Get Impressive Email Open Rates with these 8 Strategies

Author: Arun Pillai

There are so many aspects of digital marketing that a marketer can use today. The marketing efforts could be planned around social media profiles, and social media engagement. There could be opinions and thoughts expressed through blogs, which could generate debate and discussions. The website, is of course, one of the most popular ways of conveying the marketing messaging of an organization. But above and beyond all of these aspects, email marketing is still one of the oldest yet most effective weapons in any digital marketing arsenal.

Open Rates for Marketing Emails

Before a recipient even takes a look at a marketing email, the Email Marketing team needs to cross two hurdles first. The first is the technical hurdle, where certain mail servers are blocked out by the recipient. The second is that even if the mail makes its way to a recipient’s inbox, the recipient might have set up automatic instructions to direct the mail to a particular folder (where it would stay unread) or to the recycle bin.

Once it has crossed both these hurdles and has found its way to the inbox of a recipient, comes the question of whether the person would actually open it. The open rate of an email campaign is found by first subtracting the bounced messages (due to wrong or invalid email ids), and then calculating the emails actually opened, as a percentage of the total number of mails sent. The email open rates are a very important metric to gauge and predict the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. Let us look at 8 ways to increase the open rates for an email campaign.

Ways to Increase Open Rate

1. The first thing that needs to be checked is if the mail server that is sending your emails is blocked by any of the recipients or not, or if there is any technical misalignment. That should be first corrected.
2. If you are not getting open hits or responses from a particular email id, you need to contact them using some other means to check if they have set up an auto-rule for diverting emails from your id to some other folder.
3. If you are carrying out a B2B campaign, then a yahoo or gmail extension for your email id doesn’t provide your email id with the requisite respect it deserves. Invest in a company email id.

   

4. The subject line of the email has one of the biggest impacts on the open rate. Too generic a subject won’t evince interest or give an indication of the contents. But too detailed subject line might make it too long.
   
5. The right frequency of emails can affect the email open rates. Too frequent and recipients will get bored, but too far apart, and you might lose the top-of-mind-recall.
6. The content should be different every time, giving the recipient a curiosity and a reason to open the email, instead of becoming predictable.

   

7. Right mix of promotional content and general interest content.
8. Finally, email campaigns should be cross linked and referenced to other digital marketing aspects of the company.