10 Tips for Improving Your Email Open Rate
Ten ways to help get your emails opened! There’s no point in having subscribers if they’re not seeing your content…
So you have an email list set up and you’re sending out regular newsletters (if you’re not at this stage yet and you’re not sure which email marketing software to go for, go check out my comparison between Mailchimp & Flodesk video here), but you’re starting to realise the struggle that is getting your subscribers to actually open the damn things!
Just because you have 100 subscribers, doesn’t mean that automatically 100 people will be seeing your email newsletter content. The truth is that usually, well over half of those people will never even open your email at all! It’s a shame, but this is just statistics, and is totally normal.
Watch this as a youtube video (or keep scrolling for the blog post)
What is an email open rate?
An email open rate is the % of people who opened the email you sent, out of all the people it was actually sent to. Your email marketing software will usually tell you what this is (along with the ‘click rate’, which tells you how many people clicked a link in your email) for each individual email you send.
But what is a good email open rate? And what is a bad open rate?
This totally depends on your industry and the quality of your list. Different industries will have very different averages, and if your list is full of ‘bad quality subscribers’ (ie. people who aren’t actually interested in what you’re offering, or just full of spam), then this will affect your open rate. As your list grows, it’s natural to find your open rate decreasing, but there are ways you can help this, as I’ve listed below.
As a very rough general guide, average open rates can be anywhere between 18% and 35%. If your open rate is lower than 18%, you could probably use some of the tips below to help improve this! If your open rate is over 40%, that is pretty darn good and you can definitely give yourself a pat on the back!
How can we improve our email open rates?
Want to get more of your email list seeing your content? Take a look at the tips below.
1. Be consistent with when you send emails
With sending email newsletters, it doesn’t matter if you plan to send one a day, one a week, or one a month, but at a minimum you need to be consistent with it. If you start off sending one newsletter a week, and then take a month’s break, and then go back to one a week, only to fall off the wagon again, your email subscribers might start to get confused or irritated at your sporadic-ness.
If it’s been a while since people have heard from you, they may forget that they signed up to your email list in the first place, and may just dump all of your emails into trash.
2. Regularly ‘cleanse’ your email list
It is really important to regularly go through your email list and get rid of any subscribers who are essentially ‘dead weight’. By this I mean any subscribers who haven’t opened any of your email newsletters within the last few months. Not only will they be skewing your open rates to appear lower, but when people stop opening your emails this can add a ‘negative mark’ against your email address, and cause other inboxes (like Gmail, Hotmail etc) for your other subscribers to start marketing your emails as spam.
I talk about this in much more detail (and how to actually do this) in my ‘why I deleted 1000 subscribers off my email list’ blog post.
3. Try short & snappy subject lines
Many of us access our inboxes via mobile devices now, and these email apps tend to only show the first few words in an email subject line. There are exceptions to the rule, but typically shorter subject lines perform better rather than wordy ones, so when you’re writing out your subject lines, be sure to make it as concise and snappy as possible!
4. Avoid spammy words in your subject lines & preview text
Using certain words in your email subject lines and preview text can trigger off peoples’ spam filters in their inboxes. This means your email might get hidden away in the ‘Promotions’ folder, or worse, dumped into ‘spam’. To avoid this, try not to use typically triggering words like ‘free’, ‘sale’, ‘buy now’ etc.
Instead, you can get creative and find other ways of indicating urgency or hinting at discounts, such as: “12 hours left!” or “Don’t miss out…”
5. Inspire action with good verbs
This is a good copywriting tip in general, but try and use inspiring, active verbs in your subject lines, such as ‘claim’, ‘grab’, or ‘create’, rather than just ‘get’.
6. Ask questions & speak to your subscribers
When you speak in rhetoric to your subscribers, it feels more personal and this tends to encourage people to open emails more. Use the second person by using ‘you’, and ask direct questions. For example: “Would you drop everything to do X?” or “How’s your writing going?”
7. Be mysterious & pique curiosity
Some of the best performing email subject lines are often ones that are, at a first glance, confusing or extremely vague/non-specific. It creates a sense of intrigue for the reader, and makes them want to open the email to find out what on earth you’re talking about.
Eg. “I can’t stand this…” or “Here’s your invite…”
8. Don’t forget the email preview text!
The email preview text is the little snippet that appears after or underneath the subject line in peoples’ inboxes. If you don’t write one, it will automatically show the first bits of text in your email, which sometimes don’t make much sense, so be sure to actually write one out specifically for each email. It’s prime real estate after all, and a great way to add context to the subject line, or create more mystery.
Eg. Subject line = “Here’s your invite…”
Preview text= “You don’t want to miss this exclusive class. Only available for VIPs!”
9. Resend your best content to ‘unopens’
Most email marketing softwares will offer you the feature to resend your emails to people who didn’t open it the first time around, after a certain period of time. I explain exactly how to do this in Flodesk in my Email Marketing with Flodesk course, but it’s usually pretty simple.
I’d recommend only doing this for your best emails that you really don’t want people to miss, otherwise if you overuse it, it can annoy people. Also you want to give people a reasonable amount of time to open the initial email, so I’d probably only do this after at least 2 days.
10. Keep track of your best open rate subject lines
Everyone’s audience is different and will respond better to different things, so it can take a bit of testing! I’d recommend keeping track of the subject lines you’ve used in a spreadsheet, and mark the open rate next to each one so that you can see really clearly which types of subject lines are performing best with your specific audience.
I’ve created a template in Google Sheets that you can use for free! Just click here and go to File > Make a Copy, to create an editable version for yourself.
Learn how to start, grow and nurture an email list for your business!
Join my ‘email marketing with flodesk’ online course
The course will be using Flodesk’s email marketing software, and all course students will get 50% off their software (for a whole year!) too, plus a 30 day free trial so no need to pay until you’re all set up.
IN THE COURSE YOU’LL LEARN HOW TO:
📓Understand the legal/GDPR information surrounding email marketing
☑️ Set up Flodesk correctly and add/move over your subscribers
🏷 Organise subscribers with tags and segments
📈 Grow your list with sign up forms and opt-in incentives
☕️ Set up automated email sequences and workflows
💌 Plan, design & write amazing emails that get read and clicked on
🌟 Understand email analytics and track behaviours
