5 Practical ways to Increase your Email Open Rates by 12 – 15%

Did you know the success or failure of your email marketing campaign efforts mostly depends on your email open rate?

Picture this: If you have a 5% open rate, then your conversion rate will definitely be at the same rate or lower.

Maybe you’re struggling to get your emails opened by your audience, Or you’re consistently getting low open rates for your emails, stay, let’s address the issue together.

We’ve all been there, with open rates of less than 10% for every campaign we sent. Is it that people hate email? that’s why they decide not to open our email campaigns?

No, according to a study by Wordstream, 72% of people prefer to be contacted via email.

In this article, we will be looking at how we can increase our email open rates. Here is how to improve open rates for your email campaign.

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What is an email open rate?

Email open rate depicts the number of your total subscribers who opened and viewed your email content as against the total number of subscribers you have on your list.

It is calculated by dividing the number of subscribers who opened your email by the total subscribers and multiplying by 100.

Say you send an email to a list of 100 subscribers, and 70 open your email.

Open rate = (70/100)×100; 

Open rate = 70%.

Tactics to increase email open rate

1. Prune your email list to maintain an engaged audience:

Keeping an engaged list is a significant aspect of your email marketing journey.

Although the general advice to send emails consistently to keep an engaged list may work, subscribers may still go stale at a point in time due to content fatigue and other unknown factors.

That is why periodically pruning your list to remove inactive subscribers is significant. Use email marketing tools that help you detect subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in a long time and remove them from your list.

Also, avoid buying email lists from third-party vendors. Always build contacts from scratch. Learn how to build your email list exponentially for free.

2. Ask for a reply in welcome emails

Sometimes, your emails have lower open rates because they’re peacefully lying down in subscribers’ spam folders. To avoid this from happening to you again, always ask for a reply in your welcome emails.

As soon as a subscriber replies to your email, signals are sent to the email server that your audience trusts you and wants to hear from you. The next email is definitely hitting their inboxes.

3. Personalize the experience, always use profile pictures your subscribers easily recognize.

Is your profile picture blank? are you using a company logo that only a few people recognize?

I suggest you change the profile pictures of your email addresses to fit what your subscribers are used to.

So what should I use? my company logo or my picture?

I’d recommend using profile pictures subscribers can easily relate to when they see your message.

An influencer on LinkedIn may choose to use his image rather than his crash course logo because LinkedIn is where most of his subscribers signed up and will easily recognize his emails.

Pro tip: a colorful image or a simple animation to draw subscribers’ attention.

4. Test different subject lines

Did you know subject lines can boost your email open rates by up to 7%? That’s how important a subject line is to your email campaigns.

Avoid using generic subject lines for your emails, however, let every reader have a personal experience whenever they see your email.

Before sending out your email, you can run several tests on different segments of your list to see the effectiveness of each subject. The best subject line wins.

5. Segment your audience

Segmenting your audience will help you better understand what content resonates better with them.

Segmentation helps you realize little bits of information that tell a story about your subscribers. It helps you deliver content based on their preferences.