Email Open Rate: Increase your sales and website traffic, maximize your ROI and revenue by improving your email open rates.
As this year is ending and a new one is beginning, all businesses and especially small ones are thriving and planning on how to increase their sales, ROI, and revenue. As well as boosting their brand awareness, brand positioning, engagement, and new customer acquisition.
With so many marketing activities and methods to do this. Email marketing has proved that it is one of the best, most effective, and most efficient marketing tools for all eCommerce businesses.
Being inexpensive, easy to use, and highly targeted, email marketing can boost your business in the way you want. By having a segmented list and sending personalized content to each group, you can attract the right audiences and increase your sales by increasing your website traffic. However, you might face some challenges that you need to know to be fully prepared for. As your email marketing will be effective only if your emails are opened and read.
In this article, you will know all about email open rates. This will definitely help you and your business to know how to perform better.
Table of Content:
- What is Email Open Rate?
- What is The Average Email Open Rate?
- Factors Affecting Your Email Open Rate
- 16 Best Practices To Increase Your Email Open Rate
What is Email Open Rate?
Email open rate is simply the number of people who clicked on your message and opened it from your total number of subscribers.
Open rate is the only way to make sure that your email has achieved its goal and that your target audience has opened it.
To know how your messages are performing, you need to keep track and analyze whether your email open rate is increasing or not! This will give you insight on how well your messages are performing. You will also know what content your target audience loves the most.
Email Open Rate is considered the first and most important metric that can determine the success of your email campaigns.
Elaboration: If you get a 50% open rate, this means that for every 100 emails delivered to your audience’s inbox, 50 were actually opened.
Read more about the Top 7 Email Marketing Metrics for eCommerce You Should Track
What is The Average Email Open Rate?
This might vary according to your target audience as well as your industry. However, the average open rate across industries is 21.33%, according to the 2022 marketing statistics of MailChimp.
You can consider your email marketing campaign a success when the open rate ranges between 17-28%.
Some industries might have a higher open rate such as: Education, Agriculture, and Financial Services, with a range of 25-28%.
The email open rate might also vary according to the device being used. Research has proven that nearly 85% of users use smartphones to access emails. Moreover, for the people aged 25-34, the rate goes up to 90%.
Only 68% of people choose to check their emails on laptops or desktop computers.
Factors Affecting Your Email Open Rate
Being so important and being a good indicator for your business performance, email open rate gets affected by so many factors. The most important ones are:
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Content
Content is the most important factor in email marketing and can be the main reason for increasing or decreasing your email open rate. Relevant and personalized email content can attract your existing and potential customers into opening your email and clicking on it.
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Time
Yes. Time can be a primary factor in why people can open or ignore their emails. For example, if your email is sent during your audience’s working hours, chances are that they will definitely check it.
If your email is sent during their vacations, chances are it will get ignored. According to a research at Mailmunch, the best time to send an email is Monday. However, the worst time to send an email is during weekends.
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Frequency
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Email Segmentation
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Subject Lines
This is one of the most important factors in writing your emails! This can be the main reason why people can be attracted or not to your email. A catchy subject line can help increase your open rate.
The Best Practices To Increase Your Email Open Rate
As we said, your email open rates can be a very good indicator of how your email marketing is performing and how engaging your content is.
Increasing your email open rate is so crucial for your business to perform better and increase your sales. Here is how:
1- Use high-quality relevant content
Be concise and to the point, and have a clear objective of your message before writing and creating your content. Let your email be as organized as possible. Try to make it visually appealing without cluttering it. This will surely lead to a more engaged audience.
2- Try Different Subject Lines
You need to know what works best with your different audience segments. To do this, you need to try out different subject line strategies. For example: try using questions, offers, and numbers. You can even use a person's email for a more personalized message. Use 6 to 10 words in your subject line.
3- Do A/B Testing Campaigns
This can help you understand what your audience needs more of and what works best in content, visuals and offers. This can help you with your future email marketing campaigns.
4- Use Humor
Using humor in emails means evoking your customers’ emotions in a funny way by using emojis or jokes or funny phrases. Making your audience laugh or at least smile while reading your email can be a great way to build a strong and emotional relationship with them. However, make sure that your brand identity allows you to use a few funny quotes or humorous phrases. This can help increase conversion.
5- Avoid Being in the Spam Folder
If your email reaches the spam folder, it has zero chance to be seen or opened. To do this you need to do these:
- Don’t use the word “free” in your email subject line.
- Use lowercase letters in the subject line.
- Authenticate your email account to avoid other people sending emails in your name.
- Let people have the option to unsubscribe and provide a place for users to state the reasons why they have unsubscribed.
Read: Email Click Rate For eCommerce And The Best Strategies To Increase It
6- Proofread Your Emails Before Sending
As absurd as this might seem, proofreading is so underrated, however, it is super important to make sure of every single word written in your email. Look for any errors, misspellings, wrong punctuation, misinformation, and in general, any aspect that needs to be tweaked.
7- Spark Curiosity
Enticing and attracting your audience can be quite challenging. However, with the right tools you can spark your audience’s curiosity and convince them into opening your email and taking action.
To do this, you can start or end with a question or tell them to check the upcoming email for an answer or announcement that they are waiting for. Use open-ended questions and use curiosity gaps. This is the gap between the information your audience’s know and the information they don’t know.
8- Don’t send too many emails
Avoid bombarding your customers with too many emails or information at once. Sending too many emails can lead to less engagement from recipients or it can lead to your audiences unsubscribing. The last thing your audience wants is to keep receiving endless emails from your brand. The ideal situation is to send one email per month with high-quality content or two emails at max that speak with an important message.
9- Resend!
Actually you can resend an email if you have seen that it was unopened or if the open rate was too low. However, you need to resend it with a different subject line.
10- Use Emojis
Some businesses might think they shouldn’t use emojis at all! Well, emojis give your email a more personal look and feel and can be a great way to engage with your customers. This also might give more credibility to your email. If your brand personality allows this, you can use emojis to sound more friendly.
11- Give Your Customers Options
Whether to unsubscribe or to receive the timings in which they receive your emails. Giving your customers more control over receiving your emails can increase your open rate.
12- Use Limited-time Offers
Creating a time-bound promotional deal will let your audience fear missing out on purchasing your products or taking the action you want them to take! This can happen by offering a mega sale for a very limited time. Use clear time and date and clear communication when it will be unavailable.
13- Use Appealing Images
Using images is essential for communicating your messages in an easy and enticing way. It is proven that people respond better and quicker to images than text. Images can be a great way to attract people to open your emails. You can even use appealing images with very minimal text. Moreover, images lead to better conversion and retention.
Pro Tip: using a background image in your email can help achieve better results by standing out from your competitors and letting your email be unique.
14- Use Engaging Content
Not all your emails need to have a sales or conversion objective. You can also send engaging fun emails. You can send quizzes or motivating quotes or greetings. This can boost engagement and loyalty and can maximize your open rate.
15- Use Stats & Keep it Short
Using numbers always gives a credible feeling! Also, people love to see numbers and it can let your information be easily delivered. Most importantly, you need to keep your emails short and concise. People nowadays don’t have the patience nor the time! Hook them with nice content, and keep your email as short as possible.
16- Have a Compelling CTA
The right call to action can result in people ignoring your email or clicking on your website and purchasing your product! Make sure your call to action is clear and very attractive so that it might convert.
Make sure you are prepared for your next email campaign and read on to know how to fully automate your next email campaign!
Automate Your Email Marketing
Now you can automate your marketing efforts and exert less effort, less time, and gain more money with sales increase! Convertedin has got your back!
Now you can build and customize personalized email marketing campaigns effortlessly to increase your sales, revenue and maximize your ROI. Moreover, you can create a campaign for each activity (reactivation, post-sales campaigns, etc.).
Automate your campaign's workflow with just one click. Increase your conversion rate with less effort exerted.
