Is your email open rates low?
Are you looking for ways to improve your email open rates?
There are some easy things you can do to boost your email open rates without sounding spammy.
The open rate is the most important metric when it comes to email marketing.
It determines whether your emails are useful or whether contacts stop opening them after receiving so many or even one.
If your open rate is low, then it is a clear indication that you need to change something to improve it.
Getting your contacts actually to open your emails can be a very frustrating mission, but once you have done it, you will be more than happy that you persevered.
To make it a bit easier for you, though, I have added 8 ways in which you can improve your email open rates.
Improve The Deliverability
I’m sure you will agree that if your contacts aren’t receiving your emails, then they’re not going to be able to open them. This is a very common cause of low open rates that many businesses overlook.
I recommend that improving your deliverability should be the first thing you should do to boost our email open rates.
Here are a few ways in which you can improve the overall deliverability of your emails:
1. Check Your Spam Score
Image Source: MOZ
The first thing you need to check is your email spam score.
There are some tools online you can use to check whether your emails are considered as spam such as Active Campaign.
You want to aim for your spam score to be 0 out of 8. If it is above 0, then you need to work on your email messaging to reduce the spam score.
2. Ask Contacts To Add You To Their Address Books
If there is one way to make sure your emails are getting delivered, it is to ask your contacts to add your email address to their address book.
To do this, you must make sure that all your emails are being sent from the same email address which is best practice anyway.
All you need to do it add a line of text at the top of your emails asking contacts to add you to their address book.
3. Make Sure Your Emails Are Of Quality
Image Source: Hubspot
You may be surprised at this, but an indication of a non-spammy email is one that contains a good ratio of text and images.
Sending emails that are made up of just one big image can be an indication of spam.
Most times, emails won’t automatically show images and recipients have to click to display the images in the email.
If your emails are made up of up one big image, then it can appear that you’re sending blank emails.
Your contacts will be unlikely to open another email that you send after this.
As well as using both text and images in your emails, be sure that the text in the email isn’t just filler text but is content that offers value.
Only Send Emails To Those Who Will Want To See Them
After you have worked on making changes to improve the deliverability of your emails, you can then start working on who you’re sending your emails to.
Those who are not interested in what you have to say or the offers that you are giving them will simply not open your emails.
There has to come to a point where you need to stop sending emails to those who don’t want to receive them.
If you continue to do this, you will only generate spam signals.
Sending emails to those who want to see them will boost your email open rates massively.
Here are a few ways in which you can determine who does and doesn’t wish to receive your emails:
4. Segment Your Contacts
Image Source: Exact Target
One of the most important factors in email marketing is to segment your email list so that you aren’t sending the same message to all contacts.
Not all of your contacts will be at the same stage of the sales funnel, have the same pain points, have the same goals or have the same interests.
For this reason, it is important that you send different messages to different groups of contacts.
One of the greatest mistakes marketers and businesses make is to send an email to as many contacts in their list as possible because they believe this will lead to higher response rates.
This is not true.
Sending the right emails to the right people at the right time means that contacts will be a lot more engaged than if you were to send it to the majority.
Segmenting your email list will mean that you aren’t irritating your contact by sending them irrelevant emails because as soon as you send one irrelevant email, they may never open any more of your emails and may unsubscribe.
5. Implement A Double Opt-In Strategy
Image Source: BounceCreative
Nothing good will ever come from tricking people into submitting their email address because as soon as you send them an email, they will either flag as junk, unsubscribe or do both.
To avoid this from happening, make sure contacts know that they are opting in to receive emails from you by adding an opt-in check on your contact forms.
You can also go one step further and send an email to newly subscribed contacts asking them to confirm their subscription via a clickable button.
This gives you reassurance that contacts want to receive your emails and will be highly likely to open and engage with them.
6. Let Your Contacts Decide How Often They Want To Receive Emails
Image Source: InboundMartech
Image Source: BestHosting
If there is one way to please contacts, it is to let them have control over how often they receive emails from you and what they want to see in those emails.
This is a strategy that smart marketers use and swear by.
Letting contact have this level control will certainly boost open rates.
Letting contacts have this level of control means they will never view your emails as spam or irrelevant.
You can add two fields to your subscription forms that ask how often they would like to receive emails and what information they would like to receive.
You can use these responses to segment your contacts as mentioned above.
Optimize Your Subject Lines
After you have improved your deliverability and have worked on who you’re sending your emails to, you can work on the subject lines of your emails.
The subject line is the most important content of your email.
If it isn’t enticing enough, contacts won’t open the email to see even the rest of the content you have put together.
The aim is to create enticing subject lines that will pique their interest.
Avoid using any spammy overly promotional words in your subject lines though as is this could do the opposite.
Here are a couple of things you can do to improve your subject lines:
7. Create A Sense Of Urgency
Image Source: ConversionXL
A great way to get contacts to open your emails is to make them feel like they will miss out on something if they don’t open it.
I wouldn’t use this with every email though as it will cancel out the sense of urgency.
An example of an urgent subject line could something along the lines of “webinar registration ends soon” or “last day to sign up for our 21-day free trial”.
8. Split Test Your Subject Lines
Image Source: MailChimp
The only way you will be able to determine which subject lines actually work, is to split test them.
You can do this by splitting a segmented group of contacts in two and sending them the same email, at the same time with the only difference being that the subject lines.
You can then determine which subject line results in the higher open rate so you can implement it into all future emails.
You can continue to split test your email subject lines to find which words and tactics are most effective.
Conclusion
These are just 8 ways to boost your email open rates.
There are more things you can do to improve your open rates however the factors in this blog post tend to get the best results.
Other factors you can try are:
- Ask contacts who have unsubscribed why they have unsubscribed so you can work on correcting issues to reduce the amount of unsubscribes and increase open rates moving forward.
- Use correct spelling and grammar in subject lines as poor spelling and grammar will not give the best first impression, could come across as spam and will deter contacts from opening your emails.
- Personalize your email subject lines so they include the contacts name, location, past purchases, Contacts are more likely to open and respond to emails that are tailored to them.
How many of these factors have you tried and tested to improve your email open rates?
Let me know by leaving your comments below.