How to Improve Your Email Marketing Open Rates

Is email marketing dead? Of course not! That’s just a rumor some “experts” try to peddle every year with zero foundation for their argument. Instead, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest email marketing is one of the best things you can spend your money on:

• Email marketing has an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.
• One survey found that 60% of customers bought something because of an email (as opposed to 12.5% on social media).
• Two-thirds of people who sign up for an email list want to get at least one email a week.
• Email is considered the most personal form of brand communication across all generations.

Is your email marketing dead? You may feel frustrated because you do not experience these averages, leaving you frustrated and looking for new ways to market your business. How do you improve your email marketing open rate?

We have some bad news: If you aren’t getting the results you want from email marketing, it’s your fault. It probably means you haven’t done enough testing or aren’t implementing best practices.

You may have too high of expectations for your emails. The average open rate for emails across industries is 29.55%. The average click rate is bleaker at 1.27%. If your numbers are below these, there’s reason to worry.

Fortunately, there’s always time to course correct. To start this correction, you should first learn how to improve your email marketing open rate. 

Here are five suggestions to get you started:

1. Find the Best Time to Send

What’s the best time to send emails? Some experts say Tuesdays and Thursdays, but there’s no perfect time.

That would make life easier. Could you imagine if 10 AM on Tuesday was the best time to send emails? Then every business would send emails at that time, and your email would drown in the noise of corporate greed.

Instead of listening to what other people say is the best time, make your own observations. Try sending emails on Wednesday afternoons, Monday nights—heck, even Saturday mornings! Eventually, you’ll discover that sending during certain times or days produces greater results.

2. Send the Right Number of Emails

While there isn’t a sweet spot for when you should send emails, there is a sweet spot for how many emails you should send in a month. 

As we mentioned, most email subscribers expect at least one email a week from a brand. You should be sending at least four emails a month to meet that expectation. 

But according to Hubspot, the best results come when you send between 16 and 30 emails a month—almost one a day! Companies that sent emails this frequently experienced a median open rate two times higher than those who only sent one or two emails a month.

How can you fill all of those email slots? With a mixture of personalized product offerings, limited-time deals, and discount codes.

3. Refresh Your Email Lists

Are you working with months-old email lists? If so, your window of opportunity may have expired. Those people aren’t interested in your product offering anymore, and if they haven’t unsubscribed, your emails are probably going to a folder they never open.

So how often should you clean up your email lists? That depends on a couple of factors:

• How often are you sending out emails? If you only send out a few campaigns a year, you should check your list before every campaign. If you’re more consistent, you can refresh your list every couple of months.
• How do you collect emails? If customers automatically get added to a list by signing up for your services, you’re probably sending many emails to people who don’t want them. But if users are deliberately signing up for your emails, you probably don’t have to refresh your lists as often. 

You can peer into which users are and aren’t opening your emails with an email marketing service. That way, you can take a more surgical approach to slim down your email lists.

4. Segment Your Lists

List segmentation is one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve the effectiveness of your emails, especially for eCommerce businesses. 

The general idea of segmentation is dividing the email addresses on your list according to specific criteria. You may separate addresses by demographic information, like age and gender identity. You can also get more granular, like highlighting who bought a specific product in the last “X” amount of time.

Big Leap’s experts have seen major success from email list segmentation. We recently helped one of our clients, Redmond Life, generate over $27,000 in sales from a single segmented email blast.

5. Obsess Over Subject Lines

Aside from your company’s name, the subject line is the first thing your audience sees in their inbox. That means you have to spend a lot of time ensuring that the subject line will entice a click.

The subject line should be a window into what they can expect in the email—not a tease like “Open to see what’s inside.” No one wants to do that.

Here are some tips to make your subject line the star of your email:

• Add the recipient’s name to the subject line
• Keep it short—no more than 60 characters (or 30 characters for mobile users)
• Use keywords that will grab their attention
• Start with the deadline (if applicable)
• Make them feel special (“We’re giving you 50%”)
• Avoid ALL CAPS unless you want to look like spam
• Infuse the email’s call to action into the subject line

Don’t forget to test those subject lines. Your audience may resonate more with a certain tone—testing multiple tones will help you find that secret sauce.

Get Your Email Marketing Back on Track

Do you think you’ll need assistance implementing all of these strategies to make your email marketing strategy an asset to your business? Big Leap is happy and ready to help. Find out how our email marketing and other services can help you find the leads you’re looking for.

Or, if you’re just looking for more tips to improve your marketing performance, please check out our free resources.