One way to determine the success of your email marketing campaign is by checking the open rate.
It’s an important metric that gives you a clear picture of the several critical aspects of your email marketing approach.
For instance, it tells you if your recipients are interested in what you offer or say. It also gives you an idea about how your customers perceive your brand and the quality of your newsletters.
Do they see it as something interesting or helpful from a trusted source, or do they view it as a nuisance?
So, if your campaigns have a low open rate, it’s a wake-up call that you may fail to catch your subscribers’ attention or not send your emails at the right time. Worse, your zimbabwe email list 362320 contact leads instead of inbox.
What’s a Good Email Open Rate?
Although every industry’s open rates will differ, here are a few averages from leading service providers:
- Constant Contact: 17.13%
- Campaign Monitor: 18.0%
- HubSpot: 20.94%
- MailChimp: 21.33%
- GetResponse: 22.15%
Depending also on the industry which you’re in, the overall average email open rate should be somewhere between 12 and 25%.
For instance, if you’re in the health and beauty industry, the average open rate is 23.58%. However, if you’re in the food or restaurant industry, you should expect a higher rate (41.37%).
Note that this metric is not determined by the number of emails delivered but by the number of emails opened.
Here is how we calculate the email open rate:
Open rate = unique opens/(sent emails – bounced emails) x 100
Does it really matter?
Some marketers think that open rates are given more attention than they are due and that it is not even an accurate measure of the number of people who opened and read your emails.
However, we believe it does matter. Why? Conventional wisdom will tell you that if an email has not been clicked or opened, what’s the point of investing time, effort, and money into your campaign?
Keep in mind that the end goal of your email campaigns is for people to click the call-to-action (CTA). If your email is opened and has higher engagement, it means the more significant your ROI will be. So, along with email open rates, click through rates should also be closely monitored.
Now that you understand what a good email open rate is, you will have a better idea of how your email campaign is performing. Let’s now find out the ways to increase email open rates.
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11 Email Marketing Strategies to Increase Open Rates
1. Invest In Your Email Subject Line
Your email subject line is your hook to your audience, so you should write it in a way that triggers curiosity or urgency.
We bet you’re swamped with emails, too, daily. You probably don’t have all the time in the world to open them all? I bet you would first open those that immediately grab your attention.
That’s what you should be using in your email marketing campaign, too, if you want to increase your open rate.
But be careful; buy phone number library avoid cheap tricks to have your email opened. You may benefit from using bait-and-switch subject lines in the short term, but in the long run, this trick won’t be sustainable for your campaign.
Not to mention, it damages your brand and disrespects your subscribers. If you’re in the US, using deceptive subject lines is illegal.
Some tips to craft a compelling subject line include using odd numbers, getting the essential phrases and words at the beginning of your subject line, keeping it short, using power words, drawing your audience with mystery, asking a question, and going easy on punctuation and exclamation points.
2. Use a Personal Sender’s Name
Besides the subject line, the sender’s name is also one of the most essential factors in getting your emails opened.
Having a proper name clarifies the purpose of the email rather than the “no-reply” email address.
It may seem an excellent way to avoid out-of-office notifications or clogging up inboxes, but remember that email marketing requires mutual trust between the sender and the target audience or recipient.
If the sender uses their name, the campaign is more personal, which makes it more likely to be opened. How about you? What sender name do you use in your email campaign?
3. Keep Your Email List Clean
If the recipient didn’t ask for your newsletter or isn’t expecting it, they’re unlikely to click or email open rates open your email. You can even expect high spam complaints and unsubscribe rates!
Therefore, adb directory we encourage email marketers to keep their contact lists clean and filled with engaged subscribers. Then, periodically remove the inactive subscribers or re-engage them using a win-back email campaign.
For instance, HubSpot used this in their subject: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” If you’re feeling gutsy, you may use the subject line “Do I bore you?” or “Is the love gone?”
Removing those who don’t open your emails after the re-engagement campaign will help improve your open rate.
4. Segment Your Audience or Subscribers
It’s not easy to appeal to a broad audience. Imagine telling a story to ten people. You know these people by name; you can tailor what you are saying to appeal to them, and you can gauge their reactions.
Yet, it’ll be challenging when you have a bigger audience. You can keep telling your story, but tracking what each of them genuinely wants to hear becomes harder.
If half of your audience realizes that the message is not relevant to them, there’s a chance that they’ll tune out. The same applies to email marketing.
The good news is that segmenting your email list will help you increase your email open rates, proven! Why? It’s because it allows you to send personalized emails.
Some email marketers segment their subscribers email open rates based on their likes, dislikes, desires, or pain points. Others group their audience by the content upgrade they opted for.
Finally, you can use behavioral segmentation to group your subscribers based on their behavior on your website. For instance, a particular email is sent to those who visit a specific page.
Bonus tip: Segment based on account engagement or recent order activity rather than email list performance. For example, thousands of subscribers may open and read your emails, but they never buy. You can segment them instead based on product interest, gender, location, or type of email.
5. Avoid the Spam Filters
Certain words can trigger the spam filter set by any email service provider. As such, it should be your top priority to be familiar with these words and find a way to outsmart them.
Some words that can land your emails in spam folders and eventually affect your sender’s reputation include “free,” “special promotion,” “winner, “order now,” this is not spam,” and “cancel at any time.”
You may suggest to your loyal customers that they whitelist you by adding your email address to their contacts or pay attention to phrases that set off a red flag when creating your preview text, subject line, and email content.
6. Take Advantage of the Power of an Email Preheader
Preheader text is considered to be the unsung hero of open rates. This is the sentence that appears in the inbox after the subject line.
You may only have a few words for this part of your email, but it can lift your open rate. So, as you should take time on your subject line, do the same with your email preheader.
The main goal is to make your email preheader complement the subject line. For instance, if your subject line asks a question, a preheader should start answering it.
If you don’t write them yourself, these bits of text can be automatically added to your emails by the email service providers. However, it may not be the phrase you want to highlight.
