Ideas to Help You Increase Your Email Open Rates

by Paiton McDuffie | Nov 2, 2021

There’s a reason email marketers place so much importance on open rates. If your audience isn’t opening your emails, they’re not receiving your message or engaging with your content. So how do you increase your open rates and ensure your contacts are reading your messages? Read on for a few tactics you should consider implementing.

Keep your list clean

In a couple of previous blog posts, I detail the importance of list cleanliness and practical ways to go about cleaning your list. List cleanliness is also of the utmost importance if you want to increase your open rates. If your list is full of outdated information, disengaged contacts, or mistyped email addresses, your open rates will suffer. For one of our clients, we started excluding “disengaged” contacts from receiving their monthly email messages. We saw open rates increase significantly from an average of 9.41% up to 29.53%. This is a prime example of segmenting audiences to ensure the most engaged users receive the most relevant information.

Segment your audience

Ever receive an email about a topic or product that you had zero interest in? Yeah, me too. And I’m guessing, like me, you didn’t open the email and sent it straight to your trash. Avoid sending irrelevant messages to users who won’t open them in the first place by segmenting your audience based on their interests. (Read more about hyper-personalization here.) Mailchimp found that by segmenting their audience, they saw a 14.1% higher open rate. Narrow your focus and watch your stats increase.

Take time to write your subject line and TEST, TEST, TEST

Your email subject lines are your first (and often only) chance to capture your audience’s attention – don’t rush or flippantly compose it. Use personalization and merge fields when applicable (like a contact’s first name, or maybe the city or neighborhood where they live) to make your email even more tailored and personal. We tested including personalization in one client’s monthly email campaign and saw a jump in open rates from an average of 12.75% up to 21.38% (that’s an increase of 67.68%). Test phrasing, tone, or even including emojis in your subject lines to see what your audience prefers. For a different client, we saw a 2% increase in the average open rate by phrasing our subject line as a question rather than a statement. You’ll only know what resonates with your audience by testing.

Change up your sender name

Next to your subject line, your sender name is going to be one of the first pieces of information your contacts see when your email hits their inbox. A great way to make your email message stand out is to change your sender name from your brand’s name to a person’s name. Consumers are hit with hundreds of promotional emails a day, all coming “from” brands: Target, Amazon, Apple, you name it. But receiving an email from “Paiton McDuffie at Syrup” stands out,  is more likely to be noticed and therefore opened. Test out different sender names within your organization and test against a non-personal sender name to see what resonates with your audience the most.

As with most things, these email tactics aren’t a one size fits all solution. Each audience is unique and should be treated as such. But by testing the ideas mentioned above, you’ll learn what your audience(s) prefer, and in turn, your open rates will increase. Have another strategy that has helped increase your open rates? Tell me about it!