3 ways to improve your email open rates

Email marketing – A new challenge for 2015. (Updated May 2019)

The right time

There are a number of times considered the best time to send emails. If most people are in the office and start work at 8am then it’s a good bet the first they will be doing is checking their emails, so sending an email to arrive in time for 8 am is a good start.

Using software such as mailchimp, it can work out the optimal time for your emails to be sent. Mailchimp collects data from millions of emails and also from your own list and has the ability to work out the ideal time to send your emails.

Remember: different people are in different time zones so you may wish to take this 1 step further and optimize around time zones.

Call to Action

A strong call to action should be used in your email. Always have a call to action repeated several times in your email repeatedly!

Remember: Using a PS. At the end of an email can also be a great place to put your call to action as studies have shown that people quite often jump right down to the bottom of an email, so having your offer and call to action repeated in a PS is always a great idea.

Split testing

The bigger your list, the better for split testing. There is email split testing software out there that allows you to split test subject lines, content and send times to allow you to get the most out of your campaign.

Changing 1 word in an email subject line can improve conversions by 7%. Once you have tested your best subject line continue to test and test it to get the most return from it.

There’s a number of platforms available to test email subject lines , so be sure to check out the market.

Personalisation

Personalisation encompasses a lot of the elements mentioned above. There are a number of ways that you can personalise your email, the easiest and most basic is by using your recipients name in the subject and hello lines.

Smart companies out there such as Amazon and other eCommerce retailers personalise their emails by sending you special offers based on your past purchase history.

A simple little email recommending something, whether it be a product, a book or other offer, based on past purchase history is certain to get a better reception than a non-targeted, generic recommendation.

A catchy email subject is what’s required to increase your email open rates and something that fortunately can be very easily tested and monitored.

Your SEO agency will be able to help you set up ways to track the open rate of your email campaign, if they can’t then tools such as Mailchimp make it very easy for you to do yourself.

If you can increase your open rate by using A/B testing by just a few %, then what will that do to your bottom line?

Bonus Tip: Verify Your Email Addresses

It’s also important to reduce your bounce rates – by cleaning up your email list.

This means that you should aim to verify email addresses before you email them.

But how does this increase your open rates?

Well, the less email bounces you have, the better your domain’s email deliverability and therefore your overall email sending reputation improves.

Essentially higher email deliverability = better open rates.

When used correctly, email & digital marketing can generate you a good return on investment, however the first challenge is to get those emails delivered and then opened!