Your Email Open Rates Suck. Now What? 13 Tips from the Experts

Email marketing has been around for years and is still one of the most effective channels up to date for reaching out to potential and existing customers. Research shows that for every $1 spent on email marketing, marketers can expect an average return of $42.

According to Statista, approximately 3.9 billion users currently use email across the world, and this figure is expected to rise to 4.48 billion by 2023. For those who still aren’t convinced by this channel, here are several email marketing statistics that’ll change your mind:

• 78% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement in the past year
• 59% of consumers say emails influence their purchase decisions
• Marketing professionals who segment their campaigns report a rise of 760% in revenue
• 73% of millennials prefer to receive communications via email

While email remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels, not all consumers open them. Therefore, it’s good practice to monitor and compare your email open rates.

Email open rate

An open email rate refers to the percentage of subscribers who open an email campaign successfully. These rates will vary based on the subject matter and subject line.

What is a good open rate for email marketing?

The ideal open rate for email campaigns is 20.94% across all industries. But depending on your industry, this figure will differ slightly.

Source

Unfortunately, marketers are bound to encounter low open rates at some stage, so we asked 13 experts for their tips on how to improve email open rates.

1. Test multiple subject lines

Earlier in 2020, I ran an email marketing test for a client and we achieved the following results:

• 93% open rate
• 14% click rate on the links

I recommend testing at least two different subject lines to a small portion of your email list. Next, take the email subject line with the highest open rate and use that to send an email to the rest of your list. Specifically, I use 10% of the list for this test (e.g. if you have 1,000 subscribers, send the test emails to approximately 100 subscribers).

In addition, we also had a novelty factor contributing to the success of the email. The client used the same type of email subject line (i.e. “PRODUCT for sale – June”) for many months. So testing a new type of subject line offering a content article made a positive impression.

Bruce Harpham, B2B SaaS Content Marketing Consultant at BruceHarpham.com

2. Write short and succinct email subject lines

One excellent method for improving email open-rates is to keep subject lines short and to the point. According to a study, subject lines 6-10 words long had the highest open rates. Additionally, you should try to make a clear value proposition in the subject line. The more specific you can be, the better. Alternatively, you can arouse curiosity with a question: "Was It Something We Said?" Try to entice the customer one way or another, but don't be overly vague or too wordy—balance is essential.

Grant Aldrich, CEO for OnlineDegree.com

3. Timing is key

Timing can have a significant impact on whether or not people open your messages. Consumer inboxes are stuffed with sign-ups, spam and social media notifications, and pressing send at the wrong time means your email could get lost. From my experience, the best times for emails are between 8.30-9.30am (for the morning commuters, and people just switching on their work emails) and 5-6pm.

Jase Rodley, Founder at Dialed Labs

4. Use the right language and create a clear action

If you’re sending a cold email, make it more personal instead of “salesy” and create catchy headlines, or else they’ll just get deleted. Be more realistic and authentic in your claim and approach, so it sounds like an approachable conversation you can enter into, not get pulled into a sales page

Don’t use vague language that’s clickbait. Especially in COVID season, that messaging doesn’t resonate well. People want authentic connection, realness, and safety in proposed approaches to better their business

Keep your emails short and ask for talk time to expand the conversation. Quick and actionable messages allow for quicker decisions and responses. If you want a reply, then make a short, specific and direct ask that requires a response

If you want to coordinate a meeting, offer a couple of specific dates in tandem with a calendar link. Some prefer to set up appointments the “old school” way and others via calendar links

James Jacobi, Founder of Jacobi Enterprises

5. Don’t mention your brand name

Use a real person's name in the "from" field rather than your brand name. People open emails from other people. To further improve this effect, use a short, punchy subject line. Some of my best-performing subject lines are "Introducing myself" and "Checking in".

Avoid using capitalization and punctuation in the subject line, as that closely mimics how real people write them. It works!

Jayson DeMers, CEO of EmailAnalytics

To learn more about how to optimize and enhance your email strategy, listen to our interview with Nikki Elbaz on The Strategic Marketing Show:

Listen to the episode via your preferred pocast platform:

• Spotify
• Audible
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

6. Personalized videos

One trick that’s improved our open rates is the use of personalized videos. We film a personalized greeting "Hi ___, love your blog or content" then combine that intro video with a generic body video that we can use for any of our leads. This hack enables us to make dozens of videos in an hour since most of it is the same for each lead.

I find that emails are more likely to be opened if you have a casual/informal subject line like "Love your content, wanted to send you this video I filmed". Then, in the body of the email, send the link to the video you made for them.

Julia Enthoven, Founder and CEO of Kapwing

7. Remove inactive subscribers from your email list

Remove inactive subscribers from your email list who haven’t opened an email in XX number of months/years/what-have-you. [Base this on multiple factors, how often do you email? How long is your typical sales cycle? etc.] That might sound brutal, but they don’t care about you or your email, and you’re more than likely ending up in their spam folder or straight in the trash. Even if they do care, they aren't interacting with the email, so why send it to them until they've made another, more recent, connection with your business?

With providers automatically filtering emails, it’s harder to make an impact through 'traditional' email tactics. Depending on the company size, you may want to consider alternative options, like custom emails for those who interact with them regularly with a layer of strategy for new emails you get throughout the process. Creating separate strategies for different groups of people, including custom emails directly from an individual at your company rather than bulk emailing a list, is imperative for increasing your email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Meg Raiano, Managing Director at reCreative + Co

8. Simple things we should all be doing

1. Set yourself apart by checking emails from others to see what they’re doing and how you can diversify yourself
2. Personalize your subjects. Generic titles have fewer chances of being opened because they lack that “human touch”
3. Use eye-catching titles, but use them carefully and make sure they deliver on your promise

Allan Borch, Growth Hacker and Founder of Dotcom Dollar

9. A/B test your emails

A/B test your email subject lines and analyze the open rate and engagement rate of each one. Testing not only gives you a greater understanding of which strategies work best, but the analytics and data acquired from the experiment will ultimately provide valuable insights into your business that’ll benefit future email marketing campaigns.

Dave Charest, Director of Content Marketing at Constant Contact

10. Make sure your subscribers want to hear from you

Low open rates will hurt your overall deliverability across all the emails you send. They’re a clear signal to email providers that your recipients don’t want to read your content. This signal is a ranking factor for the delivery of future emails, and if this worsens, it can even lead to your campaigns being blocked.

To prevent this, make sure your subscribers actually want to hear from you. At User Growth, we’ve put mechanisms in place to periodically remove inactive subscribers.

We sent them one last email asking them to reconfirm that they want to keep hearing from us, and if they don’t respond, we take it upon ourselves to remove them automatically from the email list.

It’s always better to have 1K subscribers that want to hear from you, than having 100K subscribers that never open an email.

Hans van Gent, Founder and Chief Strategist of User Growth

11. Four factors of a strong email subject line

The subject line of your email will influence whether the recipient will open your email or not. To compel people to take action when your email arrives in their inbox, use between 30 and 50 characters (including spaces) to deliver an incentive-focused subject line that matches the content of your email. Doing so can increase your open rates by as much as 50%.

Physiological, social, and cognitive factors can all play a role in what incentives your audience finds motivating. Things that can be used to incentivize a subject line include:

• The recipient’s name
• Action verbs
• An appropriate, relevant emoji (no more than two)
• A clear and irresistible value proposition that is in sync with the content of your email

Kristoffer Howes, Chief Executive Officer at Weal Digital

12. Send personalized emails

Don’t make emails all about you. Readers just want to hear about topics that relate to their businesses or lives. If you met someone at a party and all they did was go on about themselves and their favorite topics, would you choose to spend time with them the next time you saw them?

Personalize the content for each reader or segment of your audience. Businesses have access to the data to deliver personalized, if not hyper-personalized, content based on their audience’s unique wants and needs. If you know what content each member wants and you deliver it when they want it, they’ll give you their attention, loyalty, and trust because you always get it right, or at least, almost always. Businesses should take advantage of the technology in the email content marketplace that’ll allow them to send personalized emails their recipients will always open and never complain about.

After using our platform to personalize emails, customers often reported open rates of over 50% and click-through rates between 15-25%, which was a game-changer for them.

Amith Nagarajan, Executive Chairman and Founder at rasa.io

13. Keep your content relevant and brief

The best way to improve your email open rates is to be relevant to your audience. Short of putting COVID-19 in the subject line, there isn’t a magic potion that’ll gain you higher open rates other than pertinent content. Your audience needs to want what you have to offer.

Open rates for our newsletters are consistently above 35%. Bite-size content keeps readers informed. The weekly “In the News” email featuring top news briefs is our most popular email.

The subject line must pique the recipient’s interest. As I glance at my personal inbox, travel, professional, home décor, news, and fashion retail emails are vying for my attention. CheapOair captures my interest with “One Way” flight deals, Birch Lane offers chaise lounges under budget, and The New York Times gives me breaking news. I am opening each of them because:

1. I’m game for a vacation
2. I’d like to explore how a chaise lounge could lift my tired living room into a new decade
3. Access to breaking news keeps me in the know

Presenting useful information in clever ways that resonate with the desires of your audience will help increase email open rates and broaden interaction with your brand in the long run. Remember to keep your content relevant.

Angela Harrington, VP, Communications and External Relations at Berkeley College