As a marketer, your email open rate is one of your most important metrics and you should constantly be looking for ways to improve this. We are often asked “how can I increase my open rate?” so in this blog article we are going to look at several different things you can try to improve your open rate.
First things first, the start of your relationship with your subscribers is very important. When you are getting people to sign up to your database, you should be open and honest about what you are going to communicate with them and how often. If a subscriber signs up to receive your monthly newsletter and starts to receive daily promotional mailers from you, they are likely going to unsubscribe or start to ignore your emails.
Now that we’ve discussed the golden rule, let’s take a look at a couple of ways you can improve your open rate.
Keep your database up to date and clean
We encourage all our customers to email their database on a regular basis to make sure that your contacts don’t go stale or forget that they did in fact join your database. However, even if you email your database regularly some subscribers can become inactive. We suggest running re-engagement campaigns every six months to a year and removing subscribers who remain inactive.
A great way to re-engage subscribers is to incentivize them to update their details with you in exchange for a discount on their next purchase or even offer them some gated content. This is a win-win for both you and your subscribers as you get the information you need to keep communicating with your subscribers and they get a reward too.
Send segmented campaigns
Where possible send tailored campaigns to segments instead of sending an email to your full database with the hope that they will open it.
Find out exactly what your subscribers are interested in and segment your database accordingly. Every business is going to have different segments that make sense for them, so spend some time creating a segmentation strategy that is going to work for your business.
Segmented campaigns get higher open and click rates, as well as lower, unsubscribe rates.
Provide value to your readers
When you start creating an email campaign ask yourself “How do my subscribers benefit from reading this email?”. Your email campaigns shouldn’t be all about your company and products, they also need to include value add content.
Video’s, blog articles and case studies are great ways to add value to your email campaigns. As much as you want to use your email campaigns to sell your company, you need to keep in mind that every subscriber in your database is not going to be in the right place to make a purchase and to keep those subscribers engaged your campaigns still need to offer them something of value.
Test your subject line
You’ll never know how something will perform with your database until you test it. A/B tests on your subject lines are a must.
But how do you construct the perfect subject line A/B test?
Start by deciding what you want to learn from your test. Choose the one variable you believe will have the highest impact on open rates and conversion, and start there.
- Subject line length: Do you think a short subject line will work better than a long subject line? Test it.
- Personalization: Do you think a personalised subject line will result in more opens? Test that, too.
- Offers: Do you think your subscribers respond better to coupons than free shipping? There’s another A/B test for you.
- Emojis: How about emojis in subject lines? Go ahead, test it.
Use your preheader text
Firstly, what is your preheader text? The preheader is a short summary text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox. Most desktop and web email clients provide them to tip you off on what the email contains before you open it, but they’re most predominant on mobile email clients.
You can use this valuable space to entice more readers to want to open your email. Your preheader text should complement your subject line and give readers enough insight into your email campaign that they feel they need to open it.
Send emails that your readers love
If you send your subscribers emails that they love, you are guaranteed to maintain a good and healthy open rate. Your emails should provide value and contain exactly what your subscribers signed up for.
Your email engagement is closely related to your open rate. If a subscriber opens an email today and it does not excite them or provide them with any value then that subscriber is less likely to open the next email you send. So, it is important to always send your readers content that they will love.
Here is a quick infographic to help you recap all our tips to help improve your email open rate.
In 2020 there were about 306.4 billion emails sent and received so it is more important than ever to make sure you maintain a healthy open rate by using our tips above. If you need any assistance or guidance with your email marketing, feel free to get in touch with us.