7 Simple Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates

7 Simple Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates Do you know what your email open rates are? Think about it: youve put the work into the email youre sending. Wouldnt it be nice if people actually opened it and read it? According to Campaign Monitor, a  20 40% open rate for email is typical, depending upon who your audience is.  Higher open rates are associated with religious or sports content (dedicated followers), while e-commerce and marketing tend to hover around 20%. If your emails are less than the average 20% email open rates, what can you do to bring that up and get more eyeballs reading your email content? 1. Treat Subject Lines Like Headlines Creating the subject lines of your email follows similar rules as making great headlines. Like a blog post headline, your email subject line bears most of the responsibility of getting your email open rates up where they should be. Good subject lines have a few characteristics: 1. No trickery.  Your subject line should tell your reader what theyll read, and not use subterfuge to trick them into opening an email. Remember the boy who cried wolf? That kind of email subject line will only work once, if they dont unsubscribe. 2. No yelling.  It should go without saying that using all caps in your subject line is a poor idea. However, both title case and sentence case can work magic. Title case works when you are using a shorter subject line which has headline-like quality (e.g. The 5 Most Important Email Tips Ever). Sentence case works when you have a longer or more conversational subject line (e.g. Have you made these 3 blogging mistakes?) 3. Numbers do work. Using numbers in your headline has shown to increase reader engagement. The same can be said for your email subject lines. Dont shy away from a subject that contains a number. 4. Some words dont work. There are words you should avoid using, even if you arent using them in a scam way. Spam filters are already working overtime to protect inboxes. You dont want to give them something to work with on your emails. There are also words that spam filters leave alone, but so do your human readers. For these,  MailChimp identifies their three worst offenders as Help, Percent Off, and Reminder. Spammers have unfortunately desensitized a lot of readers; be sure you dont sound anything like spam. 5. Hit the ideal length. The general rule of thumb is that your subject line should be around 50 characters. Thats not to say 40 wont work, or that 65 is a bad idea. The key is that you must be aware some email programs might cut characters off and if you have your most important word at the end of a long subject you might lose them. Keep important words at the beginning if you have a longer subject line. 6. Story wins. Whenever possible, approach your subject line as a story. In other words, pique your readers curiosity in your email and get their emotions (fear, humor, curiosity, anger, joy, gain, logic) involved; anything that suggests there is more to be read gets readers to open your email. Our Latest Newsletter is much less interesting than Have You Missed The Biggest News Yet? Sometimes a statement-type subject line is necessary, but do try to ping emotions in the subject line when possible. 2. A/B Test Your Subject Lines We regularly test the subject line of our weekly Content Marketing Update. We do this to find out which subject line will get the most opens and perform the best for a limited number of random users before sending it out to our entire list. In the example below, using A/B testing, our sample group helped us select the most successful headline of the two wed come up with, and increased our open rate by an estimated 70%. Version A carried the subject line of Are You A Content Hacker? which forced the reader to ask themselves a question they likely didnt know the answer to, since it is a new term. They clicked to find out. Its similar to the quizzes we get sucked into in magazines or online; were curious to find out who and what we are. Version B carried the subject line of How To Make A Living Blogging which is a helpful topic with a very specific audience of those who actually wanted to make their living blogging. A/B test your email subject and let your readers tell you what works best.I was the one creating the email, and I thought that Version B would be the more popular option. After all, there seems to be a spate of people concerned about making a living and our list was likely filled with people who wanted to do it with writing and blogging. But I was mistaken. Our list has a broad readership, with many of them serving in professional content marketing and social media marketing capacities. They were less interested in making a living blogging than they were to find out about what a content hacker might be.  The email with Are You A Content Hacker was the winner of our A/B test, and it sent out to our entire list with good success. A/B is based on the very simple idea of having two ideas, and letting your audience tell you which one they like. Most email providers, such as MailChimp and AWeber, offer A/B testing that makes it simple to test your subject lines. 3. Consider The First Sentence Its easy to forget that some email programs show the first few words of the first sentence in the inbox. My Gmail doesnt show me the first sentence and I forget that other email software, such as Sparrow and Outlook, does. Why should that matter? Because some of your readers are going to use both the subject line and the first line to give an indication on whether its worth opening or not. The first line of your email will show in some email software. In the example above, you can see that our recent Content Marketing Update email, in this view, had a truncated subject line and the first sentence had to help sell it. How many bloggers use email software that places a notice at the top that says the reader can click here if the email does not appear correctly? The first words of your email should help sell the email, not take care of maintenance.  This particular situation is the case for my personal blogs RSS-driven email, and that means the great headlines I might come up with are followed by a mundane message that suggests theres a chance my email wont look correctly and might not be worth the hassle. Thats not very enticing.  Maybe it doesnt hurt, if your headline is unbelievably superb, but it certainly doesnt help. Think of the opening line of your email like the next level headline. Do what you can with your template so that the first words are valuable. Change your email template to reflect something that feeds the curiosity that the subject line started. 4. Make Email Personally From You The from portion of your email is a way to humanize your email. When we send out our weekly email, we send it from Garrett, not from . Why? Our emails are by people, from people, for people. They arent from vague brands, apps, or objects with a possible nefarious agenda against humans. People connect with people, not with inanimate objects.