Your email open rate is calculated by dividing the total number of emails opened by the total number of emails you have sent out, minus the ones that have bounced back. Simple enough, yeah? This simple number is one of the key metrics that will decide the success of your email marketing campaign, and therefore, it is critical that you do everything to boost it.
In this post, we’ll take a quick look at 5 ways you can go about increasing your open rates.
1) Email Personalization
People love being acknowledged, especially in a time where most companies may consider them nothing more than statistics. So, when you personalize your emails, you can connect with them more easily.
There are studies showing that open rates increase by about 50% when they have a personalized subject line – a fact you can take advantage of by directly addressing your recipient by their name in the subject line.
In addition to that, you can also personalize emails further based on the data you have on your subscribers, segmenting them and targeting them as necessary. All of this will increase their engagement with your campaign and in the process, boost your open rates.
2) Clever Subject Lines
No one is going to open an email that has a bland subject line, it’s just plain boring. So, choose from the many techniques available to you such as FOMO subject lines, direct subject lines, curiosity subject lines and more. These subject lines allow you to grab your recipient’s attention more effectively and that translates into more opened emails.
3) Scheduled Emails
Studies have actually proven that the day and time in which you send your emails can have a massive impact on your open rates. In fact, these studies have compiled a list of optimum times for sending out emails.
The best results came from emails sent on Tuesdays, followed up by Thursday and then Wednesday. In regards to time, the results showed that people tend to prefer either early morning hours or late night hours – 6 AM to 10 AM,\ for the early birds and between 8 PM to 12 PM for the night owls.
So, when you’re looking to send your emails, consider this very important knowledge and create a schedule for your email campaign. If you stick to the schedule and keep sending interesting emails, you’ll find that your open rates will increase.
4) Email Segmentation
Email segmentation is when you take all the contacts you have and break them down into smaller groups. Then you categorize them based on factors like their purchase history, where they live, their interests and more.
Then, email segmentation allows you to utilize these different categories to send content that is relevant and meaningful to your subscribers.When you send all emails to every single contact on your list, it will do more harm than good and email segmentation will counter that.
According to MailChimp, email segmentation can lead to a 14.31% increase in your email open rates, so every email marketing campaign should make the most of segmentation.
5) Cleaned Email List
Email verification is a guaranteed way to increase your open rate and it is something that every email marketing campaign should most definitely do. Having an unnecessarily large amount of inactive subscribers will hurt your campaign and email verification and cleaning is the way to purge those inactive contacts. In addition, email list cleaning can also help with other problems like invalid emails, email bounce backs and more.
The best part is that while you can do this task manually, you don’t have to waste both time and man hours on such a demanding task. There are advanced email verification platforms like VerifyBee that have specially designed tools to make the task easier and you should be taking advantage of them.
