7 Tips to Increase your Email Open Rate

There are lots of expectations marketers count on from their marketing initiatives.  For example seasoned marketers understand Email campaigns to be one of the most powerful tools.  They should be in your list of initiatives because when done right, emails help drive traffic and spread awareness instantly and cost effectively when they are opened.

But, what if after following a strategic approach and putting hard work in designing content, structure and design, the email campaign does not turn up with the expected results? It may be a frustrating situation to handle, Isn’t it? There’s no denying that you want your money to bring returns, but what if just 10% of the people have opened the mail, now what? It doesn’t have to be this way.

In order to stay away from annoying low performance, let’s look at the seven great tips that can increase your email open rate when applied correctly.

1. Include Interesting Subject Lines: Your Subject line is the first glimpse that incites customers to either click the mail or ignore it. Hence, it is a “must” that you create attractive and attention grabbing subject lines. This can be done if you keep users’ expectations in mind. At the same time, always prioritize customers’ benefits and announce the reward of taking actions. Your customer’s eyes are moving fast when scanning their inbox, so remember personalized, simple and short subject lines are believed to be more effective.  You only have a very short fraction of time to catch your reader’s attention.  Your subject line is your gate-keeper.  Make it count. Take your time to craft the most powerful subjectline, short, relevant and interesting.
2. Focus on Behavioral Targeting: It is just not “open” rate, but also “click through” rate and “conversion” rate that depends upon behavioral data.  These statistics should be used to design your promotional campaigns. Practicing this one principle will bring you better lead generation as well as an improved ROI. In order to do so, it is important to understand which emails have high open rate and know which emails frustrate customers. A thorough analysis of responsive and unresponsive customers can assure you generate a high level of customer responses.  In short, know your customer, study their habits do the research or invest in an expert service to assist in this process.
3. Relevant Messaging: It is only relevant information that evokes response. Hence, build your approach of what customer wants, build realistic, rewarding and unique messages, avoid spam, and schedule your delivery and test call-to-action by using a planned strategy to gather data, relevant to the goals.
4. Delivery Time: Though there are no hard and fast rules, delivery time plays an important role in the success of your campaign. In order to decide upon delivery time, try experimenting with different days and times.  Compare the data to locate the best target dates and times, which score the highest open and click through rates.  Only after this step has been done can you further fine-tune your message by astonishing the recipients with new elements in your messaging
5. Update Contact Information on Databases: It is a must to stay active in updating email addresses, as your lists decay with time. You should also keep adding new customers to your lists regularly.
6. Timeliness: You should never miss out on scheduling your campaigns throughout the calendar.  Focus on emails which feature ongoing events or breaking news. Make sure that your subject line makes a difference to your targeted audience, even if there is a common theme, remember to unveil the story or offer in your progressive campaign as you build follow-up emails.
7. Consider Mobile Device: Don’t forget to consider the appearance of email on mobile devices, as SmartPhones have revolutionized the marketing industry and have surpassed the user rate over the PC and laptop users. Check out the display quality and your links and be sure to optimize your email messages for all of the different mobile device platforms.

If you want your email campaign to bring out fruitful results for you, do follow these tips and see the positive impact it will have on your email “open rate” and “click through” rate.  By applying these principles, you will optimize your email marketing strategy and assess the campaign performance over time so that you have a performing email campaign with high returns.