12 Simple Strategies to Increase Your Email Open Rate

If you are an email marketer, I’m sure you know how important it is to have a high email open rate. If no one is opening or reading your emails, undoubtedly, your marketing efforts are going to waste.

Thankfully, there are a few simple steps that you can take to increase your email open rate and reach your audience. This article covers up some of the most effective strategies for boosting your email open rate to help you get better results from your email marketing campaigns.

Let’s get started.

What is Email Open Rate?

Email open rate is a measure of the percentage of recipients who open an email campaign. It is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of emails delivered, excluding bounces. A high email open rate indicates that the email campaign was successful in grabbing the recipients’ attention and motivating them to engage with the content.

What is a good email open rate?

A “good” email open varies with industries. According to the Mailchimp benchmark reports, email open rates range between 15 to 30% across most industries. And in ecommerce, 16% is a good email open rate.

Why is the Email open rate important?

Open rates deliver a good measure of engagement over time.

It helps to examine;

• How much our customers like our brand?
• Are we maintaining healthy customer relationships?
• How interested are our customers in your products and offers
• How well the customer perceived our brand
• How well do our customers like the email quality?
• Do our emails land in the customer’s promotions list, primary email list, or spam folder?
• Are we sending emails to the right customer?
• Have we taken consent from the customer before beginning the email marketing transaction.?

How to improve the email open rate?

Every email marketing campaign targets an excellent open rate. Here we are bringing to you 12 simple strategies to increase email open rate.

Keep your list updated.

An email list is the collection of email addresses acquired by your blog, website, social media or any marketing events.

It is not possible to hang on a list for a long time. Customers may change their mail account, or for some reason, they may not be interested in your brand furthermore. so finding out and removing them from the list is important.

And you will meet people who are only interested in free stuff and have no regard for your content or Business. The good news is that you don’t want those folks on your email list in the first place. They will not open your emails, become devoted fans, devour your information, or eventually buy from you.

Update your email list with time. If you include only your customer with the potential to open, you will get the best open rate.

Segment your email list.

Email marketing segmentation is a prioritisation method that categorises email contacts into classes based on predefined standards and a database of customers.

It ensures a more targeted or personalised experience.

According to lyris, segmentation creates a difference in email open rate; marketers who split their email list got a 39% increase in open rate and 28% lower opt-out rates.

Depending on your business, you can tag customers according to their purchase behaviour, demographics, location, etc. It will make it easy to plan for a specific customer.

Within segmentation, you can consider micro-segmentation too.

Write a clear subject line

A subject line is the first text recipient sees after the sender’s name when the email reaches the inbox. So the subject line provides a first impression for the customer.

A creative, appealing subject line helps stand out from the hustle in the inbox. People decide whether the email is spammy or open-worthy by the subject line. If you don’t have an awe-inspiring call-to-action copy as a subject, people won’t click on it.

According to experts, when designing a subject line, many factors exist in writing a perfect subject line. A good Subject Line should:

• Be short and sweet.
• Make the customers feel special
• Sound important.
• Sound urgent.
• Make an Interesting Question.
• Make Only promises that can be kept.

The preview text is also important. If the subject line is too short, you can fill in some good words as preview text to catch the recipient’s attention.

Personalise your email.

Email marketing is a more personalised marketing channel; even though you plan a campaign for thousands of people, you need to create personalised emails.

Feeling connected is essential for customer loyalty, so the content must be friendly and relevant to the customer. Subscribers must feel happy with your content; otherwise, they don’t even open the following email.

It is not all about calling by the first name. Know your buyer persona. Address their desires, values, likes, and dislikes. It will become more effective.

And don’t forget to inject some humour. It’s the best tactic to develop personal connections. Humour dialogues, quotes, gifs, and images all work well.

Keep things simple

We all hate and try to avoid complexity in the real world. Then, who likes to read complicated content in your emails?

People like simplicity. Simple and direct content with good readability always performs better. Use simple language with common easy-to-reach vocabulary, and write like a friend, not a boss or teacher.

Ensure Consistency

Consistency is crucial in email marketing; it helps keep your list alive and build customer loyalty. There will be adverse effects if people wait for your mail and you don’t serve.

There are many email automation programs to help you ensure Consistency.

Brand recognition relies on your target audience’s familiarity with your brand or how well they recognise it. When you consistently show your brand in the email inbox, your brand will easily get recognised by the recipient.

And this familiarity and recognition will lead to a good email open rate.

Get your perfect time.

If you don’t hit at the correct time, your campaign doesn’t work well, even though You have a catching subject line, refined list, and perfect content.

Timing is important. You want to deliver when the customer checks emails unless it is going to be buried in the inbox. And it is not easy to get a perfect time, and it depends on the different factors, geographic locations, demographics, and even the daily chart of the customers.

According to MailChimp’s and Experian’s data, weekdays perform well than weekends.

Perfect timing is all about information you gathered about a customer, and you can obtain it only by A/B tests.

Automate the Process.

Email marketing automation is a strategy that sees marketers send triggered or timed promotional emails to subscribers on their mailing list.

A powerful marketing automation tool lets you send the right message to the right people at the right time. It uses automated workflow, which is highly effective for lead nurturing and driving sales from potential and existing customers.

It enables online marketers to send personalised messages to prospects and customers on a schedule or when specific conditions meet. Email marketing automation makes the whole process easy and effective.. There are many software and plugins available for your ecommerce store, and finding a correct and suitable, reliable one is important.

Avoid Spam filters.

Spam filters are some tools used by email service providers to protect inboxes from junk mail. It generally uses technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and prevent unsolicited, unwanted, and infected messages.

But spam filters are turning into a nightmare for email marketers. Suppose your marketing campaigns are trying to target more people. There is a high possibility of being flagged as spam. We want to save our effort by dropping emails in a spam folder. Avoiding spam filters is a vital task for email marketers to obtain a better open rate.

So to avoid spam flags, ensure only opt-in people are on the list and include an opt-out option. Send your campaign with a suitable IP address and verified domain. Keep all code clean and avoid salesy language.

Send re-engagement campaigns.

Re-engagement campaigns are a series of emails sent to inactive subscribers. A re-engagement email aims to get people to interact with your emails.

If you’ve used different subject lines, tried other send times, mixed up your content, and your subscribers still won’t engage with your emails – it’s time to launch some re-engagement email campaigns. It may not seem like a huge deal. Still, as a significant percentage of your list stops engaging, you risk damaging your sender’s reputation and your email deliverability rates.

There will be many reasons for this lack of interest. Sometimes customers lose interest in your product or service or may find an alternative. There is a chance customers sometimes forget you.

Winning back is a challenge. But it is possible. You can adopt different tactics according to customer persona, offer incentives, more attractive mail, address their needs, or give a decent way to opt out.

Use Optimised Image

An image will describe more than 1000 words, and it is the easiest way to catch attention, make it feel real, and humanise the message.

Images are the backbone of content. People conventionally spend small-time on promotional emails, so using a perfect image is more convenient. Please understand it’s not necessary and consider what your email aims for.

Test, measure, and Improve.

Please don’t keep a one-and-done mentality in the case of email marketing. You can only achieve a better open rate by testing, measuring and analysing the campaign.

Test your subject line with length and phrasing, measure the result, and analyse it. Like this, you can test the content, call to action, layout, images, and landing pages.

Find the optimum results and implement them in the strategy.You can use a good email automation program for testing, measuring, and analysing.

Wrapping Up

We discuss a lot of strategies to increase email open rate. Start by applying those you believe will make the most significant difference and test and evaluate the others. Integrating these little techniques and modifications throughout your email marketing strategies will help you increase your email open rate easily.

You may not get immediate results, but stay focused. More tests give more results but help you pick up the better solution that really works. As experts say, there is no specific best practice in marketing, and we find the most suitable way through constant experiments. If you’re comfortable with your email open rates, consider ways to enhance them.

More open rates imply better interaction and business.

Email marketing is an art and science. Be flexible in experimenting and discovering which approaches work best for your Business and customers.