7 Ways to Boost Your Email Open Rates

You may shoot thousands of emails to your potential customers but the probability of those customers opening your emails is something really hard to predict. However, if you take care of few important things before you send across your marketing emails, you may significantly improve your email open rate and eventually the conversions and the returns on investment.

Here are 7 Ways to help you boost your email open rates:

Create an Appealing Subject Line: The subject line is the first thing the recipient of your email will get to see. A boring, irrelevant or misleading subject line will kill their mood and they are most likely put your email into the thrash. A subject line should be precise, objective, appealing and personalized.

Personalization: If you believe in a philosophy that says ‘All our customers are equal to us’, great!! But probably your prospective customer may not be too happy with this philosophy and may want to be treated as special. Personalized messages are effective in drawing the attention of recipients and are more likely to be opened by the intended audience. According to Marketo, personalized messages based on behaviour are 3x better than batch and blast.

Timing Is Important: Many times, marketers do not give enough importance to timing their emails well and eventually fail to get the results that they intent to achieve. Emails which are sent out at times which are inconvenient to your prospects have a poor open rate. Hence, it’s important to determine the suitable time to send out marketing emails based on the geographic location of your target customers, their time zone and their digital information consumption.

Use Qualitative Email List: Having an email list is just not enough. Your email list should include prospects who are potential buyers of your products or services. Also, many organizations do not invest in updating their outdated databases and run their email campaigns using the same. Often, the reason for poor open rates and response rates can be outdated database. Building or procuring a qualitative database can significantly enhance your campaign efficiency.

Content: Email content which is neither useful nor interesting does not have a positive impact on the readers. The content of your email must be focused on helping customers, educating them and solving their everyday challenges. It must be engaging and be able to establish a personal bond with the reader.

Optimize for Mobile: Around 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices. With increasing consumption of information on mobile devices, it is imperative for marketers to optimize their emails for better readability on mobiles. Emails not optimized for mobiles do may be a turn-off for those who access their emails on mobile phones.

Test, Test and Test: Marketers must test their emails on different devices and platforms based on various metrics such as readability, balance between text and graphical content, and more. They may send different templates to different small test groups to measure the response and accordingly choose the one that best serves their purpose. Similarly other factors such as the timing of the email can also be determined based on testing. Running these tests will surely help you determine a better email campaign strategy and will positively impact your email open rates.

Email marketing is more relevant than ever. With social media and mobile marketing complimenting your email campaigns, all you need is a strong marketing strategy that takes into consideration the multi-dimensional aspects of email marketing. Planning your email campaign strategy meticulously will surely help you achieve a better email open rate and will positively impact your response rate, conversion rate and the returns on investment.