How to Improve Your Email Open Rate: Part 2

Email your customers all the great offers you want, if they don’t open your email, your campaign is going to flop.

Last week we published How to Improve Your Email Open Rates: Part 1. Please read this before continuing with this second part on email open rate.

Find a Balance

When trying to improve your client’s email open rate, there is a fine line between sending so many emails that you annoy your audience and sending so few that you don’t optimize your email campaigns.

The number of emails you send will depend on your client’s audience. For example, is the segment you are emailing to uninvolved, perhaps only having downloaded a white paper on a whim? Or are they loyal customers who buy from your client repeatedly? Consider this and other factors.

Don’t Over-Send

In your quest to improve email open rate, if you send too many emails right on top of each other, you are going to annoy your audience. That means they will not open your email unless they are doing so to unsubscribe. You may be pumped about these great offers or great contents you want your audience to enjoy, but curb the enthusiasm.

You want to create interest and curiosity. Give that a little time to percolate. Carefully plan the dates you want to send for your entire email campaign.

Don’t Under-Send

While you don’t want to irritate your audience with a barrage of email, you don’t want them to forget about you either. This is particularly true if you are sending an email campaign where one email builds on the next.

 So How Often Should I Send Email?

How often you send email depends on your industry, where your audience segment is in the buying cycle, how engaged they are and other factors. To plan what’s right for client’s business, you may want to start by reading these best practices for email frequency.

The main thing is that you need a plan. Don’t just wing it. And test the success of email frequency variations just like you test everything else in email marketing.

Resend Unopened Emails

I know it’s hard to believe, but your client’s audience is generally not continuously and avidly scanning their inboxes for messages from your client. The average office worker receives an average of 121 emails each day, and many people get a whole lot more. Therefore, your client’s email has a very good chance of slipping through the cracks.

So, a basic of improving email open rate is to resend unopened emails. You can normally program your email program to do this. And while you’re at it, you may want to resend with a more attention-grabbing subject line.

When People Unsubscribe, Ask Why

Of course, you don’t want your client’s customers to unsubscribe from their email list. But the silver lining is that it’s an opportunity to find out why they are unsubscribing. This will enable you to correct the problem for other subscribers. You may want to send unsubscribers to a page that lists various reasons for them to check a box (Too many emails, Irrelevant to me, etc.). But be sure to include an “Other” section that gives the unsubscriber the opportunity to write in a reason.

One thing is for sure. If people are happy with the email, if it is interesting to them, they are not going to unsubscribe.

Watch Out for Spam Filters

For your client’s email to be opened, it needs to make it past the spam filters. Here are some tips to help them do just that.

• Your email list should be opt-in only.
• Use a verified domain that has not been blacklisted due to past spam issues.
• Be sure you are sending from an IP address not associated with past spam problems.
• Avoid spam trigger words in your subject line such as “buy direct” or clearance”. Here’s a list of words to avoid in 2023.
• Use merge tags to personalize the “To:” field of your campaign.

• Ask your subscribers to add you to their contact list and whitelist your emails.

• Include your location.
• Give your subscribers an easy way to opt out of future emails.
• Don’t overdo the uppercase letters in your subject line. A lot of uppercase letters may trigger a spam filter

Don’t Neglect A/B Testing

Test everything about your email, but for open rate the first thing you want to test is your subject line. Should you try to be humorous? Mysterious? To the point? You don’t need to guess. Test them all.

Be sure to test topics and content. The best subject line in the world can only go so far if the topic doesn’t interest your client’s audience. You will also want to test images, calls to action and more for those who do open the email.

Want to Improve Email Open Rate?

We have published two blog posts in the last two weeks to scratch the surface of increasing your client’s email open rate. There is a lot of skill and know-how that goes into expert email marketing. But if email marketing is not your primary bailiwick, never fear.

You can contact Umbrella for the best white label email marketing services. Contact us for a free consultation through this Umbrella website form or by calling 1(866) 760-2638.