5 Effective Strategies to Increase Email Open Rates
When referring to an effective email campaign, we’re not talking about the amount of people who opt in to your list but how many of them actively engage with your messages. It’s important that you have subscribers who open your email messages because this will increase your returning visitors and conversions equaling profits. Imagine if your average open rate is 20%, this means 70% of your subscribers are not viewing your email messages. You’re essentially losing 70% potential profits that could have been generated through your subscribers. Over the years, higher open rates have been the subject of numerous case studies, and the results have been astonishing.
Let’s look at the 5 most important factors which will increase your open rate.
Personalized Emails
It’s been proven that emails with a personal touch increase open rates. Much of the success of personalized emails has to do with the psychological aspect which involves “special” treatment that has impacted the way we interact in society. It builds a level of comfort with the recipient, which translates to increased engagement with follow-up messages.
Going forward, always send your email messages including the first & last name of the recipient. You may want to add a short question after the person’s name ,as we are programmed to respond to questions more consciously than anything else.
Send Time
If you can schedule your emails to be sent at the right time, you’ll dramatically increase your email open rates. There is no point in sending emails during times when people are occupied and won’t be able to engage with them. For example, statistically it’s been proven emails sent during 8pm-12am have the highest open rates. During this time people have come home from work, had dinner and have spare time to check personal emails. Anything before that time, their usually busy checking work related emails and would skim through deleting anything that looks like spam.
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Send Day
Tuesday to Thursday have the highest open rates with weekends having the lowest as people are enjoying time away from home and work. Monday is the first day back to work and people are skimming through their inbox cleaning anything not related to work. If you want to increase your open rates, send emails from Tuesday to Thursday since people spend more time paying attention to other types of messages entering into their inbox.
Email Regularly
Frequent email sending is a great way to build trust and loyalty. When people subscribe to your newsletter, they expect to receive regular updates with quality content. However, many bloggers make the mistake of sending emails once or twice a month which is not frequent enough. Subscribers often forget they opted in to your newsletter so when you finally send a follow-up it gets marked as spam or they unsubscribe.
It’s easy to setup a frequent sending schedule as many ESP’s have the option to schedule follow-up messages. Simply create a few messages and schedule them a few days apart which would put each new subscriber into the sequence when they opt in.
Provide The Best
When emailing your subscribers, send them your best content every time since that’s exactly what they’re looking for. They joined your list because they read content that provided value to them, so it’s important to keep the quality your priority. If subscribers receive content that does not resonate well with them, they’ll unsubscribe and getting them back will be difficult as they don’t trust the quality of your content.