10 Easy Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rate

improve your email open rate

You’ve taken the time to craft a well-written email, you’ve even spent the time to make sure that your email looks good, but all of your hard work can be for naught if your open rate is low. For every thousand emails sent, only 10% will be opened if you’re lucky.

This means that if you send out one thousand emails, only 100 people will see the message.

So what are some of the most common reasons for an email not being opened? Here are ten tips to help you improve your email open rate and ensure that your message gets delivered.

1. Regularly Clean Your Lists

One of the biggest reasons that people don’t read your email is because they are tired of receiving messages from you. This is why it is important to regularly clean your list and remove any inactive members. A common mistake people make with their outreach lists is to think about quantity over quality. The fact is, if you send an email to a list and nobody on that list clicks on the links or opens the message, then what was the point of sending it in the first place?

Before sending out an email blast, remove anyone who hasn’t opened your emails for six months or more. This will ensure that you aren’t wasting time on those that will never be interested in what you have to say.

2. Segment Your Lists Into Areas Of Interest

You can segment your list into areas of interest by including a link to a newsletter sign-up form, a blog, or a free trial offer. This way, you can target different types of people with different messages. For example, if you wanted to send an email about your new products and services to two separate lists, you could pair one list with the new product mailing and the other mailing with the free trial offer.

3. Do Your Research

Before you send your email, do your research. Find out who your target audience is and what their interests are. This can be done by looking at social media profiles, reading blogs, and doing surveys. Once you find out who your target audience is and what their interests are, you can craft a more tailored message that will appeal to them more.

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4. Speak Directly To Your Audience Segment

One of the most common reasons why an email is not opened is because it is not relevant to the audience. If you are sending out a newsletter that does not apply to your audience, then they are less likely to open it.

For example, if you are sending out a monthly newsletter about your company’s products and services, but your company sells electronics and the recipient only buys clothing, they may not be interested in opening this email. You can use marketing automation to segment your list so that people who purchase clothing will only receive emails about clothing related items.

Not personalising emails

Customers like feeling like their opinion matters – for this reason alone, making sure that you personalize all emails you send can help boost open rates. This doesn’t mean changing the content; instead edit subject lines and senders’ names to show that you know them on a more personal level. Personalized emails get opened 11% more often than non-personalized ones!

Lack of urgency

Creating a sense of urgency with customers can also increase email opens. You can do this by giving discounts or free shipping for limited time only or by telling customers they need to act now before supplies run out. Plenty more ideas exist – try testing different time frames or offers to see what works best for your business!

Excessive promotional language

If there’s one thing people don’t want in their inbox, it’s another advertisement. Make sure that your email contains valuable information for readers rather than just

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5. Make It Easy To Read

One of the most common reasons people don’t open emails is because it takes too much effort to read them. You can avoid this by making sure that your email is short and easy to read. Long paragraphs and sentences that go on for several lines make it difficult for readers to focus and skim through your message.

The best way to make your email easier to read is by using bullet points, short sentences, and breaking up long paragraphs. Breaking up your email will also help you keep the reader’s attention, which will in turn increase your open rate. Let’s talk copywriting.

Another way to make it easy for your reader to scan through your email is by using plenty of white space between each paragraph. Most people feel overwhelmed when they come across a large block of text that doesn’t have any white space between the paragraphs.

It’s an understandable reaction; we’re used to reading books with tons of white space in between the pages and columns in order to give us a break from all the words on a page at once. This same concept applies when we’re scanning through an email inbox; we want some white space so we can stop every few lines rather than trying to scroll down one long page with no breaks in between.

To add even more white spaces, use numbered lists instead of bulleted lists—why not? Numbers are easier for humans to digest than bullets because they come naturally in sequence without having to count each time you see one. And lastly, don’t forget about headings!

clear-call-to-action

6. Include A Clear Call-To-Action

One of the simplest things you can do to improve your email open rate is to include a clear call-to-action. A call-to-action might be an offer, a date and time, or a link to another email. You may want to add in a strong call-to-action if you’re trying to get someone to book with you for an appointment. This way they know when and how they can reach you. Check our Shopify’s article about lead magnets for more subscribers.

7. Send At The Right Time

The most common mistake is sending an email at the wrong time. One study found that emails sent between 3 and 5pm on Tuesday had higher open rates than any other day of the week. So what does that mean for you? If your customer base is in North America, then send your emails after 3pm on a Tuesday. If you have a global customer base, then send your emails on a Friday evening.

8. Resend Your Email To Unopens

If you’ve sent an email and it’s been a while, then you might want to check if that recipient opened it. If they haven’t opened the email by clicking on the link, then it could be because they either moved to a different email address or deleted your contact from their list of contacts.

In this case, you can resend your email to them by going to “Contact” > “Recipients” > “All Contacts”. You should also double-check your contact management system for any discrepancies. Sometimes people might have moved to a different business but kept the same email address. This is another great way to improve your email open rate.

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9. Make Your Subject Line Pop

The most important step in making your email effective is the subject line. The subject line should be eye-catching and concise, and it should also give a sense of what the email is about. But make sure you’re not being too cryptic or misleading with the subject line. If you’re going to use a pun or a joke in your subject line, make sure it’s clear what the joke is.

10. Avoid Spam Filters

One of the most common reasons for an email being labeled as spam is because it contains words that are considered to be spammy. Unsubscribe links, promotional text, and offers are all potential red flags for email filters. What does this mean for you?

Well, much like how websites with pop-ups that demand visitors fill out lengthy forms or surveys are often blocked by browsers, your emails will also be blocked by these filters if they contain spammy language.

Before sending out an email blast, remove anyone who hasn’t opened your emails for six months or more. This will ensure that you aren’t wasting time on those that will never be interested in what you have to say.

Let’s talk about how to improve your email open rate.

Top 10 Ways To Make Sure Your Customers Keep Coming Back

Customer

Keeping Your Customers As Happy As Possible.

Everyone strives to keep their business as healthy and successful as possible. Providing unique and relevant products and services and then marketing those products and services correctly and at attractive price points, to the right people are all big parts of that equation, but the most important aspect of keeping your business running on all cylinders is as obvious as it’s often overlooked: keeping your customers as happy as possible.

It’s a lot better to keep the customers you have as happy as clams than to watch your company become a revolving door of customers. You want your customers to fall in love with you so they stick around, and it’s this process of building that loyalty that’s so crucial in today’s highly competitive business marketplace.

That’s why we’ve collected 10 of the best ways to make your customers absolutely fall in love with you for years to come!

Customer-Satisfaction-Data

1. Share Annual Customer Satisfaction Data

Any company worth their salt knows that it’s important to get a snapshot of their long-time clients at least once a year. Collecting customer satisfaction data is obviously important, but what’s not so clear is that you have to share this data so that these results can be discussed. This means more than just celebrating successes – you also have to analyse any customer service failures on your part in order to prevent the same mistakes in the future. Just because the feedback might be temporarily embarrassing doesn’t mean that it’s not incredibly useful for learning how to do better next time!

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2. Keep Lines of Communication Open Monthly

Your customer database needs to feel like they’re being kept in the loop when it comes to how their product or service provider is doing. You can accomplish this by publishing relevant blog articles on a monthly basis, sharing them with your database as you do so. In addition to keeping these crucial lines of communication open with your customers, monthly blog posting can also help you push your search engine ranking just that big higher. This helps you get your key messages across to existing customers and new prospects all at the same time!

Live-Chat-Is-A-Necessity

3. Live Chat Is a Necessity

People are over leaving phone messages and waiting for email responses. They’re especially over dealing with automated customer service solutions! Be sure that you enable and manage live chat on your website correctly. This helps you turn frustrated or upset customers into appreciative ones when you deal with their questions, comments, or issues right there on the spot in real-time. Even if you can’t resolve their issue right then and there, customers chatting with a real person remember that you’re willing to go the extra mile for them.

Use-A-Good-CRM-Platform

4. Use a Good CRM Platform

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the name of the game, and that’s why you need a good CRM platform to manage that customer relationship! You can’t be expected to keep track of all your sales leads, customers, and digital marketing all through a simple spreadsheet or two. Instead, an all-inclusive CRM platform can help you systematically manage all your customer touch-points in a way that you can see where you are at a single glance. Take our CRM for a free 15 day test drive.

Leverage-Your-Digital-Marketing-Efforts

5. Leverage and Evaluate your Digital Marketing Efforts

Before you go all-in when it comes to your digital marketing efforts, it’s important to make sure they’re actually cost-effective when it comes to generating real leads. Investigate the ROI on your Google, Facebook, and Instagram marketing performance. If you’re getting leads and sales from this activity, keep it up – if it’s underperforming, you may want to consider using those marketing funds differently.

Build-Your-Social-Media-Presence

6. Build Your Social Media Presence

Social media is huge, and it’s getting bigger each and every day. This isn’t going to change anytime soon. If you’re not publishing social media posts regularly, you’re leaving money on the table as well as letting your customers down. It only takes landing one lead to pay for your social media expenditures and then some – and not only that, your customer base will see your social media visibility as a positive!

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7. Leverage Videoconferencing Methods Constantly

Meeting with customers is always important, but so valuing both your time and the time of your customers. Whenever possible, opt out of face-to-face meetings and instead use telephone or video conferencing as much as you like. This not only minimises travel time and meeting time wastage but it makes it easier to spend time getting to know your customers and really understand what makes them tick. You can’t build that same level of rapport simply over email!

Everyone-Loves-Free-Stuff

8. Everyone Loves Free Stuff

Go above and beyond for your customers, and do it for free. It will leave them feeling absolutely delighted. It doesn’t have to be big and expensive, but it does have to be relevant and something that holds intrinsic value when viewed through the lens of their own corporate culture. It’s a touch like this that will show your customers that you value the relationship you’ve built with them.

Research

9. Research and Share New Discoveries

Your customers will stick to you like glue if you periodically spend some time researching new technologies, strategies, and tactics that your customers could benefit from. Sharing this knowledge with them will fill them with the kind of appreciation you can’t get anywhere else. Show them you’re thinking of them as more than just a pay-check!

Share-Feedback-And-Testimonials-Publicly

10. Share Feedback and Testimonials Publicly

When your customer leaves you glowing feedback or a particularly fantastic testimonial, it’s natural to want to share that on your website. Go one step further and make it as public as possible by linking back to each and every one of your happy customers’ websites. This will help their own search engine ranking, pushing up lead generation for their own business. It’s what we call in the business a “win-win”!

Contact Informatix if you’d like more information about making your customers fall in love with your business or just want to implement one of these 10 strategies.

3 Ways To Captivate Your Audience: You Only Have 8 Seconds

Captivate Your Audience

Every marketer knows that the average human attention span is short—but just how short is it?

Remember – You’ve only got 8 Seconds to captivate your audience. According to recently released data from Statistics Brain, people pay less attention than goldfish, because the human attention span is down to a mere eight seconds (compared to nine seconds for a goldfish). Read More

Is it time to break down the marketing technology silos?

break-down-the-marketing-technology-silos

How many sales and marketing platforms do you have? Think about it for a minute. You probably have one to manage your email campaigns. Another for your content management system. A few more for your social media management, search engine marketing and customer relationship management. Not forgetting a program to manage data synchronisation across all these applications. Read More

Get ready to accelerate better email marketing results

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Did you know there are some really simple things you can do, right now, to drive engagement and accelerate conversions through email marketing?

Switch to our email marketing services today and you can unlock a host of new platform features – each designed to transform the way you use email marketing to connect with customers (and make your life easier!).

Read More