I’m sure most of you have opened your inbox, looked at the subject and sender of new unread emails and instantly deleted them without even peeking at the content. I’ve done it plenty of times and it’s a pitfall many businesses face when creating their email marketing campaign – the open rate pitfall.
Despite your best efforts and creative content writing, oftentimes your emails are just deleted without a second thought. It’s frustrating, but more importantly, it means wasted money and effort on fruitless campaigns.
So, how do you combat this? How do you make sure a higher percentage of your audience actually open and read your emails? Fear not – I’m going to show you how. In the below guide, I explain the principle of email open rates, together with seven tips on how to boost them.
Understanding Email Open Rates
Email open rate is a common metric used to assess the performance of your email marketing. It shows how many people opened emails you sent them. It’s a simple formula and usually something your email provider quantifies if you have access to analytics:
Email Open Rate = (Total emails opened / Total emails sent) *100
So, for example, let’s say you had an email campaign where you sent 255 emails. 245 of these were delivered (oftentimes marketing emails get blocked, or bounced back if the mailbox isn’t reachable) and after 1 week, analytics showed that 54 were opened. This means an email open rate of:
(54 / 245) *100 = 22.04%
Simple!
Now, it’s also vital to understand averages and benchmarks you should be aiming for as expecting an 100% open rate is unrealistic. An email marketing benchmark report from GetResponse showed that the average global email open rate is just under 20%.
Factors that can affect this average include location, industry, business type, and the type of email. For example, the food, automotive, and real estate industries see higher open rate overages of 28% plus, and businesses in Europe enjoy a slightly higher average of 25.18%.
Bear this in mind when setting goals and KPIs for your email marketing so you aren’t trying to achieve the impossible.
7 Ways to Boost Your Email Marketing Open Rates
Maybe your open rates are already over the global average, if so, amazing! However, that doesn’t mean you can’t strive to make improvements. To that end, using my extensive knowledge and experience, I’ve created 7 simple ways you can boost your email marketing open rates below.
1. Make Sure Your Email Content Offers Real Value
If your customers are thinking, “why have I been sent this email?” you’re doing something wrong! Email marketing must offer real value to have a hope of increasing open rates.
Is your email personalised? Is it relevant to your customers? Does it help them solve a problem or offer them some type of benefit? Part of this is down to customer research and the importance of understanding what your customers want.
Whenever you create an email, first think, what does my customer stand to gain from opening this email? If this isn’t immediately clear, don’t expect high open rates.
2. Split Your Email Marketing with Audience Segmentation
As a business you may have a diverse customer demographic. If this is the case, ask yourself, will a generic email be relevant to each different demographic? If not, consider audience segmentation. Here, you essentially create different versions of your email tailored to your different customer demographic.
This does mean extra work, but the results should reap dividends and you should see improved open rates due to the targeted content. Segmentation can be done via several factors such as geography, gender, income, or different categories like customer aspirations, industries, or purchase decisions.
3. Create an Eye-Catching Email Subject Line
Marketing emails have three important aspects to perfect that are shown when the mail appears in your customers inbox. The first of these is the subject line. Think of this as the title to your email. It gives a short description or tagline of the email’s contents.
As this is usually the first thing people see and it’s especially important to get it right. From personal experience, I know that if an email has no subject or a poor subject, I’m far more likely to delete it without opening it!
The subject must be short and snappy. There is no right or wrong answer in terms of content, but you can take one of several different approaches to the subject such as humorous, personal, benefit-oriented, or intriguing. The art is in crafting the right subject suitable for your target audience and the email contents.
4. Don’t Overlook the Importance of the Email Pre-Header
While the subject line/title is incredibly important, so is the pre-header. This is the section of text to the right of the subject line that acts as a brief intro or description of what the email contains.
It’s important to nail this aspect of your email marketing campaigns to improve open rates. The simplest tip is to make the subject line clean and to the point. It should convey the subject of the email concisely while also giving them a peek of what to expect from the rest of the content.
If you can draw someone in or show them exactly what the email contains with a perfectly crafted pre-header, your open rates should increase. You should always create custom pre-headers and use the customer’s name where possible using automated personalisation tools.
5. Consider Your from Name
The final aspect of the makeup of your emails is the “from” name or the sender name. This is the third element customers see in their inbox before opening an email together with the pre-header and subject line. The from name us usually set apart from the other two items on the left-hand side of the email row.
Two common from name formats include:
- First Name + Brand Name
- Brand Name + Team
The first name + brand name makes your emails more personable and approachable as there is a human element there – your name. At the same time, the brand name allows customers to quickly identify who the email is from and its potential purpose.
The brand name + team is less personal if you don’t want your name revealing but still makes the email more personal and human as it shows that there is a group of people behind the creation.
6. Know How to Avoid the Spam Folder
Email spam filters are becoming incredibly advanced, and this means that oftentimes your emails don’t even reach a customer’s mailbox. Instead, they get instantly marked as spam and sent to the void – never to see the light of day.
Although there is no concrete way to avoid the spam folder, there are some simple things you can do to decrease the chances, including:
- Consider email frequency – don’t bombard your customers with daily emails.
- Don’t overpromise in your subject lines or use misleading words.
- Make sure there is a clear “unsubscribe” option available to all recipients.
- Only use your own customer email address to send marketing emails (Avoid Gmail for example).
- Refrain from unethical practices like purchasing email lists.
- Only use trustworthy email marketing platforms/mailbox platforms.
- Make sure your email design and coding is tight.
7. Research the Best Email Sending Times
Timing also plays a factor in email open rates and it makes logical sense when you see the trends. Typically, we see higher open rates before and after traditional working hours, and at lunchtime.
For example, the highest rates appear to be between 7am-10am (as most people are waking up here, and checking their phones before starting work), and then again at 18:00-19:00 (most people have finished work at this point and will check their phones/email before or during their evening meal).
There is also usually a slight increase at lunchtime. In terms of days of the week, there isn’t much variance, except that traditional working days (Monday to Friday) perform better than the weekends. Consider this when scheduling your email campaigns as it’s clear that timing does have a slight impact on open rates.
Get Your Email Marketing Seen with These Simple Tips to Boost Open Rates
If you need assistance with your email marketing and improving open rates, please don’t hesitate to contact us as we can organise a consultation to evaluate your current strategies and outline areas of improvement.
Email marketing remains an especially effective form of digital marketing and compared to other processes, it’s relatively cost effective. The key, however, is to optimize your email campaigns including the content, mail lists, customer research, and targeting.
Bearing this in mind, the first step is to look at your email open rates. Getting people to actually open and read your emails can greatly increase conversions. By using the above tips, you can hopefully do this. After that, you must then concentrate on the email content so that those who have opened it will be inspired and persuaded to take further action.
