Why Do My Email Open Rates Suck?

Do you have good email open rates?

One of the main ‘key performance indicators’ you’ll want to measure is your email open rate. The more people that open your emails, the greater your revenue from any given email.

Each industry, and different businesses, have unique open rates. For instance, e-commerce and coupon sites tend to have lower open rates than legal and accounting businesses. However, this is small comfort if you have a particularly low open rate.

What Is A Low Email Open Rate?

A low email marketing open rate can be considered anything that’s less than 15%. If you have this, you should be looking to make a lot of improvements.

Luckily, there are many potential changes you can make which can help you improve open rates and grow revenues. Here are some quick suggestions for you to try.

1. Create Better Subject Lines

A lot of people will open your marketing emails based on the subject lines. If you don’t have a compelling subject line for the reader, they’re going to read another business’ emails first, or perhaps not even bother with yours.

There are many ways to improve a subject line. You could:

• Personalise your emails so they are more specific to the reader.
• Create a compelling offer that has value to the audience.
• Be controversial.
• Use humour to make a point.

2. Reduce The Number Of Subscribers Who Receive Your Emails

While you might think this is about culling your email marketing list, it’s anything but. In this point we primarily speak about reducing the number of people who receive specific emails. This is known as segmentation.

Segmentation is about sending emails to only those who should receive the email. Such as those who have expressed an interest in a certain product or service. It’s no good sending an email about boy shoes to a person who has only bought girl shoes.

Segmentation can automatically increase open rates because there are fewer people receiving the emails who have no interest. This helps to reduce costs and unsubscribe rates.

3. Remove Unresponsive Subscribers

Now we’re going to discuss removing subscribers from your list. However, you shouldn’t just remove subscribers. You should look for people who haven’t engaged with an email for three to six months (depends on the frequency of your emails). Also look for those who hard and soft bounce.

These people need to be sent a re-engagement campaign email where you attempt to bring them back to your brand. If they don’t respond, then you remove them. Note that those who hard bounce should be removed immediately after a bounce. These bounces can harm your brand’s reputation.

While it’s unfortunate to lose subscribers, sometimes you’ve got to do it. It helps to reduce costs and gives you a better set of statistics you can rely on.

4. Change Your Email Marketing Strategy

Auto-responders and behavioural triggered emails work much better than traditional emails. Therefore, you want to try and switch your email marketing campaigns so they are more automated and triggered.

There are several benefits to this. Firstly, automated emails and behavioural emails are more aligned to the current needs of the audience. Therefore, they have a greater chance to be engaged with. Your brand is also in their current memory, so you have an advantage.

Secondly, you can reduce your workload. Automated emails are pre-written. You just need to adjust them when you want to change them. This means you can concentrate on other digital marketing campaigns that can draw audiences into subscribing to your mailing list.

5. Change When You Send Emails

Ensure you’re sending emails at the right time. Email open rates are different for particular days of the week and times of the day. If you send emails at the wrong time, then your email could be missed among others.

Check with your past campaigns to determine when emails are being opened and engaged with. Then use those times as a basis.

Conclusion

Your mail marketing campaigns can be a great success and while your email open rates suck now – they don’t have to. Try some of the improvements above and see how your email’s KPIs change. You might see your business succeed.

What is your email open rate? How does that compare with your industry?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image from Pixabay.

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