Clever Tips to Increase Open Rate in Email Marketing

Introduction

How many emails in our promotional inbox go unread? This is one question that seemingly haunts email marketers very frequently.

If the rate at which your customers open an email is not at par with your expectations, it is highly likely that your email marketing strategy is failing. A poor email opening rate also implies that you will have fewer conversions, which may lead to fewer sales opportunity further affecting the revenue.

To maintain a steady income, bag more sales of products and services, and enhance the market standing of your brand, it is necessary that more and more subscribers click on your marketing mails.

So, what is the trick to improving the open rates of emails? In this article, we are sharing some clever tips to increase the open rate in email marketing with you. We have compiled these tips after interviewing are digital experts. These are a few very fundamental no-fuss essentials that you must keep in mind to get a significantly high email opening rate. Make sure that you go through the article fully to achieve holistic benefits from it.

But before we can hop on to figuring out the tips, let us briefly understand how you can find out the ideal click-through rate or CTR on your emails.

Honestly, the range of ideal CTR can vary largely from one brand to another. This happens because the benchmark and marketing objectives brands also differ. Hence, figuring out a CTR that is ideal for your strategy might be tedious.

Paceco claims that a CTR rate of 10 percent is what marketers should aim for. However, many emails fail miserably in reaching that average.

At the same time, MailChimp 2017 benchmark shared a CTR ranging from 1.25 percent to 5.13 percent across diverse sectors.

So, the best way to determine the ideal CTR for you is to understand the industry averages. Once you have figured out the average, compare them with your CTR with the help of digital analytics or marketing management tools. If you are not at par with the standard CTR, you will have to refine your email marketing strategy.

By following the tips shared below, you can ensure the best results:

Ways to Improve Your Email Open Rate

While the internet is flooded with blogs, articles, videos, and podcast content on this topic, here are a few very simple steps that can guarantee your results:

• Caption To Impress

Having an impressive email subject line is the key. Convinceandconvert.com shares that 35 percent of audiences open an email after reading the subject line.  So you know the significance of choosing the right email subject line that can captivate your audience. 

However, the art is in doing it subtly. In case your subject line fails to create an impression, 69% of your audience is going to spam the email even before they open it. There is no point in being too smart or deeply existential with the subject line as people do not have the time to give two hoots about either. 

While your email subject lines need to be crisp, it should focus on the problem as well as the solution. And, you will likely get a high engagement rate if you can contain your subject line to 3 words (with an engagement rate of 21.2 percent) or 7 words (with an engagement rate of 7.8) percent as per Sendgrid.com.

Try to create a subject line that can trigger curiosity in your audience such as “Facing issues with CTR? We can help.” So, if you are a marketer who is genuinely seeking a solution for low CTR, you will be curious to know the solution. Consequently, you will open the mail to read the content. And, getting the user to do that is the objective.  Give them something which resonates with them and is not too complex. 

• Audit your Subscribers List

Filtering your subscriber’s list is one of the most essential things to do if you wish to increase your CTR. It involves figuring out whether your subscribers are active or interested in reading your brand mails.

If you consider that emailing your consumer base consistently is the key to ensure that your list stays fresh then you might wish to rethink your strategy. This study by ConvicneandConvert.com shares that a whopping 80% of social media users receive emails or invites that are unsolicited. It is highly likely that some of your old subscribers have deactivated their email accounts or might not be interested in your offerings.  

Hence, it is wise to audit your subscriber’s list and lay off the subscribers who haven’t interacted with your content over a period of 6 months or longer. But, before doing so, you might want to win them one last time. For doing so, you can strategize an email campaign that determines if they actually want to discontinue receiving your mails. 
Here are some good examples of subject lines you can use for the “win-back” emails shared by Ravan Levesque, a cited Digital Marketing expert by CNBC and Yahoo. You can refer also refer to “Myntra” for examples of how they like to keep in touch with customers through emails. 

Another way is to keep communicating with your subscribers by asking them to update their information or your preferences on your website. Besides that, you can also keep checking regularly at how frequently they want to hear or receive any content from you.

You can build surveys around your old customers and reward them for engaging with it. This shall not only increase engagement but also help you to get important insights about your customer base.

• Avoid Getting Spammed

Spam filters have advanced a lot in recent years. However, they are still not accurate in distinguishing emails that are not spam. In such a case, the last thing you want to do is end up in your audience’s spam folder.

Research shows that 21 percent of readers are likely to mark an email as spam even when it is not.  This only happens when your email is unable to strick a chord with your readers or they are not interested in your offering anymore. Hence, you need to make sure that doesn’t happen to your email.

You can avoid getting flagged by ensuring to follow a few simples steps. These include ensuring that all your readers have actually subscribed to receive email marketing communication from you. You will also need to ensure that the IP address through which you are sending emails is high-authority and has never been used to share any spam content previously. Get your domains verified and keep coding as clean as possible. Include ways through which your readers can conveniently unsubscribe from your emails if they wish to. Do not click-bait your captions or use too much promotional content in your mails.

Conclusion

Paying attention to these small details will help you ensure that your mails are safe from getting spammed.

So these were a few very handy tips that we wanted to share with you for ensuring that you secure a high CTR Rate. While there is no dearth of steps that could be followed in order to get a reader to open an email, the tips we have shared will offer certain and significant results.

Do let us know if you have any tips or tricks to improve the opening rate of emails. Also shared if we have missed out on any significant point. If you liked this article, do not forget to share it with your peers.