5 Tips for Better Email Open Rates

The phrase “email is dead” is one that has been uttered by companies for years now, but according to the most recent email statistics by The Radicati Group, the total number of email accounts was expected to increase to 4.3 billion by the end of 2016.

This statistic, when combined with the fact that employees spend 13 of their working hours each week reading emails, means that email is anything but dead. In fact, it’s more useful than ever.
If you’ve been stymied by poor email open rates, then you should pay close attention to the five tips below to make the most of your email list and get better open rates.

Tip #1: Personalize Your Emails

We’ve all received an email that starts off with the dreaded phrase, “Dear Sir or Madam.” Sending out a scripted email that doesn’t include even the slightest personalization for your reader will immediately make them feel like they are just another email address on your marketing list, something that no customer wants to feel like.

Taking the time to address your customer by their first name is an easy way to personalize an email, and it has a decidedly positive impact on your open rate. If you personalize the subject line, it makes your customers 26 percent more likely to open that email, and Experian found that personalized emails deliver 6 times higher transaction rates.

Personalizing emails is a cornerstone of the Agile CRM email marketing platform. You can create templates that allow you to easily craft personalized emails faster, and it will have a dramatic impact on your email open rates.

Tip #2: Keep A Lean List with Double Opt-In

For any company that is looking to market their product, it can be easy to think that you would be that much more profitable if you only had a larger email list. This strict focus on email list size is detrimental to your businesses, however, because it takes away from the real goal of an email list–getting your message out to interested people.

Using double opt-in will increase the quality of your email list and allow you to weed out those subscribers that are just looking, so you will naturally see an improvement in open rates when you weed out the least committed members of your list.

A second aspect to this tip is that you should regularly go through your email list and actively look to cut out subscribers who haven’t opened up your emails in months. If you have sent out 25 emails in the past six months, but some subscribers haven’t opened up any of those emails, then they don’t deserve to be on your list. Agile CRM email tracking can help you keep your list lean and mean, which is essential for high open rates.

Tip #3: Utilize Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation involves collecting user behavior data and using it to determine what type of content your users enjoy. This can help you better understand why a group of readers didn’t open your email.

Once you’ve done this, you will be able to create a few test subject lines for each email, and then resend the same email to subscribers who didn’t open your first email using a new subject meant to interest a different subset of your customers.

This allows you to effectively market to customers who may have missed your first email again, but with little effort on your part. In practice, you can expect to see a marked improvement to your overall open rates for that email with minimal additional effort.

And yes, Agile CRM can show you who opens your emails.

Tip #4: Use Proven Email Subject Lines

It can be tempting to think that you know your customers better than email marketers who send out the same email subject lines as everyone else, but there is a clear reason why they are doing this.

Marketers often use similar sounding subject lines because they fall into one of the top four categories that all successful email subject lines fall into:

• Direct or benefit-driven subjects
• Subjects that create scarcity or urgency
• Subjects showing proof or credibility
• Curiosity-based email subjects

If you are concerned about your email open rates, the first thing that you should do is make sure that your emails fall into one of the four categories listed above. If they don’t, then you have an easy change to make that will dramatically improve your email open rate.

Tip #5: Always Be Testing

The reason that we focus so heavily on analytics at Agile CRM is because it’s important to track the metrics which are important to your business if you are looking to improve them. You can also use our analytics to test different aspects of your email marketing to see which work best with your audience.

Even if you’ve hit the perfect email subject line to get your audience to open emails that you send, you should always be testing your subject lines to see if you can do better.

For each email that you send, you can try a few different subject lines to see which works the best. This is the type of real-world knowledge that will allow you to learn more about your customers and give you the best chance of consistently improving your email open rates. If you aren’t testing your email subjects every time that you send out an email, then you won’t be able to see what works (and what doesn’t) in your business.

Have other email tips you recommend? Let us know in the comments!