Improve your email open rates

By Mark Brownlow, August, 2006 | Post to del.icio.us

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MarketingSherpa's 260-chart 2008 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide includes heaps of data to help you optimize your efforts. Read a review.

Previous: Average email open rates

Whatever email open rates you get in your email marketing software or service reports, you obviously want to improve. Since the open rate is a measure of success, improving open rates is simply about doing better email marketing.

And that's a giant subject.

So here's a list of the main things to consider to get those stats up. Take the keywords and plump them into your favorite search engine (or use the box at the bottom of the page) to learn more about how you can make them work for your own email marketing efforts.

I've also listed many good articles on this topic in the recommended reading section at the end of this article.

Long-term efforts

1. Improve overall strategy and approach

Adopting best practices in all aspects of your email marketing produces sustainable, significant improvements in all success measures. A commitment to professional permission-based email marketing practice is your best long-term hope of raising open rates.

Where to start?

I suggest reading my Creed for Email Marketing over at Squidoo for an overview and pointers to the people and places that give out the information and tools you need.

To summarize: if you send useful, relevant, engaging emails to the right set of people at the right time, then open rates will rise. Easy, eh?

2. Improve deliverability

Facetious I know. But the more emails get delivered, the better chance you have of people actually looking at them. No changes to the actual email itself will help if they never land in the right inbox.

Keywords: email deliverability

3. Refine sign-up procedures and targeting

Reader interest in your emails depends on how targeted your audience are. The better you target, the more likely you are to plunk your email in front of someone who is interested in the contents (i.e. higher open rates).

Targeting starts with where and how you gather email addresses.

You need to ensure that you set expectations correctly, so people sign up because they want what you send out. And you need to ensure they really do want those emails. Only add addresses to your list when the owners explicitly requested you do so. Respect that permission.

Keywords: permission email

Targeting also comes into play when you send out your emails. It means matching content to reader. Which is where it helps to split up your list into smaller groups sharing particular characteristics, letting you fine tune your messages to their needs: segmentation.

Keywords: database marketing, email list segmentation

4. Get people to add you to their address list

In your welcome message or at the top of each email you send out, you can invite people to add your "from" address to their personal address list.

As well as helping you bypass spam filters set up by that individual, it often means their email client or web-based email service will now display images that were previously blocked in your emails. Which means the tracking image gets requested and opens show up where before they were missed.

Keywords: whitelisting

Short-term efforts

1. Subject lines and other headers

The subject line is probably the single most important in-email element that drives open rates. Bad subject lines, poor open rates. Good subject lines, good open rates.

When you're exploring the potential of subject lines, don't forget the other elements that appear in the headers of an email and get displayed in a reader's inbox. The "from" line in particular needs your attention.

Keywords: subject line(s), from line(s), email headers

2. Timing

Open rates will vary for the same email sent on different days or at different times of the day.

There are a lot of folk who will claim various days and times are best. Like our open rate benchmarking problems, these recommendations are based on averages and not on the specific characteristics of your list and situation.

Use your intuition to gauge when people are most likely to have the time and interest to view your email and go from there. Then test alternatives and see how they work out.

Keywords: best day to send

3. Frequency

Send too much email and people lose interest. Send too little email...and people lose interest.

What's the right amount of email to send out? It depends on your situation. And don't forget that responses to your marketing emails are affected by all the email your company or business sends out to recipients (transactional emails, personal emails, account updates, welcome messages etc.)

As a rule of thumb, it's hard to sustain open rates when you send more than two marketing emails a week to a recipient. Ditto at once a month or less. Not impossible -- just hard -- as you're fighting email fatigue and forgetfulness on top of all the usual problems.

Keyword: email frequency

OK, you're now an email open rate expert. I'd value your comments or suggestions or ideas on this topic (contact details). And if you're still hungry for more specifics, can I recommend the following articles:

1. Email open rates guide
2. What do email open rates mean?
3. How to use email open rates
4. Average email open rates (why yours are different)
5. How to improve email open rates