Email marketing has emerged as one of the most used marketing tools for millions of e-commerce startups. The key performance indicator of any email marketing campaign is the email open rate. The more people that open your email, the higher your conversions are likely to be, so you need to figure out how to ensure your emails are opened.
Your email open rate is the percentage of emails that have been opened by the recipients of your email campaign. Simply, it’s the number of emails opened divided by the amount of the recipients. Email open rates differ across industries, determine if your email open rate is good by comparing it to the average email open rate for your industry.
How can you enjoy a higher email open rate? We explore this question in detail in this article and provide some great tips for your email marketing campaigns.
1. Perfect Subject Line
Your email subject line directly influences your email open rate. According to the research of CoSchedule, 35% of emails are opened because of fantastic subject lines. This means your subject line is the key determining factor affecting your email open rate.
Ensure your subject line conveys urgency by adding deadlines or limited spots into it. This method only works when your recipients are interested in your products or services. For example, you can use the word “free” to draw target audience attention for promotion activity.
Arousing the curiosity of your recipients is another method to increase your email rate. For instance, you can put a teaser into the subject line to attract subscribers to open your email and read it.
Your subject line should be 50 words or less, and present your idea clearly. Make it personal, and you’ll increase the possibility of them opening it.
2. Optimize Your Subscriber List
Your subscriber list plays an important role in your email open rate. To enjoy a higher email open rate, you have to build high-quality lists. Make sure all of them are interested in your products or services and are likely to buy them. The best subscribers are ones that sign up for content as opposed to coupons.
To improve the quality of your subscribers, remove inactive subscribers. You have to decide which type users you will class as inactive recipients. For instance, you can decide that subscribers who have not opened your emails for over a year are no longer engaged and should be cleaned. These inactive members undermine your email marketing result.
Misspelled email address should be removed. If possible, ask the relevant person for the correct email address. Run through all your subscriber lists and check if all of them are valid or not.
3. Carry out A/B Test
If you have two different versions of emails and don’t know which one will deliver a better result, an A/B test will be the best option for you to check the result. It will help you identify which one is the best.
Send these two versions to the same group of people, and the resulting open rate will tell you which will be better. You can send it to a sample contact list to get the result. Whatever variable you want to test, make sure to keep other variables constant to compare the statistics. After the test, analyze the performance of these campaigns. A/B testing will help you increase your email campaign’s performance.
4. Get Personal
Your tone is the first thing subscribers notice, try to make it personal. This is to build a relationship and familiarity with your subscribers. It is the same feeling as an acquaintance recognizes you amongst a crowd and greets you as “Hello, Lisa!” This personalization ensures a connection and response.
It’s easy to make your emails personal. You can include your subscribers’ names in the greeting, and use a conversational tone in email writing. Try to be relevant to your audience; think about writing the content like you are talking with an old friend.
5. Segment Subscribers
It’s important for you to segment your subscribers into different groups. Segmenting will bring your email campaign a higher email open rate and conversion rate. There are many different ways to segment your lists based on what will work best.
You can segment them according to age, gender, demographics, job, etc. You can also segment the list by content topic, preference, location, etc. This is a great way for you to be more accurate with the relevance of your emails and establish communication with your audience based on what might interest them.
6. Be Consistent
Being consistent means always delivering high-value content and at a consistent time. Consistency is not so important when you are starting email marketing, but it becomes important once your audience understands what your business is. When they value your regular sharing of high-quality info, they want to get your business update regularly. Pay attention to the email content quality and the core values of your business as this is the key that attracts your customers. Once you get a regular subscription, remember to send your emails at the same time of the day. To make it easy, you can use an auto-responder to set up the delivery time. It’s not acceptable to send your emails randomly. Success means engaging with your audience regularly with consistent high-value content.
7. Set up Proper Email Authentication
It’s very important for your website subscribers to authenticate their emails and have them whitelist your email address. These steps ensure against the possible delivery failure of your marketing email. Proving who you ensure higher deliverability. Successful delivery will increase your email open rate.
How can you set up proper email authentication? Technology offers several different ways for you; sender policy framework, sender ID, and the domain key identified email. If you use a legit email service provider, this stuff will be taken care of for you. Given the difficulty and technology, we highly recommend you to ask the email service provider to deal with it.
8. Respond to the Non-openers
What if you find many people never open your marketing emails and your email open rate is not so desirable? How can you increase it? If this is your case, resend the email to those people who do not open your email the first time but change the subject line.
Resending your marketing campaign is a great way to remind people that they missed some important info. If you want to increase your email open rate this way, there are some tips for you to keep in mind. Firstly, set up a regular interval to resend your email campaign. You can resend it a full day or three days after the first delivery. It’s up to you to decide your schedule. Change the subject line and make it more compelling and interesting. Resend the email campaign but don’t overdo it.
9. Choose the Perfect Time
The email delivery time matters your open rates. With email marketing, it’s very important to pick the right moment of the day to send your newsletter. Think carefully about the best time to send your emails out to your registered subscribers.
According to the analysis of Mailchimp, open rates were at the highest on the morning around 10 am on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. You can start A/B tests test to figure out the best delivery time. Keep the demographic and geographic distribution of your subscribers in mind, you will get what the best time is.
10. Make it Available for Mobile Users
Given the rising number of mobile users, you have to make your email campaigns available for these subscribers who are likely to check emails on smartphones.
To make your emails available for smartphone users make sure your email is mobile friendly. The format should be responsive, and the relevant format should be able to be loaded. Remember to consider the screen of the smartphone, and ensure all contents are viewable on mobile devices.
Keep the formatting simple and use a larger font for smaller screens. Use smaller images to reduce the loading time and make sure you use the appropriate size to make sure it looks good. Enlarge you call-to-action button to make it easier to tap with a thumb.
If you are beginning with email marketing, do not get discouraged with a low email open rate. It takes time to get it right, incorporate some tips from this article and find the tactics that work for you. Hopefully, the tips in this article will help you and deliver a better email open rate and a higher email conversion rate. It’s time for you to go ahead and get started.
Author Bio:
Sharline Shaw, the founder of a leelineSourcing.com, is an expert on Chinese export trade. With 10 years of experiences in the field of sourcing in China, she is familiar with all relevant regulations and laws about China’s exporting. She’d love to share her experience with people and has written many helpful articles.
