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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What You Can Do To Make Sure Your Email Is Read
How can you get your emails opened
Sending emails is not enough, they must be read to be of any value to your business. But getting them read by your audience can be challenging. There are so many emails delivered to your audience’s inbox every day that yours could be overlooked if it doesn’t grab their attention straight away.
So how can you ensure your emails are read and get your audience to take the next step in your purchasing path?
1. Make Your Subject Intriguing But Specific
Audiences don’t like too big a surprise – they want to be sure that what they are opening has relevance to their needs or wants. At the same time, you don’t want to give the whole game away. Otherwise, they won’t read the email because there is going to be no new information for them to gleam.
2. Be Provocative
Sometimes, you need to try to get the audience to react strongly to your email. If they feel strongly about an email subject, they are more likely to open it to see if your views match. It’s the same kind of reaction that humans get about hearing of a secret, they instinctively want to know what the central message is.
3. Be Negative
Titles with negative words have higher open rates than those with positive titles. Why? Because as humans, we like to know we are better than someone else. So, you might create a title about the worst website design principles or terrible accounting practices because people want to know that they aren’t doing them to make them feel better about themselves.
Use words like:
- The worst
- Absolutely wrong
- No fewer
- Diabolical
4. Offer Exclusivity
People want to feel special about what they are reading. So, you should use words like VIP, special, exclusive etc. These are words that make people think they are part of a small community or that the offer is only for them. It increases their buy-in and their need to read the content to not miss out on whatever’s in the central message.
5. No Capital Letters
In email etiquette, words written entirely in capital letters are considered to be shouting at the audience. This is something that most people don’t enjoy so it’s best to avoid it whenever possible. Also, email filters are looking out for words in capitals and will block emails that contain a title without any lower-case letters.
5. Be Controversial
Don’t have a mainstream opinion about a current, trending story. That’s boring, and the audience has probably read the same arguments about a dozen times. So, what makes you different from them? Nothing.
Instead, take the opposite approach and be a little controversial. You could gain a little virality and be seen as someone with an original point of view.
6. Send Your Email At The Right Time
While people know that email messages don’t disappear, the evidence does suggest that emails have higher open rates at different times of the day. For many B2C organisations, the best time to send an email is often between 8 pm and midnight. But that doesn’t mean that’s right for your audience; you need to do A/B testing for your business’ audience before settling on the best time.
You should also look at what day to send emails. Some evidence suggests Tuesday to Thursday, but other evidence states that the weekend is a good time for sending emails.
7. Don’t Use A Brand Name For Sender Details
Just using a brand name for your sender details is going to reduce your open rate. Instead, you need to look at using an individual as the spokesperson for the organisation.
Conclusion
Getting your emails opened is important. It helps improve sales and can grow your business without too much expense. You can improve your open rates, and therefore your sales by using some of our tips above.
How do you maximise open rates? What time and day do you send your emails?
Let us know in the comments below.
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