5 Things You Need Less Of To Improve Open Rates

What do you need to lose to improve open rates?

Your email campaign open rate is an important metric. The higher the open rate, the more people that are reading your campaigns and therefore, the greater revenue you can generate. However, there are several elements that can actually prevent you from having high open rates. By reducing some aspects within your campaign, you can actually improve open rates.

A higher open rate will also validate you as a sender. Therefore, if you can maintain high open rates, then your email domain will be whitelisted by email servers and this prevents your email from being sent into spam folders.

So, here are some of the things you can reduce in your email campaigns that can help you improve your open rates.

1. Subject Line Length

The first thing you should look at is the length of your subject lines. While they’ve got to include enough information to personalise, provide value and include an offer, the subject should also be short.

More than half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices and these have fewer spaces for letters. Therefore, if you have a subject line that is more than 41 characters then you’re likely to have part of the subject missing to audiences. This will devalue your subject line and reduce your open rate.

2. Spam Words

There are nearly 500 words that are considered spam by filters embedded in email servers. If you have these spam words inserted into the subject line or throughout the copy of your email, then you will have a hard time avoiding the spam folder in your subscriber’s email accounts. You might even have some hard bounces that will further impact your email server’s reputation.

Note that spam words being exempt from the email subject line isn’t the only requirement here. You must make sure that you limit their use within the copy of the email as many filters will assess the quality of the content now as well as the subject line.

3. Images Within The Copy Of The Email

There are many ways that images embedded within the email can reduce your open rates. Firstly, too many images might get flagged up by email filters. Secondly, images consume more memory than simple text. So when readers are on the move, it can take longer for people to open emails with lots of images.

When you do need to have images within an email, try to reduce the memory they require by using image optimisation tools like RIOT. These free tools will reduce the size of the images and convert them into different formats that make it easier and quicker for subscribers to view.

4. The Number Of People On A Send List

You’re never really looking to increase the number of people opening an email, you’re always looking at increasing the percentage of people who open an email in a campaign. This might seem the same, but they aren’t. There are many different people who reside on your email marketing list. They are all at different parts of the purchasing journey or are interested in different products.

Sending emails that aren’t relevant to people is not going to have them open the mail. Therefore, you need to segment your list so that campaigns are sent to the right people. This might mean you’re sending more emails out, but each campaign is to fewer, but more relevant people.

You should also look at cleansing your list every so often so those that haven’t responded to your campaigns, or have hard or soft bounced are removed from your list.

5. Number Of Emails Sent

If you send out emails too frequently you can put subscribers off from reading your emails. Some industries like coupon sites and job sites that send emails out every day experience very low open rates.

Instead you need to find the right sending frequency for your list. It is different for each industry and even demographic, so you might need to do some A/B testing on this tactic.

Get More Opens Through Smarter Email Campaigning

Your email list is valuable. Don’t waste that by limiting your potential results from campaigns. Ensure you’re leaving the right things out of your email content and subject line that can reduce your campaign’s open rates.

What is your open rate? What will you try to improve your open rate?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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