11 Essential Tips to Increase Your Email Marketing Open Rate

Is your email marketing strategy not increasing the open rate of your emails? Even still, if you are content with your open rate, can you confirm your emails opened and reacted to, not just opened and then decluttered from the mailbox. So how does this happen? First, you need to know what your email open rate is.  

What Email Marketing Open Rate is

Your email open rate is the calculated percentage of the number of subscribers who received and opened your email campaign. It is not those who received it and ignored it or those that delete it but never opened.

It isn’t determined by the number of emails delivered, but by the number of emails opened. The average email open rate ranges between 19-25% depending on your industry, while the average click-through rate is 2.5%. The average click to open rate is, however, 20-30%.

Want to learn more about email marketing KPIs? Read our blog: 10 Essential Email Marketing KPIs and Metrics.

Your Email Service Provider will give you the statistics with which you can calculate your open rate. The calculation is done by taking the number of people who opened the email and divided by the number of emails sent that didn’t bounce.  

Whenever it comes to marketing, creating a success plan requires everything is calculated and precise. You want to ensure you have metrics in place that give you feedback on how well your campaign went and benchmarks to compare your progress over time. You have to plan and review to obtain the best results, in this case, to achieve a high email open rate.

Don’t be afraid to adopt whatever methods other companies in your industry are using. The best thing to do is to acquire a professional mobile marketing team to assist you and handle the calculation and technicalities, a team that will give you quality at ease. 

So at this integral point, you ask, “how do I increase my email marketing open rate?”, the answer is compiled in this list of 11 essential tips to increase your email marketing open rate:

1. Segment Audience to Increase Relevance
2. Improve Email Deliverability
3. Do not purchase email lists!
4. Authenticate your email
5. Pick the Right Time and Frequency
6. Write to one person
7. Use a recognizable sender name
8. Optimize your Subject Line
9. New Subscribers are Gold
10. Focus on Quality Content
11. Personalize the content of your emails

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1. Segment Audience to Increase Relevance  

The importance of segmentation in email marketing cannot be overemphasized. You have to know what they want from you. When you relate your marketing email to an existing record of a client’s purchase/request/inquiry, your email’s content is more relevant and less spam-like. Rest assured: your average open rate will go up!

2. Improve Email Deliverability 

The first step to email marketing is ensuring your emails reach your audience and land in their inbox (not their spam folder, or junk mail). Your efforts go to waste if your audience is not exposed to your content. One of the biggest challenges faced by businesses that utilize email marketing is the ‘bounce factor’; The tendency of emails not to go through. Email ‘bounce’ or ‘bounce backs’ are resultant of issues with receiving account(may be temporary or permanent) or a block on the email from a recipient server. Over time, a high bounce rate could ruin your sender reputation and put your IP on a blacklist.

When a bounce happens, the receiving server sends the message back to its sender. This is essentially the digital version of “Return to Sender”. So how do you improve deliverability or avoid bounce backs?  

3. Do not purchase email lists! 

A popular short cut that people use to get an extensive list of receivers with the hopes of advertising to prospective clients. Very bad. What happens is, either the recipient server blocks you completely, or your mail goes straight to the spam folder.

You have to get subscribers genuinely and sign up directly on your page or social media. Having people sign up directly also helps you gather the information that can be useful in the segmentation of your emails. 

4. Authenticate your email 

Email authentication can also be called domain authentication. Email authentication is a batch of procedures set to procure valid information on the root of emails by substantiating the domain ownership.   

5. Pick the Right Time and Frequency 

The time of day you send your email marketing campaign matters. So does the day in the week, and how many times a month you dispatch bulk emails. It does, however, also depend on your customers and the product/service you provide. On average, most Emails are opened at 8 a.m, a higher click-through rate occurs at 5 p.m.

While it is best to send one email a week, it would be better if you and your campaign team check the statistics of your industry and what other companies are doing. 

6. Write to one person 

Your customer is your priority, right? Then, you must make them feel like it.

Don’t write to a thousand people; write to one valued customer. Writing about one customer is more likely to capture their attention (and reduce the unsubscribe rate). That is the secret to good copywriting.

The services are being rendered to them, and they are searching for what’s in it for them, not for everyone. When you speak directly to each customer individually, you garner more loyalty because each customer believes that you pay attention to their individual needs. So once they receive an email from you, they are more likely to open it.  

7. Use a recognizable sender name 

Most people hate anonymous emails because these tend to be scammers or people phishing for the gullible. So if your business name is ‘Evans Haircare,’ then that should be your sender name. It is also vital because a client could be waiting to hear from you, but because your email is not identifiable, it could be deleted right away. 

8. Optimize your Subject Line 

Your subject line should be concise and intriguing. Brief because then it can be read at a glance, intriguing because that will convince the client/prospect to open the email. A subject line of 20 words is preferable because it can be scanned through quickly.

You should also make an effort to personalize your subject line. One step from basic advertisement to successful marketing. You can also create a subject line that triggers curiosity in whoever is reading the subject line and encourages them to read the email. 

9. New Subscribers are Gold 

A new subscriber is more likely to open your emails, so you need to make an effort to gain loyalty and devotion. Once they know that you deliver quality and your emails are engaging, you’re sure to have won devoted email openers. Don’t barrage them with loads of emails and offers that will make them unsubscribe entirely, instead strategically send emails that require they’re engagement. The more they engage, the more items and offers you advertise in your responses and voila, more patronage, and a robust open rate. 

(Learn more about this in our blog “Better Triggered Email: 5 Ways to Engage New Email Subscribers Instantly”)

10. Focus on Quality Content 

So, you have a well-planned dissemination schedule, a captivating subject line, a recognizable sender name, and so on, but what about the content of the email?

It would be horrible to deliver an email at the best time and then captured a prospect’s attention enough to open the email, and then they meet blah! Content is king. What you deliver should be witty, concise, humorous, and engaging yet still get you sales. That is the underlying goal of every other thing.    

11. Personalize the content of your emails 

Personalizing the emails you send out tend to increase your open rate because it is less like a bulk announcement, and you’ll receive more like an “oh, Evans Haircare knows what I want.” Personalizing the emails is not just about adding their name to the email. It could be sending offers exclusive to the prospect’s age range or informing them when a product/service is available in their area