5 Ways to Increase Email Open Rates

With the advent of email marketing automation, you need to give recipients a reason to open your email, read it and click-through to your website or landing page. You have to encourage people to open your emails in their over-saturated email inboxes. Here are five sure-fire ways to increase your email open rates and make your email marketing campaigns far more effective.

How to increase your email open rates

1. Focus on crafting perfect subject lines

Think about your audience. Who is the recipient you’re sending this email to? You want to create a subject line that entices people to click open your email, click on a call-to-action and visit your website. Avoid generic formulas when crafting your subject line. People will always register your email as spam if it's more of the same.  Consider the nature of the email, if it’s a list article for example than the subject line should encapsulate the content.

2. Send emails at the right time of the day

If you’re using an email marketing software program like MailChimp, Constant Contact and others, then you’ll have email reporting functionalities available to you. Email reports will tell you when your recipients are active and at what times of the day they’re opening the emails you send. Use this information to inform when you send out future email marketing campaigns, and see your open rates improve.

3. Remember to use the recipient’s name

Personalisation is key to increasing the open rates of your emails. Always remember to use the recipient’s first name in the subject line and preview text when writing and setting up emails. This will help to prevent your email from being seen as spam in someone’s inbox.

4. Always utilise the preview text for emails

Much like the subject line, preview text is one of the first bits of information a recipient will see. Apply the same degree of personalisation as you do with a subject line to the preview text section. You can even elaborate with an overview of the content of the email.

5. Keep measuring everything

As we mentioned before, email reporting is your friend, and the analytics of your email marketing programs can help to determine whether the changes you’ve implemented have impacted the open rates of your email marketing campaigns. We can’t stress enough that you should be measuring everything in your email marketing campaigns. Keeping an eye on those open rates will help to direct you to what your next step should be.

The above recommendations will assist in increasing your email open rates. The key to effective email marketing is adapting and measuring the metrics for your email campaigns. Flexibility and changing things up will improve your results in the long term.

For more insights into email marketing, we suggest downloading our infographic that breaks down the state of email marketing.