Get the Highest Email Open Rates!

Did you know that your email open rates can be influenced by your reputation with your email service provider? If you have a history of low engagement or high spam complaints, your emails may end up in spam folders or be blocked by the email service provider, even if your content is great. Eeeekh. 

That's why it's essential to maintain a positive reputation by keeping your email list clean, avoiding spammy tactics, and providing valuable content to your subscribers. However, your open rates are determined by a number of things: subject line, preview text, and your previous content to mention some. 

It depends on how you craft your subject lines and the content you choose for your email marketing campaign. All of this combined determine your open rate and whether you will have a high one next time. 

This blog post will cover a few tips and best practices to help email marketing professionals get the highest email open rates possible.

Also read: ChatGPT and Email AI: The way to the future

Why open rate emails are an important metric in email marketing campaigns?

Whether you use Apple Mail or are using Constant Contact or any other email marketing service for mass email campaigns, you need to ensure your future emails have high open rates.

First, let's understand what this means.

Understanding email marketing metrics

Before we dive into the tips, it's important to understand some key email marketing stats and metrics. Open rate and click-through rate (CTR) are two of the most important metrics to track.

Open rate is the percentage of receivers who opened your email. 

CTR is the percentage of receivers who clicked on a link within your email.

Industry average open rates

Campaign Monitor shows the average email open rate for email across all industries is around 20%. But here's the thing, good email open rates vary widely by industry.

For example, the education industry has an industry average open rate of about 25%, while the government has an average email open rate of around 30%.

If you are achieving a good average email open rate, that is close to these industry averages, you are doing well. However, always strive to do even better. 

Tips for increasing email open rates

If you want to increase open rates, you need to work on these factors.

Write compelling subject lines

Your email subject line is the most important thing for your email recipients because it is the first thing they see when they receive your email. Therefore, it is crucial to write a subject line that grabs their attention and piques their interest.

Personalized subject lines in emails are particularly effective, making the recipient feel like the email was specifically created for them.

Understand your target market 

Understanding your target market is key to creating an effective email strategy and marketing campaign. The more you recognize and understand your audience, the better you can tailor your marketing emails according to their interests and needs.

This will increase not only your average email open rates and click-through rates, but also help you achieve top click-through rates. After you understand your audience's preferences, create a list for creating relevant content to entice them towards regularly opening your emails.

Use emojis in your subject lines

A unique tip to increase email open rates is to use emojis in your subject lines. Emojis can add a fun and engaging element to your subject line and help your email stand out in a crowded Inbox.

However, it's important to use emojis sparingly and make sure they are relevant to the content of your email. Testing different emojis and analyzing their impact on open rates can help you find the right balance.

Segment your email campaigns

Segmenting your email campaigns means dividing your email list into smaller groups based on specific characteristics, such as location or purchase history. This allows you to send more targeted and relevant emails, leading to higher open rates. 

Optimize for mobile devices

More than half of all email users read their emails on mobile devices, so it's important to ensure that your emails are optimized for mobile device viewing. 

This includes using a responsive email design, clear and concise copy, and optimizing images for mobile devices.

Use personalization and automation

Personalization and automation can help improve your email open rates. Personalization involves tailoring your emails to specific recipients, while automation involves setting up automated email campaigns triggered by specific actions or behaviors.

The best part is that both can help you increase your click-to-open rate, email frequency, and rates of engagement with emails. This helps build a connection with your audience and build a foundation for future communications.

Test your email subject line

Testing your email subject lines is a great way to determine what works and what doesn't. A/B testing involves sending two versions of an email with different subject lines to a small group of recipients and then using the subject line that gets the highest open rate for the larger email campaign.

The subject line with the higher open rate can also set a precedent for the type of subject lines that will be used in the future.

Avoid spam filters

Emails ending in the spam folder are delivered emails, but they are not, at the same time. They are unlikely to be seen or opened, so avoiding spam filters is important.

Some things to avoid so you can bypass the spam filters include sending emails using too many images, sending promotional emails or marketing emails with invalid email addresses leading to many hard bounces (undeliverable emails), and sending emails to different industries too frequently.

Test and analyze your email marketing campaigns

Testing and analyzing your average email open rates and email marketing campaigns is essential to improving your average email open rates and metrics.

So how do you do it? By testing different email subject lines, sending times, email formats, and other variables, so, you can identify what works best for your target audience and refine your email strategy accordingly.

Some email marketing platforms, such as Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact, offer A/B testing features that allow you to test different versions of your promotional emails and compare their performance. However, they are not the only tools that do so.

GoCustomer offers several features that neither Constant Contact nor other email marketing tools offer - you can warm-up your domain, use the AI tool to craft amazing emails, and send mass or drip campaigns easily.

Evaluating your email marketing metrics can help you identify areas for improvement and track your progress over time by comparing them to other industry open rates. 

Maintain a good sender reputation

Your sender reputation is a score email service providers assign based on your emails' performance. An above-average email open rate can improve your email deliverability as it strengthens your sender reputation.

You can monitor your bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rate and compare them to email marketing benchmarks - all of these elements determine your sender reputation. 

Use a clear and recognizable name and email address, provide a clear opt-in and out mechanism, and avoid using spam triggers in your email content and subject lines.

Keep your email list clean

Maintaining a clean email list means regularly removing invalid, bounced, or inactive email addresses. A clean email list can improve your email deliverability and reduce bounce rates.

To keep your email list clean, use email verification tools to validate new subscribers. You should also try to re-engage inactive subscribers, before removing them from your list.

Use an email warm-up tool

As mentioned above, as an email marketer, you need to constantly evaluate your email marketing metrics, including email open rate and email click-through rate, to determine the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

It's also important to pay attention to industry averages and benchmarks for open rates. This is crucial when it comes to ensuring you are maintaining a good email open rate. If your email open rate is faltering, it may be because of a lower number of emails delivered, email clients trusting you less and most users never engaging with your emails.

It is important to set your own benchmark for what you want to achieve and if your sender reputation isn't strong enough for you to meet your benchmark, use an email warm-up tool such as GoCustomer to land in the Priority Inbox more often.

Elevate your email marketing game

As we mentioned above, open rates by industry vary. Email marketers need to pay attention to all of the above factors to devise a concrete strategy and ensure open rates stay high. Of course, you can't hit a home run unless someone pitches the ball. 

If your audience opens your email and reads it, that's when the whole game starts. 

Remember, GoCustomer, is a key component of this game and can help you get a winning streak with its features which are specifically tailored to help small and medium-sized business owners connect and convert.