Escalate the Email Open Rates: How And What are the Success Factors?

Overloaded inboxes with chock-full of emails and numerous marketing emails bombarding them from all sides makes the fight fierce for you to catch your potential client’s attention. You need to stay ahead of the curve in order to witness a boom in your email open rates.

What are Email Open Rates?

What are the metrics that define the success of email marketing campaigns? There are many and the email open rate is an important one.

Email open rates set the stage for the overall performance of an email marketing campaign. It is a percentage that indicates how many subscribers opened your successfully delivered email campaigns. 

A high email open rate suggests that your subject lines are resonating with your target audience and that they are compelled to open your email. The average open rates vary depending on the audience persona, your business market, and other aspects.

How to Improve Email Open Rates?

Ensuring that your brand pursues best practices for email marketing will improve your email open rates more significantly over time. This will lead to a more engaged audience that is invested in your brand, and also spending time on your subject line will only result in an increased open rate for that one ‘email send’.

Most industries witness an average email open rate of 20-30%. The overall average email open rate stands at around 16.97 percent.

What matters the most for high email open rates is comprehensive out-turn. Whereas, a low email open rate indicates:

• Your email list comprises a diverse group of people with different interests and behaviours.
• It’s possible that you’re sending out too many or too few campaigns.
• The email subject line isn’t fascinating or relevant enough.

Open rates are flawed metrics with your ESP and Google Analytics showing somewhat discrete data. The purpose, however, is not to have perfect data. The goal is to gain relevant insights and put those insights into action in the next move.

So, how can a marketer get more people to open their emails? What are the most important factors that influence email open rates?

Let’s dive in to see the 5 success factors that can be a fuelling source for dwindling email open rates.

Subject Lines & Pre-header Text Copy are Everything

The subject line is the first thing that an email subscriber will see – so it can win or bust the case for your campaigns.

47% of subscribers open an email solely on the basis of the subject line. Therefore, it is important to keep the subject line copy both compelling and intriguing.

The same goes with the pre-header text – create something with an incentivized copy. However, do not overdo it. Your email is more likely to be opened if this text delivers a concise, to-the-point summary of what you’re offering.

Here are some tried-and-true best practices for subject lines that will help you increase email open rates:

• Use email personalization tactics to instantly grab the receiver’s attention. Including first names in the subject lines work wonders for open rates.
• Write your subject lines keeping mobile users in mind. Mobile devices trim long subject lines. Keep your subject copy around 50 characters long and you’ll be OK.
• Avoid using spam words and words which sound more “salesy”.
• Add an emoji or two, but be cautious in using them as different systems will render and display them differently. But a little research and testing will do the job.
• Infuse a sense of secrecy, emotion, humour, or urgency in the subject line. Studies show that subject lines with a feel of urgency get a 22% greater open rate.
• Use a striking statistic or phrase that includes a number in the subject lines.

List Segmentation is the Table Turner

One of the most crucial criteria for a recipient in deciding whether or not to open an email is whether or not the email is relevant to them.

What’s the greatest approach to make your emails more relevant? The answer to this is list segmentation.

According to studies, 39% of marketers who segment their email lists had improved open rates, 28% saw reduced unsubscribe rates, and 24% saw better deliverability and revenue.

Segmented lists as per the audience and their demography make it easier to determine what subject lines and messages attract them to open and engage with your emails.

Effective List Cleaning

Is it still the case that your subscribers are interested in hearing about your brand? You’ve probably heard that it’s critical to send emails to your subscribers on a regular basis to keep your list from becoming stale. Even yet, email subscribers might get stale over time. Some customers may have changed email addresses, or they may no longer be interested in your services or brand.

It’s a wise idea to delete inactive members from your list on a regular basis to keep it updated and consisting of engaged subscribers. Inactive subscribers are those who have not opened or clicked on an email in the last six months or longer.

However, before bidding goodbye to them, launch a win-back email campaign to try to re-engage your inactive subscribers. Send a breakup email series to unresponsive subscribers to get their attention. Include an option for the subscriber to interact with each email.

The Timing

The right email sending time is another crucial success factor contributing to high email open rates. Knowing your audience will help you determine when and on which day to send your email campaigns.

According to studies, sending emails on weekdays results in higher email open rates. Additionally, subscribers are most likely to open your email at 10 a.m., when they first arrive at work, or at 1 p.m., when they are catching up on emails after lunch.

Various findings have come to various conclusions while deciding the best day to send email campaigns. According to a study, Fridays and Tuesdays have the highest email open rate in 2020, while Saturdays have the lowest rate of 17.3 percent.

The first hour after delivery accounts for 23% of all email opens and over 30% happen within the second hour. An email’s chance of getting opened decreases to 1% after 24 hours!

Sending Frequency – Evaluate the frequency of sending your emails, if your open rate is significantly lower than the industry average despite using tested subject lines and other strategies. Generally speaking, sending emails more frequently reduces the level of engagement per campaign delivered, although everyone’s situation is different.

Optimization of Each Element of an Email

65% of marketing emails are now opened on a mobile device.

Optimizing your email accordingly and checking how your email looks on an iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphone is one of the most critical things you can do for high email open rates. You’ll lose nearly half of your audience right away if your emails are too cumbersome for subscribers to view and navigate on their phones. 

Apart from mobile-optimized versions, optimization of each and every element of your emails is essential. A lengthy email with no clear insights or explicit Call-to-Action (CTAs) will almost certainly result in low email open rates.

People like short, crisp emails with a clear emphasis and the feel of having been tailored just for them. They are more likely to open the email and take the action indicated by the CTA link or button if they see personalized information and can scan it swiftly.

Incorporate real-time content with personalized product recommendations, combo deals, or limited-time specials to increase email open rates.

The addition of alt text to images, including the CTA images, can help increase open rates. Even if the HTML doesn’t render properly or if the recipient’s email software filters photos by default, the alt text helps readers grasp what they’re reading.

Create text versions of your emails for readers whose email systems don’t support HTML-rich emails or who choose to just read plain text messages. If you don’t optimize the plain-text form of your emails, readers will see a jumbled mess that they won’t want to open, let alone read.

Takeaway

There are a variety of reasons why email marketers fascinate high email open rates. Admittedly, if an email isn’t opened, there’s a minimal likelihood that the recipient will click on anything within it. The average open rate can be a precursor to some very impressive results from email marketing initiatives.

Email marketing is a curious creature. And so is the email open rate. You must employ marketing strategies while remaining humane to encourage people to open your email.

Use these success factors as a roadmap to be doubly sure that your email pops out in the recipient’s inbox, subsequently increasing the open rates.

Bonus Tip: A/B test different versions of an email to see which one has the highest email open rates. You can experiment with two different subject lines, different optimum sending times and days, or different possibilities for the “from” section.