How You Can Improve Your Email Open Rates

In today’s business world, email remains the preferred method of communication between brands and consumers. When you send great emails, you can improve your conversion rates. If your email marketing efforts are failing to hit the mark, it’s time to take another approach to your strategy. Although email is a powerful tool, if your emails aren’t being opened, your efforts will prove futile; you’ll waste time, money, and energy. Even if you manage to increase your open rate by just a few percent, it can make all the difference to your bottom line. With that in mind, here are a few ways you can improve your email open rates:

Use Segmentation

One of the best ways you can improve your email open rates is to use segmentation. Segmentation is when you split your email campaigns to accommodate specific segments of your markets. There are dozens of ways you can segment your email list, and the more data you have about your customers, the better targeted your efforts will be. For example, you might segment a campaign for men and women, or segment based on geographic location. According to a study conducted by Lyris, 39% of marketers who segmented their lists experienced higher open rates. Additionally, 24% saw greater revenue and higher deliverability.

Be Consistent

“Brand Consistency is critical for all businesses, from large to small,” says Lee Jacobs, a former partner at AngelList. “It is important to find the right cadence on how you communicate with your customers, each message should go through a filter of “how am I adding value to my customers” If you don’t have a good answer for that don’t send it.”

The number of acceptable email sends per month depends on the industry you’re in, and HubSpot has a reliable tool to help determine where you stack up against others. With the Email Open Rate Benchmark Tool, simply input your current email open rate, select the industry you’re in, and you’ll see what’s acceptable in your area of expertise.

Choose the Right Time

Choosing the right time to send your email list as imperative. Several studies and statistics have been published to distinguish how different times and days produce results against one another. The time you send your email can have a huge effect on your open rates. According to Mailchimp, the best time to send your email is around 10am in the recipient’s local time zone on a weekday. However, another study from Experian found that, although weekdays are the better options, afternoons fared better. With so many differing perspectives and studies, split testing is critical. Split test your campaigns time and time again to find your sweet. For example, the type of content being sent affects open rates, too, which means the ideal time to send an email depends on the type of industry you’re in.

Write to One Person

When crafting email campaigns, it’s easy to get lost thinking about how you can appeal to your hundreds of subscribers. However, if you create a buyer persona and hone in on that persona during email creation, you’ll successfully create the illusion of writing to one person. Think about who your target market is. It helps to actually create a mood board or digital notebook of everything there is to know about this “person.” What’s their age? Where do they live? What education do they have? What are their daily struggles? These are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself when you’re thinking about buyer persona.

Create a Standout Subject Line

• Just as a headline has to be captivating enough to capture a click, so too does your email subject line. If your subject line doesn’t entice your subscriber, chances are you’ll lose them before you have a chance to show them what you have to offer. First and foremost, keep your email subjects short and sweet. The majority of subscribers are opening their emails on their mobile devices, and a subject line that’s too long will easily get cut off. Additionally, avoid the “no-reply” sender name. A real recipient address is more relatable. Here are a few other tips for creating great subject lines.
• Encourage curiosity—lend an air of mystery without being overly cryptic
• Use numbers in your subject
• Inject humor
• Be conversational and speak in the same language as your target market
• Communicate urgency and/or scarcity

Need some inspiration? Check out this lengthy list of awesome subject lines to help steer you in the right direction.