There are a lot of methods for promoting any business these days. Among them, email marketing is one. So learning how to increase email open rate is very important for the growth of your business.

But how can you actually do this?

Since email marketing is both cost-effective and affordable many small businesses hugely rely on it for the promotion of their products and services.

In fact, if you spend a dollar for every email marketing it can return you with $44.

But that’s not all…

In this post, I am going to talk about 10 actionable ways that can actually increase the open rate of your email marketing campaign effectively.

9 Actionable Ways to Increase Email Open Rate

1. Keep Your Subject Line Between 6 to 10 Words Long

Retention Science found that the subject lines of emails that are kept between 6 to 10 deliver the highest open rate.

Your subject line is the first thing your customer will see and know what is your email about.

The best part?

Keeping the subject line short and sweet helps you both increase and improve your email open rate.

How can you do that?

• Make your subject line curiosity-evoking. Just give a bit of the information but not all. Here is an example. See this blog title from Quicksprout.
• Create urgency in the recipients’ minds using words like “today”, “tomorrow”, “final hours” etc. It has the capability to improve your open rate by up to 22%.
• Include some FREE offers in your subject line. Giving your subscribers free offers from time to time keeps them jocund.

• Try to include numbers. It easily draws people’s attention and can increase your email open rate.
• Always keep your email personalized. Aberdeen Research discovered that a “Personalized” email can deliver a good click-through rate by 14% and conversion rate by 10%.

• Start with a story. Storytelling is a great art for driving more sales. It connects with your customers and creates emotions in them.

• Stuff your subject line with business events and promotions. It does create a sense of both urgency and curiosity in people.
• Use a subject line that reflects your own experience and lesson. Here is an example from Neil Patel’s blog.
• Include emoji in the subject line instead of words. It is found that 56% of marketers who include emoji in their subject line experienced higher email open rates that those who don’t.

• 13 Insanely Clickable Email Subject Lines to Improve Email Open Rate

2. Segmentation Is Important to Increase Email Open Rate

By the term “segment” it is suggested to divide something.

In email marketing, segmentation is the process of dividing people based on their interests, demographics, behaviors, or their likings on products and services.

How important is segmentation?

If you do not segment your email list you might end up losing scores of customers. Even you can experience a lot more unsubscribe too.

How can you actually do this?

Here are listed four points to consider to segment your email list:

• Get Acquainted with Their Preferences

The best way to know or get acquainted with your customers’ preferences is to ask them before signing up for your newsletter.

Here is an example from No Rest For Bridget fashion retailer:

• Ask For Their Locations

You can know about your customers’ interests and preferences based on their location too.

How can you get their locations?

Well, it’s simple! Just create a signup form like this:

You are done!

Cool, isn’t it?

• Pay Heed to Your Customers’ Behaviours

Paying heed to customers’ behaviors also help you segment your email list.

Open your email report and check out your audience’s preferences. What they are buying, what they are taking interest in or on what kind of email they are clicking or opening.

Now your job is to create a new group and add that audience separately.

The Festival City Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland possesses twenty various email lists for the various kinds of performances they host.

• Relationship Matters

When it comes to segment your email list and increase your email open rate relationship plays a significant role.

A lot of organizations as well as businesses have some specific kind of organizations they contact.

That’s the root reason they can bring forth the right email to the very right person.

I hope you are all set now to get started and segment your email list right away.

3) Personalize Your Email to Increase Open Rate

Personalization is a brilliant way to increase the open rate in email any marketing.

What’s the real story?

In the relevance of email marketing, by “Personalization” it is denoted to run an email campaign to a particular subscriber based on the information you know about him.

It may be his name, his interest, the product he purchased last time or some other data points. Using this information in an email campaign can evoke the recipient’s interest in opening your email.

Email personalization is a proven tactic to incredibly increase email open rate, CTR as well as improve ROI and revenue.

As per Experian, emails having personalized subject lines are 26% more possible to get opened that those with no subject line.

The point is how can you make your email personalized?

Below I have jotted down some points that should help you in this case.

•Address by your subscribers’ own names. How do you feel when someone calls you by your own name? It’s awesome, no doubt. Similarly when you address your subscribers calling their names there creates a personal connection between both of you.

So instead of saying “Hi there!” start saying “Hi John or your recipient’s name. It sounds good!

However, there is an advanced strategy to make your email more personal. That is to include the recipient’s name in the email content as well.

For example, Red Lobster did an amazing thing apart from giving a shout out to their customers:

• Personalize your email by personalizing images. Yes, it is another great way to increase email open rate as well as click-through-rate. Personalize your emails based on various data and profile you have collected from them.

•Personalization of offers. By personalizing your offers you can improve your CTR and conversion rate remarkably.

Expert marketers, in order to generate more conversion and sales, create content offers based on their subscriber’s profiles, interests, and preferences.

Example?

Addidas is crushing this technique by sending men’s offers to only men and women’s offers to only women.

That’s why they can reach their target customers and produce huge sales.

Chewy is another company that highly uses the personalization technique in their offers. They keep the records the products customers purchase from them erstwhile and later remind them emailing when they know customers are running out of products.

Quite cool, isn’t it?

4) Pen Down Amazing and Valuable Content Every Time

When your subscribers open your email you have overcome the first level, right? Or you have almost won the battle.

Now it is your turn to give them a reason why they should open your email.

You should not look like a selfish salesman who is emailing them only to promote his offers. Rather you should add some value to them also.

The best part?

The best part of sending your customers valuable information is that is they are pleased they are likely to open your email next time. Or maybe waiting for your upcoming email eagerly.

On the contrary, if they found your email useless and get displeased they might not open your further email in future.

The worst thing is that they can even unsubscribe from your list.

That doesn’t sound good, does it?

So every time you email your subscribers make sure you are giving them a good reason to open your email.

You can link your email to an epic blog post, webinar or a FREE eBook you have just jotted down.

5) Timing is Important to Improve Your Email Open Rate

When do you email your subscribers? On which day do you perform it? Do you send emails on weekends? Or on workdays?

What’s the real story?

Studies and researches found that timing plays a significant role when it comes to increasing your email open rate as well as CTR.

Most of the studies found that the middle days of the are the best days to send emails. Here are some stats for you:

• GetResponse discovered that email open rates are high on Thursday. The second peak day is Tuesday.

• HubSpot claims that Tuesday is the best day to get the highest open rate in email marketing.

• MailerMailer claims that in terms of open rates Tuesday wins the race with Wednesday coming in the second.

For better click-through-rate Sunday wins with Tuesday comes in the second. Since Sunday gets lower open rate it is likely that Sunday gets higher CTR.

• MailChimp found the higher open rate on Thursday followed by Tuesday in second.

• According to data by Experian, Tuesday gets the higher email open rates than any other day of the week. It also agrees that Saturday is the best day to get a peek at the opening rate.

I hope you are well aware that the most fertile day for getting a high open rate of email is Tuesday.

But that’s not all…

What is the best time to send bulk emails?

You might be curious to know that, aren’t you?

Well. According to research by Campaign Monitor, 9 a.m – 11 a.m is the best time to get a higher email open rate. However, the peak hour is 10 a.m.

53% of emails are opened on working days with the time between 9 a.m – 5 p.m.

MailChimp does agree with Campaign Monitor and asserts 10 a.m is the best time to send emails for higher open rates.

However, there is an exception too.

Several types of research done by MailChimp and Wordstream reveal that the afternoon is also a peak and productive hour for good open rate which is normally between 12 p.m – 2 p.m. See the above graph!

That’s not all…

What about those who send emails during the late of the day?

Customer.io reveals that the ideal time to send a productive email during the late of the day is between 8 p.m – midnight.

What’s the real story?

It may be possible that since most of the people go to sleep after checking their emails, there lies a good chance of a better open rate.

6) Write Emails In A Friendly Manner

If you want to win your subscribers’ heart and increase your email open rate you must keep aside your corporate hat, and be friendly in tone.

That’s why being personal in email marketing helps marketers gain a 26% more open rate than those without personalization.

Here is a brilliant example of a personalized email from Spotify:

Personalized email always evokes a special interest and feeling in the recipient’s mind.

The result?

As a result, you get higher open rates in your email marketing campaign.

The best part?

There generate more sales!

7) Optimize Emails For Mobiles to Increase Email Open Rate

Litmus analyzed 15 billion emails open and they summed up their findings in 2017 Email Client Market Share the infographic.

Litmus also brought forth the above graphic after analyzing 6 billion emails opens from December 2017 to June 2018.

What is the result?

There are no major changes that mean the majority of emails continued to be read on iPhones (29%) and in Gmail (27%).

As per We Are Social, there are over 5 billion mobile users today worldwide.

And out of 5.11 billion 4.39 billion are internet users. That is a 9% increase in comparison to January 2018.

However, that’s not be all and end all…

According to the latest report from Google, it is said that Gmail has over 1B active users out of whom 75% use Gmail on mobile devices.

Moreover, as per the campaign monitor, opening emails on mobile devices grew 30% from 2010-2015.

BlueHornet claims that 67.2% of customers use their smartphones to check emails.

There’s more…

According to Litmus, the predominant environment for opening emails is mobile rather than desktop and webmail.

These stats essentially suggest that you can’t simply avoid mobile users. You have to pay special attention to them also.

 How can you optimize emails for mobiles? 

•Cut down on images. By default, Android keeps images turned off. So make sure your email looks good without them.

•Always use a responsive design your email service provider offers you.

•Use larger writing fonts to skim out your content.

•Do not make paragraphs too long. Keep it within 2-3 lines at best.

•Avoid stuffing too many links in one paragraph. It looks spammy.

•Use buttons instead of links to help recipients click them easily.

Think what would happen if your client finds your email not responsive on his mobile?

Simply they will delete it.

In fact, 70% of consumers delete emails immediately which are not mobile-optimized.

That’s really not good, is it?

8) Avoid Spam Filter and Improve Email Open Rate

This is another big point to increase your email open rate: Steer clear of SPAM FILTER.

Gmail has a built-in feature called spam filter which literally scans the unsolicited, unwanted and virus-infected emails and moves them to the spam folder.

You should be well aware of it and save yourself from being flagged as spam.

But how?

According to a report by Cyberoam in 2014, every day around 54 billion spam emails were being sent having URLs linking to mean websites or some kind of advertisements.

As of 2018 around 45% of all emails are sent spam.

It does equal to 14.5 billion spam emails sent worldwide every day.

Hence in the sea of spamming your email might also land up into spam folder.

You simply have to avoid it if you want to get more eyeballs on your email and increase your email marketing open rate.

Here are some good practices to follow to avoid spam filter:

• Send emails from your personal email ID instead of a business ID.

• Choose a reliable and trustworthy ESP (Email Service Provider) who has a high score on IP address.

• Check if your IP address is blacklisted or not. You can take the help of MxToolbox to check your IP reputation.

• Use Mail Tester to test your email superiority. It does scan your email to see if it is spam or not. As a result, you get better deliverability.

• Write a good subject line and never raise your voice.

• Stay away from spam-triggering words like “free”, “billion”, “discount”, “cash”, “best price” etc. They are associated with spammy emails and people tend to avoid them.

• Keep your email content neat and clean. Avoid stuffing multimedia in one mail.

• Better to write in standard fonts and format. It will not hurt the recipient’s eyes and can save you from being flagged spam.

• Keep the unsubscribe button to respect your client’s wish if they want to go away.

• FINALLY, give a thorough check out to your grammar and spelling. I personally use Grammarly browser extension for this.

Well! These are enough.

9) Work on Active List and Remove Inactives

How many times did you email the same person and he did not open your email?

Maybe quite often or maybe not.

The main reason why your client did not open your email is that he might have changed his email address or is not interested in your brand or services.

And the result? You are low on email open rate!

What should be the solution?

You need to simply remove your inactive subscribers from your email list.

Emailing to an inactive subscriber is just like throwing the gold to garbage. It will not come to any use to them.

But before you derail your inactive subscribers send them a last painstaking email.

Who says they could get re-connected with you!

You can try this pattern below to re-connect with your inactive subscribers:

1. In the Subject write only their first name, i.e. “Jasmine” or “Caven”.
2. In the body part goes like-

Hi {First Name},

“Are you still interested in _______ {Mention what you are offering}?”

Or, you can say like

“Are you still wondering how to _______ {Your service}?”

After that you can write like this:

How’s that?

Maybe not as good as it is to me! But no problem. Our main focus is to awaken the client who is away from our list.

Conclusion

Now that you have known all the essential points that can help you increase your email open rate remarkably.

Email marketing is still alive in full swing and it will be in the future also.

According to a report by Statista, there were over 281 billion emails sent and received every day globally.

Interestingly, by 2023 that number is expected to spike to 350 billion emails sent and received every day globally.

Which means a BRIGHT FUTURE for email marketing indeed.

What did you like most about this post? Do you want to include any further points for improving the email open rate?

Feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts.