7 Tips to Increase Email Open Rates

Increasing email open rates can be a challenging task. It can, however, be worth the effort because email marketing remains one of the most effective methods to successfully promote your products and build customer loyalty. In this article, we'll give you a couple of tips to improve the open rate of your emails.

Although the average open rate in 2021 was 21.5% and grew 3.5% from the previous year, there are no absolute percentages that determine what the ideal email open rates are.The percentages that each business reaches vary according to the region, sector, and other factors.

In addition, the success of each strategy is not determined by this indicator alone. If, for example, a campaign has an opening rate that is relatively low (10%), the response rate could be very high (80%). This would clearly still be considered a successful campaign.

With this in mind, we are going to focus on the open rate of your emails in this article, so let's get started:

1. Update your database

It's important to update your database regularly to ensure your emails reach the right people.

Make sure that the users on your subscriber list have voluntarily signed up. It is useless to have thousands of contacts who never open your emails.

A good way to ensure that your subscribers want to receive your content is through a double opt in because users need to confirm their subscription twice in order to activate it.

Likewise, we recommend that you review the email addresses and eliminate those that have not been interacting with your emails for a long time. It's possible that some of the users who signed up on your site have changed email addresses.

2. Segment your list of subscribers

Are your female customers interested in men's sneakers? Or are your male customers interested in new summer dresses? And what about your younger customers; are they interested in trekking poles?

Well... probably not.

By sending the same email to all your recipients, you may save time, but you'll probably also lose revenue. If you send emails that simply don't match the recipient's purchase behaviour or interests, you'll have a long list of users that don't open your emails. They very well may end up unsubscribing if they become frustrated enough.

To solve this issue, you can segment the email addresses of your customers. In other words, you can classify them into different groups of buyers. This will allow you to offer them the content that interests them most.

Shutterstock/Andrii Yalanskyi

You can segment your subscriber list into the following categories:

Gender
Age
Interests
Geographic location
Position in the company
Interest in receiving commercial offers
Type of downloads they've made on your site
Type of pages visited on your site

3. Improve the subject line

The subject line is the first thing the email recipient reads. Therefore, the subject should be interesting and invite the user to click on it.

On desktop, an average of 60 characters of the subject line is displayed, but on mobile, considerably less is displayed (~35 characters maximum). For this reason, subject lines should be short and to the point so the recipient really knows what your email is about and entices them to click. If your subject line can't be trimmed down that much, make sure the most important info is at the beginning.

In order to keep your emails from looking like spam, you should avoid words that sound like spam, such as "buy", "offer", or "click". For more information, see this list of the most common spam trigger words.

Also, excessive use of the punctuation mark (!!!!), as well as the USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS can trigger spam filters and cause your emails to never be opened (or seen).

According to the Radicati Group study, 80% of all respondents consider spelling and grammatical errors to be the most unacceptable email offense. These not only detract from the professionalism of the email, but are also a trigger for spam filters.

To craft a clickable subject line, answer the following questions:

What do you want to communicate to the user or what do you want to offer?
What are the benefits?
In what tone do you want to express yourself?

No matter how good and interesting the content of your email is, if the subject line does not invite the recipient to read it, the email will not be well received.

Preheader

The preheader is the text that appears in the preview of any email, following the subject line. This is an equally important element because, if cleverly worded, it can boost your open rates significantly.

It's important that the preheader is short, catchy, to the point , and most importantly, it should complement the subject line.

Recommended reading:
9 Tips for Newsletters & Email Marketing in E-commerce

4. Customise the sender

Shutterstock/oatawa

When sending an email, the sender is as important as the subject itself because it is the first element that the user sees along with the subject line.

In this sense, it is important that you personalise the sender of your emails as much as you can to generate greater confidence in the user and higher opening rates.

Ideally, you'll configure each email with an employee's first and last name instead of putting the email address as the sender (for example, "sales@company.com").

Some ways to customise the sender would be:

Your company name only
the name of an employee
The name of the person and the company

Remember to consider the number of characters between the sender and the subject so that the email platform does not leave your phrase incomplete and your email does not end up in the spam folder.

5. Choose the right moment

If an email is not sent out at the right time, this definitely affects the effectiveness of the campaign.

For example, an email that arrives in the customer's mailbox at midnight will not increase sales as much as an email that is sent at a more convenient time.

But what is the best time to send emails? The answer to this question is: it depends.

Shutterstock/Chutima Chaochaiya

As a general rule, Mondays tend to be a bad day to send emails because people return to work that day and find their inbox overflowing. Therefore, users often dedicate Monday to organising the week and cleaning up their emails. It's the perfect time to quickly delete emails that aren't relevant to their jobs.

As far as Friday is concerned, people often want to leave their inbox clean and focus on their last minute tasks in order to start the weekend with peace of mind.

In a Hubspot study, in which more than 20 million emails were analysed over 10 months, the following was revealed:

Emails sent on Tuesdays have, compared to the average, a 20% higher open rate and most emails are opened on weekdays between 10 in the morning and noon.

However, this depends a lot on the profile of your clients and the type of work they have, so it is recommend that you carry out A/B tests and send your emails at different times to check when your customers are most likely to open them.

And this brings us to the next point...

6. Perform A/B tests

One way to ensure a higher open rate for your emails is to carry out A/B tests and analyse the results.

These tests help you measure the interest levels of slightly different versions of the same email in order to determine which versions generate a higher open rate over time.

In this case, your objective is to improve the opening rate of your emails, so the aspects to test could be:

Subject line and preheader
Sender
Schedule to send emails

Should you use a serious or lighter tone? Is it better to ask a question or use an imperative sentence? With emojis or without? Find it out with A/B tests!

If your email marketing software offers the option to perform A/B tests, you should definitely use it to check which subject line, sender, and time your customers react to best.

For more details on how to run an A/B test, take a look at our blog article dedicated to this topic. 👇

7. Measure the open rate of your campaign

Measure the open rates of your email marketing campaigns and then keep measuring them: this is the last step to improve the opening rate of your email marketing campaigns.

This not only works to see how much your open rate has increased, but also to check that your subject, sender, send time and other elements are working as they should.

Measuring the open rate of your campaigns also helps you determine the elements that are worth reusing in your future strategies.

Sometimes, some strategies can also get stale, so it's good to keep checking back in and looking at your results.

Conclusion

As long as you keep a few things in mind, you can squeeze more results out of your email marketing campaigns. Remember, the key to optimisation is to test things and to continue analysing the results.