Improving Email Open Rates | smbelal.com

1. IMPROVING EMAIL OPEN RATES

2. 01 02 Introduction Getting more emails delivered Agenda 03 04 Increasing email open rates Conclusion

3. Introduction Email open rate is a measure which indicates a percentage of opened emails for a certain email marketing campaign.  Email open rate usually shows how well you were able to catch subscriber's attention with the subject line or whether your emails reached the inbox or went to the spam folder.

4. Average email open rate Given that B2B email marketing has been the most popular marketing channel for several years’ and that the average number of promotional emails sent to readers continues to increase, you would think that email open rate is on the decline. But, that’s not the case. Except for a drop in email open rate between 2013 to 2014, the average open rate for email continues to improve year over year – albeit slowly  – reaching 24.88% in 2018 (an increase of 0.3% compared to 2017). This is of course good news as it means that email is still a powerful marketing channel you can use to communicate with your prospects or customers. Before you get more people to read your emails, you first need to understand where you stand. How many people currently ready your emails? What is your current email open rate? This is where industry benchmark open rate reports comes in.

5. Benchmark reports are important in understanding of how the industry is changing on the whole and you should find out your own benchmark based on your email campaign performance. You should be able to pull this number from your email service provider. In 2018, the average open rate across all industries is 24.8%. If you have an open rate of 25% or higher, then you’re doing great! If not, don’t worry. You know your email subscribers better than anyone else. For example, if you consistently reach a 15% open rate, which is below average yet your campaign is delivering results, it’s obvious that you are not under performing even if the “industry average” says you are. The first challenge you need to work on is getting your email to your subscriber list. It’s no use spending hours crafting a perfectly optimized campaign if it ends up in your readers’ spam folder, is it? Comparing to the industry average

6. Tips on how you can increase delivery rates Use double opt-in Ask your readers to add you to their trusted address book Cleanse your email list Double opt-in means that the subscriber will verify that she wants to receive emails from your. You don’t want to send emails to people who don’t particularly care about them; otherwise, they will not read them and lower your open rates. You do this by simply asking your readers to add the “from” email address to their contact lists, you can increase the number of emails delivered.  If a subscriber does not open an email from you three times in a row, the chances are that she is no longer interested in your company. Gmail and Yahoo Mail are smart enough to understand this so if you continue to send emails to subscribers who do not open them, they might be directed to the spam folder, so consider cleansing your list.

7. How do people read my email campaigns? The way people read emails can provide key insights in how you create your email marketing campaigns. For example, the type of device they read it on. Today, 61% of all emails are now opened and read on mobile devices. Can you guess what your readers do when you send them an email that isn’t optimized for mobile? They delete it. In fact, 70% delete the email immediately! And yet, only 11% of email campaigns use responsive design to optimize their email layout. Worse still, our own email marketing benchmark report found that only 20% of email.

8. When should I send my email campaign? Timing is important to open rates. To know when to send your email campaigns, you have to know your audience. f you sell software, most of your customers will be enjoying family time on the weekends. That means sending an email campaign on the weekend will lead to fewer opens, if any at all! So when should you send your email? Research shows that the best day to send emails in order to get the highest open rate is Tuesday. Now that you know on which day to send your emails, what about the time of day? Further research shows that readers are more likely to open emails after 12 p.m. And that 23% of all email opens occur during the first hour after delivery. After 24 hours, an email’s chance of being opened drops below 1%!  If you send it on a day when people are less likely to read your email, then you could be missing out on a lot of interested customers. So, when it comes to sending out your email campaign, Tuesday, after 12 p.m. is your best bet. 

9. How to increase email open rates The sender name and subject line of your emails are the most important factors in getting them opened and read. For example, 64% of subscribers say they are likely to read your email because of who it’s from, and 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line. What sender name do you use? Do you send your emails from company XYZ, or do you use a specific person’s name? Believe it or not, but this can make a huge difference! Research from Pinpointe marketing found that by using a specific personal name, rather than a general email address or company name, you can increase open rates by as much as 35%! Which is why it’s surprising to find that that our own B2B email marketing research found that 89% of email marketing campaigns are sent from a company name.

10. When it comes to subject lines, have you heard the phrase “you should spend as much time writing your headline as you spend on writing the content”? Well, the exact same phrase applies to your subject line. A well crafted subject line shouldn’t be the first thing you think of. Instead, it should take time. And you should use research and data to help guide you. A report by Retention Science found that subject lines with 6 to 10 words deliver the highest open rate, making 8 words an ideal number for a subject line. If a subject line is too long, it will get cut off and your reader will not know what the email is about (and could ignore it). This is especially important for mobile readers as the subject line character length is even shorter! If you link to a video within your email, you can also include the word “video” in your subject line. Here are some tips on which words to use and which to avoid in the subject line: Most clicked-on emails include these words in the subject line: “secrets”, “e-sales” and “awesome”. Emails mostly reported as spam included the words “confirm”, “features” and “upgrade”. People are less likely to open emails that include a question mark (?) or a hashtag (#).

11. Conclusion So there you have it! I’ve provided the science behind email open rates and the ways you can use the data to make actionable decisions about your email marketing.You can start with the data provided in this post and use the science to guide you to more get more emails opened.

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