Finding new ways to market your product or services is always not the path towards light. With the advent of Search marketing, social media marketing the ways to reach out to our target audience is widespread, but E-mail marketing is still the bread and butter of marketers. Sometimes we all stumble upon, not knowing how to find the success of E-mail campaigns we run. There are various Key performance indicators or measures that are being used for this purpose, which includes “Email open Rates”.

What is Email Open Rate and why is it important?

There are different ways to define E-mail open rates, but in simple words the number of people who opened our marketing E-mail to study the content or take an action is called E-mail open rate. To talk math Open rate = Emails opened / emails sent – bounces.

Marketing tools, generally give this count, by putting few lines of code in the e-mail that is triggered to target audience. These tools, not all the time, give an exact count of people who have opened e-mails due to various reasons, like the customer disabling HTML in their mail client.

It’s highly important; because it is the first action that customer needs to take. Customer can’t read content, take an action, or Click the links without opening it.

How to increase Email Open Rates?

Average global E-mail open rate is 24.82%, to achieve this or to increase the E-mail open rates for your company, you can use one or few of the tips listed below.

”Win Win Situation” – Keep your list fresh and relevant:

We open and study e-mails that are only relevant to us or if it falls under the topic of interest that we have in general. Targeting specific people with specific interests in specific location will be one of the big steps that every firm takes towards building e-mail lists and ultimately increasing their e-mail open rates. In E-mail marketing, always quality is important than quantity. Tools like RedScraper can help to build reliable e-mail lists.

”Top of the Mailbox” – Find the right time to send E-mail:

All of us do study e-mails top of bottom, so it’s important to sit on top of mailbox, which in-turn depends on E-mail sending times. The prescribed timings would be 11am, 2pm and after 6pm and the best day to send emails are Tuesday and Friday.

”Bribe to Opt-in” – Build E-mail Subscribers list by giving Rewards

Inbound E-mail list is more meaningful, relevant for the business, and rewards to opt-in are the contemporary lead generation magnets. Giving away free E-books, templates, webinars, or any other content in return to subscribing to e-mail lists can be a great way to grow E-mail lists. Also these customers will definitely be interested and will open our E-mails.

”Gift to stay back” – Revive Cold E-mail list

Before ditching the customers from E-mail lists, businesses like you can make an effort to revive them by giving away gifts. Major step towards would be trying to understand their expectations and then gift them suitable give away. Also make E-mail straight and take the last ditch effort.

”Message Short and sweet” – Maintain the length of E-mail

Boomerang study reveals writing like a third grade school student will boost open rates by 36%. The ideal number of words in E-mail which gets great response is around 75 to 100 words. You or me, anyone for that matter don’t really have interest or time to read e-mails for a long time, keeping it short, straight will increase open and reading rates.

            ”Prove we know you” – Personalize E-mail content

Including name in e-mails is not only called as personalization, most companies do that now. Asking questions to get to know customers, trying to understand their reactions to product, segmenting them based on location, interests, persona and then sending appropriate content can increase the open and click rates. Sending from Employee name, instead of company name increases the reliability of E-mails.

            ”Impress the reader” – Build catchy subject lines, welcome mail, Follow-up mails

In our E-mail clients, all we are going to see is the sender name, subject line and couple of words called the Pre-header, with which we are going to decide the fate of E-mail – Trash or Read.

Subject line should be catchy; including customer name comes really handy. Use simple words, greeting and finishing lines relevant to customer persona. Marketing automation, auto-responders can be helpful here to rescue from delayed Follow-up mails, which can agitate the customers.

”Add toppings to E-mail Content” – Emojis, Videos and Links

Emotional content can stand out, than objective content. In our text-heavy E-mail inboxes colourful emojis, video links, images and links can be catchy and we will tend to open, click them. Choice of emojis according to subject lines is a pretty important step, it can make your campaigns best or worst.

            “Abide by Rules“– Avoid Spam filters

All of us don’t check our E-mail spam boxes, unless we need some important E-mails, so there is no point making it to Spam box rather than inbox of a customer. To avoid spam filters, pay attention to technical details, choose service providers, tools wisely, also have a recognizable sender name. Taking some time to test would be a good thing to do before doing a E-mail blast to customers.

            “Read On the go E-mails” – Mobile compatible E-mails

Most of us don’t check personal e-mail inboxes dedicatedly some time every day. It is mostly done when we travelling to work on mobiles. If the E-mail has HTML templates, images, links, etc it should be built in a way that it is easy and fast to check in mobiles also.