Introduction 

Striving to improve your email open rate is a constant pursuit in the world of digital marketing. While fluctuations are normal, consistently low open rates can hinder your ROI and undermine the efforts invested in crafting impactful campaigns. After all, the ultimate goal is to ensure that every email you send resonates with your audience and drives meaningful engagement. Delve into a real-life example from a seasoned business owner who successfully tackled this challenge to optimize their email marketing strategy and elevate their open rates.

A Problem Statement

Simon runs an e-commerce business. His grand-looking website showcases his product offerings, services, and other information. He sells his products and promotes his brand frequently through various online channels. However, during the initial days of promotion, he had only an average open rate for his email campaigns.

Later on, the email metrics started showing an increasing trend. And so, the conversions. So delighted with these stats and results, Simon began shooting up more email campaigns. However, after a few months of promotion, he noticed unexplained fluctuations in email open rates by industry. So, despite sending beautifully crafted emails with great deals and free offers, the results were becoming unpredictable.

Often, it tended to follow a downward spiral. What was happening? Without losing hope, he tried various ways to up the engagement rate. But he felt like an archer who constantly failed to hit the mark—confused and clueless! Do you get a déjà vu feeling?

You use intelligent subject lines, do A/B testing, and try all possible methods to get your emails to land in primary inboxes. But, despite doing all you can, it throws you off guard when you don’t get a good email open rate. You wonder if every email campaign is like throwing a dart.

The Omni Channel Marketing Solutions

If you feel déjà vu, don’t worry, you are not alone. You can try our omnichannel ecommerce platform. Here are some case studies from top brands and how they saw success with our omnichannel marketing automation. You can also read how our exit popups and web overlays can help your e-commerce store.

Here are some tried and tested tips by top email marketing companies to help you attain best-in-class email deliverability and open rates. Let’s have a closer look.

What is Email Open Rate?

ESP (Email Service Providers) in email marketing calculate the average open rate based on the formula:

Email Open Rate = (Number of Unique Opens / Number of Emails Delivered) * 100

Let’s say if you send 1000 emails, out of which 800 got delivered, and if 400 were opened and read, your open rate is 50%. Therefore, scaling up the campaign performance along with customer engagement is challenging as the list grows. Here we share a few time-tested tips for improving email open rate and getting stunning email campaign responses.

1. Keep your list fresh and healthy

When it comes to high-performing campaigns, the health of your email database is a deciding factor. So, clean and update your list frequently using the best email verification and validation tool and avoid using purchased lists. Moreover, data indicate that people prefer to open emails from their most trusted sources. Get more expert tips and advice from here.

2. Take your time to craft the subject line and pre-header text

Subject lines can make or break your email campaign. It is the first touchpoint. It’s that first chance to impress. Therefore, play strategically on choosing subject lines using the artificial intelligence-powered subject line tool.

Some quick tips:

• Use a bit of psychology to write subject lines. (Offer solutions to their problems, discounts, free/limited offers etc. work well)
• Keep it short and catchy(The ideal length is 40- 50 characters)
• Personalise it with their name, location, interests, birthday/anniversary
• Use emoji to make it more engaging.

Pre-header is the first line of text in an email that follows the subject line. Hence, use it wisely to grab attention and generate a high email unique open rate.

3. Use “drip releases” for the new subscribers

Drip campaigns are automated emails that go out periodically at a fixed threshold volume set by the marketer. And so, the drip approach delivers sure shot results to a new user base. However, this works well even for disengaged users. Learn more from our email marketing experts.

4. Test it and see before the actual launch

Do A/ B testing not just for the subject lines. In addition, split-test even your content, templates, and send time. Then, initiate A/B testing for a random sample and scale up the winner version based on opens or clicks.

5. Landing page-based segments

Segment your list based on customer behaviour during email campaigns. For instance, their buying behaviour like the products they viewed or purchased frequently, last viewed products, budget and time of purchase and so on. As a result, this helps create custom content for each cluster, which always leads to better customer response.

6. Use email surveys to ask the customers the frequency they expect, content preferences and even time

It’s better to ask them their desired frequency of receiving emails before sending them one after the other. It helps improve your email’s unique open rate and works wonders on email content engagement. Above all, it may even encourage the customer to take action. Therefore, bucket the users based on their preferences and distribute the campaigns accordingly.

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7. Use MAU data to optimise your user base

MAU (Most Active User) is a significant user engagement metric. Using this, you can track your user engagement actions like opens and clicks for your entire series of campaigns. This data will be valuable to test and optimise your user base and future campaigns. MAU data can highly contribute to your customer retention and sales.

8. Choose the proper timings

Test your campaigns by scheduling at different send times or days. Thus this will help you to find out the best day and time to send email campaigns that work for your audience.

9. Make your messages mobile-responsive

Most customers today use mobile phones to check emails. A recent study on email marketing metrics shows that mobile is responsible for at least 50% of all opens. Another interesting fact is that 52% of customers are less likely to engage with a company because of a bad mobile experience. Hence, you must make emails mobile-friendly.

10. Valuable and engaging email content

Touch your reader’s heart with your email content. Anticipate their problems and offer timely solutions. This will help build customer trust and engagement. It is a golden chance to get into their minds, tell your brand story, and make them crave your updates. The email open rate depends very much on the sender’s name. Hence, make sure you give them valuable and engaging stuff always.

11. Live and breathe email deliverability

Follow deliverability best practices to minimise bounce rate and spam and experience the best in class email deliverability. The larger the emails delivered, the higher your average open rate.

12. Use personalisation to give individual attention

Cater to your unique customer needs and send personalised emails based on their most affinity products and browsing history data to get a good email open rate. Use cart abandonment emails, welcome emails, and predictive recommendations to get high engagement, gaining more insights to create more impressive email marketing campaigns. Who doesn’t wish to get maximum reach for their business and grow customer base and revenue? Read how personalisation using segmentation help give you the best email deliverability.  

Guess you have liked our blog. Comment your views below on how to improve email deliverability and open rates.