How can you better your email open rates?

Despite working towards gathering knowledge about the industry average open rates, you really can’t set a truly realistic goal for your email open rates without bench marking your current results! Though number crunching, data and figures may not present a very pretty picture for the creative ones in marketing, that’s one of the most important aspects that no one can afford to overlook.

All you need to do is follow these few and easy steps to identify ways of bettering your own email open rates:

Updation is imperative

Have you bothered to update your lists? Have you made sure is the emails ids are still up and about? Once you’ve cleaned up your contact list, you will realize that you’ve done yourself a huge favour. You not only know who your potential customers are, you have also managed to save a lot of time, effort and energy.
Writing mails such as, “We just noticed that you haven’t been opening our emails. Would you still want to continue receiving our promotions?”, will get an action from the customer. They will either opt out or hurry back in.

Get your contact list right
Imagine you are a baker and pick up your stuff regularly from an online store. Now if this store keeps sending you updates about home decoration items, wouldn’t you want to just unsubscribe?
Irrelevant mails can harm the business. So segmentation is really important. Make lists, make segments of your customers and get on with your mailing if you want them to open it at all.

Time to experiment a bit
Don’t shy away from A/B testing. Experiment a bit with your emails and test them. Create more than one look for the same campaign. Identify which one garners more interest.

Play around with the subject lines, images, creatives, language and figure out what works best with your customers.

Identify and analyze
Next, take a look at any outliers–good or bad. Did a particular email do really well, or really poorly? If so, do you have a theory about why it did better or worse than the others? Make note of each of these outliers.
Sit back and analyze a little more. A study has just thrown up interesting statistics such as 39% marketers reporting higher open rates with segmented lists.

Perfect your timing
Sending your emails at the right time is really important for increasing your open rates.
In general, send your emails between 8:30-10:00AM, 2:30-3:30PM, or 8:00-midnight. This will avoid the times when most people are cleaning up their inbox and more likely to delete your email without reading it.

Use some humor
Humor has a way of making a strong, instant connection with people. It’s personal, entertaining, and plays around in peoples’ minds for a bit longer.
And thankfully, you don’t have to be a comedian in order to pull off a humorous email. What’s more important is that you understand your email recipients intimately. If you know their likes and dislikes, it will be so much easier to pull off a joke, or insert a tongue-in-cheek reference.

So are you all set to increase your email open rate?
Start by measuring your email open rate, because frankly, that’s where it all begins. You know you have a great product and you are sure that what’s inside the email is valuable. So why leave any stone unturned in making.
These tips can help any campaign get better open rates, but don’t get discouraged if you don’t see a turnaround right away. Email marketing is an art and science, so give yourself some wiggle room to experiment and find what tactics work best for your business and your subscribers.

Now go right ahead and benchmark your email open rates using the tips provided by Sellosphere above. Then take a look at your industry average to see how you measure up, and set a realistic goal for improving your open rates.