How to Maximize Your Email Open Rate

Email continues to be one of the most important tools for marketers, but it can be difficult to ensure that your messages get opened. To maximize your email open rate, you need to understand the right strategies to reach your desired audience and create messages that encourage them to engage. In this blog post, we’ll uncover the secrets to increasing your email open rate, providing you with specific tactics and best practices to optimize the performance of your emails.

What is an Email Open Rate?

Before I dive into the data, you and I need to understand this metric. You see, most people consider the open rate as the number of people who open your email.

Sounds logical, right?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. An email is only counted as opened when one of the following occurs:

The reader enables images in your email to be displayed in the preview pane or a full view of the email.
The recipient clicks a link in the email.

OK, easy enough. But, how are email open rates calculated?

Email service providers (ESPs) calculate the open rate by taking the number of people who open the email and dividing it by the number of emails sent that did not bounce, i.e. failed to reach the recipient.

For example, if you send 100 emails, and 10 of them bounce, this leaves you with 90 delivered emails. Of those 90 emails, let’s say that 10 are opened. This means that your email campaign open rate is 11% (10 emails opened from 90 delivered).

Emails that are not delivered cannot be opened, which is why this number is not included in the open rate percentage.

Tips to Maximize Your Email Open Rate

Let’s move ahead and examine the importance of writing compelling subject lines, the power of personalization, the value of segmentation, and more. With the below-given tips, you’ll be able to get the most out of your email campaigns and engage your customers in a meaningful way.

1. Create an Organic Email List

Quality or Quantity? This is the question.

The quality of an email list is more valuable than quantity. This is why companies that try to buy large quantities of leads to jump-start their marketing programs will find their open rates very low.

Offering a free trial, running a contest in exchange for an email address, or offering an easy way of subscribing are far better ways to build your list organically.

Popups like the above are very useful tools for creating an organic email list.

You try to create your customized popups with a good popup builder and offer your visitors an easy way to subscribe to your email list.

All you need to do is to log in to your Popupsmart account and choose from different pre-made templates for a popup and customize it with your brand’s overall style.

You’ll be amazed to see how a simple template like the example below can turn into a highly customized and converting tool to boost your email marketing campaigns.

2. Keep Your List Fresh

Don’t forget to update your email list and remove inactive subscribers.

You may want to send an email to people who have not engaged in the past 6 months or more.

You can simply evaluate the chance of re-engagement, and then eliminate them from your list.

According to Oracle:

“invalid rates are the fastest way to trigger filtering and blocking on your new IP.”

Also, if you want to keep your list fresh, try to check up on your subscribers every once in while and see if they engage or not.

You can do that by asking whether they would like to update their preferences and information. It would be great to make them feel comfortable about their preferences and the way they engage with your business.

3. Segment Your List

People tend to open emails about their relevancy. Think about yourself, when you decide whether or not to open an email, don’t you choose the relevant ones?

By segmenting your email, you will be able to provide this to your customers. The following table can give you more reasons why you need to segment your email list.

Email Segmentation Statistics

1. Opens 14.31% higher than non-segmented campaigns
2. Unique Opens 10.64% higher than non-segmented campaigns
3. Clicks 100.95% higher than non-segmented campaigns
4. Bounces 4.65% lower than non-segmented campaigns
5. Abuse Reports are 3.90% lower than non-segmented campaigns

Unsubscribes are 9.37% lower than non-segmented campaigns

You can start the segmentation process by adding tags to your subscribers based on their behaviors and preferences.

Arranging different emails based on different groups is useful. Furthermore, managing your ongoing emails based on demographics such as age or location is always a good idea.

If you know your consumers, it becomes easy to decide everything else such as subject lines and messages.

MailChimp scanned their system for users who use their list segmentation tools and sampled about 2,000 MailChimp users who sent about 11,000 segmented campaigns to almost 9 million recipients.

They compared the results of those segmented campaigns to the results of the same customers’ non-segmented campaigns.

Try to increase email open rates organically by email segmentation and don’t forget the golden rule: ”RELEVANCY!”

4. Avoid Spam Filters

The common problem with email marketing is that your emails can be sent to your visitors’ spam folders.

In this case, you should have:

1. A good IP address
2. A good email service
3. A clean template code
4. A verified domain

Include a clear unsubscribe link in your email footer and try to optimize it as much as possible.

Use branding in your “from” name:

Send emails to people who have opted-in to receive your emails. After that, use merge tags to personalize your emails. After gaining your consumers’ trust you may ask them to add you to their address book.

Don’t use spam trigger words so as not to be blocked by spam filters. Finally, don’t forget to include your location in your emails. These tips will be useful to increase email open rates.

5. Timing is Everything

Timing has a massive effect on increasing your emails’ open rates. You should think wisely about your email schedule. You should perform A/B tests to figure out which timeframes perform best.

Once you have understood the perfect timing, you will notice a huge difference in your conversion rates. Mailchimp’s Data shows that the best time of the week to send emails is on weekdays versus weekends.

Also, according to our email marketing statistic report, the best day for open rates is Friday, and the best day for click-through rates is Tuesday.

Moreover, they found that the optimal time of day to send out emails is 10 AM in the recipient’s time zone. These statistics are useful to improve email open rates, right?

6. Pay Attention to the Subject Line

Your email subject line is the key indicator that can boost your open rate. Here are some tips to consider while writing your subject line: email inbox screenshot showing different marketing emails’ subject lines

1. Try to use wordplay and write funny email subject lines.
2. Make people curious to open your emails.
3. Numbers are eye-catching elements for documents. Inserting numbers into emails will help improve email open rates.
4. Use encouraging and engaging language.
5. Talk like a friend. Stay away from terms like ‘’discount, subscribe, pay’’.
6. Instead of using percentages and dollar signs, include symbols in your subject line.
7. Stay away from phrases like, “get rid of, shocking, the secret of, won’t believe, aim, quickest”. These are irritating and decrease your emails’ trustworthiness.
8. Urgent subject lines that indicate ending sales or offers are another style that has proven to be successful.

Also, you may want to use a free Email Subject Line Tester Tool to measure the success of your subject line.

7. Don’t Forget the Character Count

In a study called, “The Art and Science of Effective Subject Lines”, Return Path found that emails with subject lines between 61–70 characters were read at a rate of 17 percent. Don’t forget to think about smartphones and desktops.

Will your target customers use smartphones or desktops to read emails?

In general, desktops show roughly 60 characters, and mobile devices are about 25–30. Better take into consideration the dimension and character count to improve email open rates.

8. Understand Recipients’ Needs

Another effective way to increase the open rates of your emails is by writing a personalized email to the individual in question. You may add a personalized subject line to the email.

This way, you will be able to understand your customer’s needs and desires and improve your services to make them happy.

Great email subject line example to increase email open rates.

9. Use Engaging Language

Imagine you’re sending an email to your friend about one of your products. Well, you should write your emails like referring a friend to hook them into your email. Otherwise, they might not open your emails at all. Have a look at this example from Scoop.it! to have a better understanding.

10. Optimize for Mobile

Have a look at these statistics to understand the importance of mobile optimization.

1. Emails that display incorrectly on mobile may be deleted within three seconds (Adestra)
2. Mobile users check their email 3x more. (Google)
3. Mobile email traffic is more valuable than desktop clicks. (Yesmail)
4. 52% of customers are less likely to engage with a company because of a bad mobile experience. (Wow Local Marketing)
5. 73% of companies surveyed prioritize mobile device optimization of emails. (Smart Insights)

As you see, mobile is huge.

The piechart of devices that are used for email marketing

You must have a responsive system to appeal to mobile users and have high conversion rates from your campaigns.

Conclusion

Following these guidelines and best practices can help you maximize your email open rate and increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns. However, it’s important to remember that each email list and audience is different, so experimenting with different techniques and approaches is essential to success. By regularly testing, measuring, and optimizing your email campaigns, you can continually improve your open rates and achieve the best results possible.