It can be so frustrating to spend time, energy and money to build your email database to then have a very small percentage of those people actually open your emails when you send them.
Most business owners are always looking for ways to improve their open rate so that more people are actually reading the emails you send. We take the time to craft the perfect email that we know contains valuable and helpful information so we know everyone needs to read it… right?!
Not only do we want our subscribers reading our emails but the percentage of people that are opening our emails affects the deliverability for future emails. If our emails aren’t seen as valuable and “open-worthy” than the email gods will send more of your emails in the future to spam or junk folders. So improving your open rates should be always something you are looking at.
Improving email open rates is something I have been working on with a few consulting clients of mine and wanted to share my learnings and what has helped so that you can implement these tips as well.
Are your emails too large?
Reducing the size of your emails can help with deliverability.
A big majority of email users use Gmail to receive and manage their emails.
If an email is bigger than 102KB than Gmail will clip the email and the user can’t read the entire email. They are given a link to click on to read the entire email in their browser.
If this happens then the email isn’t considered opened until that link is clicked and the entire message is viewed in the users browser.
Where-ever possible, you want the size of your email to be less than 102KB.
We live in a busy, fast-paced world. If you have too much text, readers may skip past and not take the time to read it, especially if you haven’t captured their attention with the subject line or first sentence. So reducing the size will increase the amount of people reading your emails as well.
Does your subject encourage people to open your email
Your subject line really has one job.. and that is to get people to open your email to read more.
According to research conducted by Business 2 Community, 47% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone which indicates the subject line is extremely important when it comes to email open rates.
Numerous studies also suggest that your subject line shouldn’t exceed 16 characters and the use of emojis can assist with the open rate as it makes your email stand out in inboxes.
Also look at the stats of the emails you have sent in the past and study what subject lines gave you a better open rate and use that as a guide for future emails.
Eliminate spammy words from your emails
Email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc. will put your email straight into a junk or spam folder if it considers your email spam!
You need to avoid using spam-trigger words such as those on this extensive list by Prospect.io
Some email hosting platforms such as Ontraport and ActiveCampaign also run your email through a spam test and give you a spam score. The aim is to have that a 0.0 before you hit send.
Resend your email
I have had success with re-sending emails that had a poor open rate to all subscribers that didn’t open the previous email.
Try sending it at a different time on a different day and changing the subject line.
Remove subscribers from your email database
Do you have subscribers on your email database that haven’t opened one single email from you in 12 months?
If so, it’s maybe time to review and remove anyone that hasn’t engaged with your emails for a while. They are unlikely to open any of your emails in the future and they are dragging your stats down, which in turn is giving you a lower sender reputation.
There are many factors that contribute to the open rate and not just the items I have mentioned above. The day and time you send emails can have an impact on the open rates as well.
As with everything in the world of marketing, it is an ongoing game of test and measure, test and measure. Keep trying new things, monitor the results and then improve on those results as you continue to test.
Want someone on your team that can help with the testing and measuring and has a thorough understanding of the current trends of what is working in the world of online marketing? Reach out and lets chat to see if I may be able to assist you with your business growth by expanding your reach
I would love to hear your thoughts...