finding out that your time and effort have been wasted because those emails were not even opened by your recipients. That’s frustrating! Isn’t it?
You want your emails to be opened and read by people, right? Also, you want your audiences to take an action as well. That’s possible if you apply some amazing tips to boost your open rates.
There can be many factors that may lower down your chances of getting your emails opened. Whatever the reasons are for a lower email open rate, in this blog, you’ll learn how to improve your email open rates quickly.
Let’s get started!
What Is An Email Open Rate?
An email open rate is a count of the subscribers who has opened an email sent by you out of your total number of subscribers. People like to track their email open rates to know how successful their email marketing strategy is.
The sender must not only judge the email open rate by a specific genre but also how your email open rates are increasing or decreasing over time. A great way to improve your email open rate is by sending high-quality content paired with a curiosity-building subject line.
Usually, an average email open rate of 15%-25% is considered as a successful campaign.
If your email open rate is below the average rate, you must consider this as a wake-up call. It means you have failed to catch your subscriber’s attention with your subject line or haven’t defined the right time for your email.
Factors Affecting Your Email Open Rate
Below are some factors that might be affecting your email open rate and might be the reason for the low open rates you’ve been getting.
- Unattractive subject lines
- No personalization in emails
- Inconsistent emails
- Emails not suitable for mobile interface
- Vague email list
- Spam words in emails
- Unrelatable email content
- No image-to-text ratio
- No new subscribers
- Emails land in promotional tabs
- Your content seems to be irrelevant to your target audience
10 Ways To Improve Email Open Rate
There are multiple ways in which you can improve your email open rate. Below we have mentioned some of the most effective ways which really worked for email marketers.
1. Focus on the character count of the Subject Line
According to many studies, the average email subject line should be under 44 characters. You just cannot write 200 or 300-character subject lines.
Your subject line must only give a gist to the readers. One important consideration is also whether or not the subject line shows up in full. If half of your subject line gets cut off, then it won’t perform as per your expectations because the readers won’t even open the mail.
You must be sure to load your subject lines with the most important information. To avoid your subject lines getting cut off, go for a length somewhere between 35 and 45 characters.
2. Personalize your emails
To build a connection with someone, we generally use first names to refer to that person. Similarly, addressing the reader by its first name in emails will surely help in gaining the attention you’re seeking of.
Personalized emails gives the feeling that the email is only written and tailored for that person. This, no doubt guarantees a positive reaction from your readers and drive them to open your emails.
Several studies have found that emails with personalized content has 26% more open rates than the ones which are not personalized. So, try it!
3. Use emojis to add color to your emails
Most people think that emojis are not an important part of effective email marketing. But they are wrong!
Nowadays, emojis are used everywhere. The use of emojis is not unprofessional or unethical. In fact, using emojis can give your readers a touch of personal message.
Emojis shows emotions. Hence, using them, your readers are bound to think that your emails are not sent by robots. This can also help you develop a personal relationship with your readers.
Use emojis in your subject line and add color to your message.
4. Give content that is useful to readers
This might seem not to be directly related to email open rates but some studies suggest that content is the main factor why any receiver opens your email.
You must create rich-in-value content related to what you promised to the subscribers when they first signed up to receive your emails. Asking people to sign up to receive health tips and then send them discount coupons on clothes is like cheating on their trust.
You must know that a reader will develop a relationship with your brand with time. Initially, you will have to show them what value you are adding to their lives.
5. Avoid being marked as spam
If your email is marked as spam, it will land in the spam folder of Gmail and the receivers won’t open it.
Even your best emails can land in the spam folder so you’ll have to do everything possible in order to avoid being flagged as a spam sender.
You can do the same by making sure that all your recipients have opted-in to receive your emails. You must send your emails from an authentic yet safe IP address and also send through verified domains.
There are tools like Mail Engine which has spam detector and ensures none of your emails are having spam words. Using such tools can be beneficial.
6. Add a touch of humor in your emails
Are you humorous? Then why not use it to your advantage.
If you want to make your reader happy through your emails, add a touch of humour to your subject line.
Sending emails that do not sound too detached or boring are a great way to increase your open rates. Whether you make your emails sarcastic or extremely funny, make sure it’s rich in value.
This strategy can even make your audience wait for your new email and look for the content you have to offer.
7. Use email marketing tools
An email marketing tool can help you improve your email open rate as it can help you send killer emails using an in-built Gmail API integration feature.
A well-known tool that I can recommend is MailEngine. It is a self-hosted tool that runs in WordPress without any chance of being banned. The awesome list marketing feature of MailEngine helps in list management and the spam word filter enables you to remove spam words easily.
This tool is affordable, self-hosted, has an in-built spam words detector, and enables automatic email flows too.
8. Send the correct number of emails
How frequently do you send emails to your subscribers? It depends on the preferences of your subscribers, right? Well, the number of emails you send will largely depend on what you’re hoping to get out of your email marketing strategy.
If you want to increase open rates, sending more emails might hurt the email open rate. You must test different email frequencies with your audience to see what they best respond to.
One great way is to let your subscribers choose their email frequency too. You will have to create different email campaigns for different frequencies. You must remember that too many emails might irritate your subscribers.
9. Give discounts & offers
Everyone loves freebies! Discounts and offers act as an open loop to attract your receivers to open your emails.
Adding phrases like “$30 off”, “50% discount”, etc attracts people to open the email immediately. Make sure you send such discounts to the right people who are genuinely interested in your product.
Sudden discounts on expensive products are bound to create curiosity in audiences and this increases your chances of getting your emails opened.
10. Schedule your emails at the right time
Do you think your emails will be read if they don’t reach the recipients at the time when they are active?
Chances are less! This is why you must find the best time to send an email and schedule your emails at the time when most of your recipients are active. Finding the best time is not a complicated process but you have to be patient.
The best time to send an email will depend on your genre and the type of emails you send. You must do A/B testing using the insights to get an appropriate time to schedule the emails.
Once you have sent a couple of email campaigns, you can analyze your campaign statistics, especially the dates/times that you had the most email opens, and schedule accordingly.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies and if you’re not a pro in it, this blog is what you needed. With the help of these ways, you should be able to efficiently start improving your open rates and find new ways to connect with your target market.
Follow the steps mentioned above to get a massive leap when it comes to open rates and also let us know in the comments below if you know any other tips that you use to improve your email open rate.
Thanks for reading.