Boost Your Email Open Rates

It takes time to write good emails. Whether you are crafting personalized messages or blasting a notice to your list, are you struggling to get a good click-rate? Some businesses stop emailing altogether because the open rate is so discouraging. As a baseline, here are some encouraging facts:

• Mailchimp reports that the average open rate across all industries is just over 21%
• Constant Contact reports an average open rate at even less, just 13.94%

Now, you may look at that and think that seems high or low, depending on your averages. Whether you’re in the 50s or below 10s, there are solutions to increase your email open rates. 

Here they are.

Clean Your List

Subscribers age out of your system. If you have had an email list for several years, it is very possible that you have old and defunct addresses in the system. Most contact management systems have the capability of addressing this and helping you delete or archive old email addresses. Having messages delivered to unchecked boxes will definitely lower your open rate.

Segment Your List

The relevance of your messaging is an essential component to getting recipients to click that open icon. Marketers find significant advantage to segmenting out the audience list. This is done by creating sublists. Essentially, you group customers based on certain criteria. 

As an example, a company who sells something may have three groups: loyal buyers, new buyers, haven’t bought. You could then create and deliver messaging to these three groups separately. This would improve open rates. The messages you send to someone who’s bought from you for a long time is very different from a prospective client. 

Segmenting this out ensures that people are getting messages they truly feel are meant for them.

Improve Your Writing

It’s important that you get messages to the right people. It’s also important that those messages are articulate, personable and reflect your brand. It may seem like a no-brainer to write an email: you’ve probably already done so today. 

And yet, emails that you send to solicit engagement of any kind require polish. You may need a copywriter or to identify someone who’s highly skilled at this. If people feel they’re being appealed to on a personal level, they’re more likely to open the emails you send.

Watch the Timing

All good contact management systems will have statistics that help you understand your “best” numbers. This includes timing. People to whom you are sending emails may have an inclination for when to open them. If you are appealing to busy professionals or anyone who uses email regularly, it’s essential that you send at the right time. This is because, once something goes too far down the inbox, it could get forgotten.

To stay front and center with people, you need to deliver at a time when they’ll be checking email and have time to quickly read yours. Do some research and data analysis to find out when this is… and then stick to it.

Practice and Test

A/B testing is a vital practice in any marketing endeavor. Many CRMs have this built-in. You simply write two different subject lines and then send the same body email with different subjects to two groups of recipients. 

The control is the body of the email and the tested element is the subject. The reality is that most people choose to open an email based on the subject line and the first few lines (depending on how their email is set up to preview content). It’s vital that you start honing in on messages that your recipients are most likely to open. You can do this by getting feedback from A/B tests.

Improve Email Open Rates: Best Practice Tips

Here are some quickfire tips to close up this conversation. If you start working on a strategy and pay attention to the results, you’ll easily improve your open rates for emails.

• Your subject line should be no more than 10 words (preferably six or less)
• Personalized subject lines perform better (using a name)
• Time of day for professionals to open emails from another business is after lunchtime or during business hours
• Carefully craft the first sentence of an email, as it could be previewed by the inbox
• Confirm that your email is authenticated and won’t get caught in a spam filter
• Throughout the body of your email and in a call to action, be as personable as possible

Go here for an (unaffiliated) useful resource with a lot of free ideas for improving your email open rates.

Ultimately, a well-written subject line is priority number one. If you need an email copywriter, reach out to us today.