Essential Tips to Increase Your Email Marketing Open Rate
However, email marketing has proved to be one of the most cost-effective and efficient means of reaching your audience. But even with great content, it’s worthless if nobody opens the email. You must increase your email marketing open rate to ensure your message reaches and engages your subscribers. Here are some important tips to increase your open rates for your email campaigns.
Write An Irresistible Subject Line
With most of our emails going unread, the first thing people see when they open an email is the subject line. To get more emails opened with your email marketing campaigns, you can’t miss out on creating a great subject line – it has to be compelling and relevant. Step one is to narrow your topic to create short, specific, and personalized subject lines. Our advice: help them discover what was sent to them by starting with curiosity, urgency, or a question; use the name of the person it was sent to (or why it was sent), or write something relevant to them.
Optimize Your Preheader Text
The preheader (also known as preheading) text is a snippet that will appear in the list below the subject line of most email clients. Email open rates are one of those things you tend to overlook that can make a huge difference. The preheader text gives extra value to your subject line, supplying the recipient with something extra to motivate him to open the email. When you see the subject line is the same as the last one, you can change things up and summarize what the content inside the email is about. Optimized right, it can greatly increase your email marketing open rate by adding more curiosity and context about your messages.
Better Targeting through Segmenting Your Audience
You do indeed save time by mailing an email to your entire list, but it often results in lower engagement. Segmentation is one of the most effective ways to increase your email marketing open rate. You can segment your email list according to demographics, behavior, purchase history, and beyond to deliver content that feels more personalized and relevant to each group. If more tailored emails are sent to a subscriber’s interest, they are more likely to be opened. By segmenting your list, you can communicate directly with this audience’s specific needs and significantly improve the likelihood they will open and engage with your emails.
Send Emails at Optimal Times
When it comes to email marketing, timing is everything. The right time to email can make or break your open rates. Depending upon your audience, there’s no ‘best time to send emails,’ the factors influencing this include industry, product, and the type of email message being sent. However, according to some popular trends, open rates tend to be higher than usual in the middle of the morning and early afternoon. Experiment with different times of day your subscribers receive them and see what works best. Recipients begin to expect your emails and a consistent schedule to help boost your email marketing open rate over time.
Beyond The Subject Line, You Can Personalize Your Emails
Email open rates are vastly improved through personalization. Other than using the recipient’s name in the subject line, you might consider personalizing emails with the content depending on what they’ve done in the past, what interests them, or where they are. If your emails seem to be written specifically for the recipient, it’s more likely that they’ll engage with you. Balance the use of data to create dynamic content that resonates with individual subscribers with the ease of use of the analytic functions available on your web and CMS platforms. This will be cultivated into a stronger oneness between brand and customer, with more opens and higher engagement rates.
Keep Your Email List Clean
You must maintain a good email list to improve your open rates. Eventually, some of your subscribers can become inactive or disengaged. Emailing these inactive subscribers can help decrease your deliverability and open rates. Remove deadwood from your email list, and reengage those who haven’t opened your emails in a long time. With an engaged audience, your email campaigns will naturally become much more effective, and you won’t waste email campaign resources reaching out to contacts who have long since lost interest.
Optimize for Mobile Devices
Since many emails are opened on mobile devices, you need to optimize your emails for mobile. If an email is hard to read or make interactions on a smartphone, it will probably not be read or deleted. Also, your emails must be responsive and adjust to different screen sizes. That includes big fonts, easy-to-tap links, and concise content. This is also mobile-friendly – meaning that more of your email readers will open and engage with your email – creating better returns on your email marketing dollars.
A/B Test to Find What Works
A great way to find out what resonates best with your audience is A/B testing. Testing the different parts of your email, including email subject lines, preheader text, sending times, and content, reveals what causes your email to get a better open rate. Try one element at a time and see which performs better. Over time, your email marketing is also improving the open rate, and this happens; you continue to test, and you optimize, as they always say, continuously. From A/B testing, we learned how to refine our strategy and keep our open rates consistently rising.
Publish Consistently But Provide Valuable Content
If your audience expects great content in every email, your audience will be more likely to open your future emails. Ensure your emails work hard by providing exclusive deals and insightful or entertaining information. The best thing you can bring to your sender reputation is consistently sending high-quality emails. You must consistently and regularly provide engaging content to keep your readers engaged and increase open rates.
Conclusion
Sending more emails doesn’t make the email more open, but doing better makes the email more open. Like any good email, start by creating compelling subject lines, improve preheader text, and segment your readers. You are already halfway to success with personalization, mobile optimization, and A/B testing. By having a clean email list and a desire to share valuable content — email marketing campaigns will become more and more effective and impactful.
