30 Experts Share their #1 Tip to Improving Email Open Rates

To be successful in your email marketing campaign, you have to make sure that your email reaches your subscribers’ inboxes and have them open it. It’s a no-brainer, right?

After all, you can craft the best email marketing campaign, but it would still be useless if your audience never opens your message. Remember: getting the target audience to click your email is already half the battle.

But how do you make 100% sure that your audience will open your email? There are plenty of tips and tricks, though they would ultimately differ from industry to industry. And you’ll find what improves your open rate best in time.

To shorten the learning curve, 30 experts share their top pieces of advice to businesses and organizations embarking on email marketing campaigns.

We hope that with these 30 tactics, you’ll improve your email open rates and have more clicks and revenue!

Let’s get started.

True enough, this technical solution is so important in improving your email open rate as ISPs have been refining the way messages are shown in the inbox.

Gmail, for instance, introduced the “tabbed inbox” in 2013 and recently displayed a question mark next to the sender’s name to emails that cannot be authenticated using SPF or DKIM.

Other ISPs are likewise changing the way messages are displayed in the inbox. Office 365 and Hotmail/ Outlook placed the “trusted sender icon” in their emails so users can easily and quickly differentiate wanted and unwanted messages without opening the email.

Yahoo, on the other hand, has corporate logos displayed in authenticated messages.

Before worrying about the open rate, marketers should worry about it landing in the mailbox instead of the spam folder. [To make it happen,] the most crucial part is the design and “HTMLization” process. What marketers can do is to ensure there’s a 60:40 ratio for text [and] image. The text should be hardcoded so it’s crawlable, instead of hyperlinking the entire image…

All major service providers have filtration parameters set in place. For example, the percentage of text [and] images in the email, keywords such as ‘FREE,’ ‘BUY NOW,’ etc. will not pass through if their system can’t crawl through the emailer, they’ll flag it as spam.

HTML email design: Does it really matter?

What Shrivastava shared about HTML email design does matter. Well crafted plain text emails can have near 100% deliverability, but emails with images have higher click-through rates compared to plain text emails. However use too much text a promotional nature, and you can trigger spam filters.

Read this article to go deeper into How to Avoid the Spam Folder.

In case you use images, make sure you add the “Alt-text” tag to describe the images so that they can make sense in case the images are disabled

To utilize alt text to its fullest capabilities, one of the best email marketing practices is to make the text short so that it’s easier for the readers to digest.

There are also email clients, such as Yahoo! Mail, Apple Mail, Gmail, iPhone, and Windows Live Mail, that throw away long alternative text.

It’s as simple as putting an unusual and attention-grabbing word in the email subject line such as ‘T rex’ with an accompanying dinosaur emoji.

Doing this unusual technique can definitely make your receivers open their emails because I am sure that it will stand out among other boring emails. I mean, whose attention wouldn’t be caught with a random ‘T rex emoji’ in their inbox?

People will be drawn to the color in your subject lines and will be more intrigued to see what’s inside

But wait. Using colorful emojis not only improves the email open rate but also the click-through rate and click-to-open rate. Some brands even use multiple emojis to complement their message.

Are you still confused with these email marketing metrics? Click-through rate (CTR) measures the number of people who clicked on the CTA, image, or hyperlink in an email, while the click-to-open rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked in the email concerning the number of those who opened it.

When you have a choice of emotionally charged words, choose those that are associated with a positive response. Avoid advertising phrases, and remove terms such as:

• definitely, probably, hopefully, etc.
• free, money, buy,
• offer, proposal,
• now, already, before it’s too late, only today.

Don’t overdo it by making people aware of how bad their problems are, as it will not help you deliver your message.

Whenever we email a contact, we research any article they’ve recently written or roles they’ve taken over in the last few months and talk about that in the introduction of our emails. It works because people receive so many unsolicited emails every day, and we found that emails which feel personal can really stand out.

When I say personal, I mean using the person’s name in the subject line and interacting/connecting with them that way to make it seem like you know your customers and who you are sending the email to.

Proper email warmup ensures customers’ attention with increased inbox placement, which is critical to any email marketer’s ROI! By constantly keeping your inbox warmed up, you never need to worry about a lack of positive engagements keeping your inbox alive

The warmup process may include sending email from a new account, wherein you begin sending to a smaller number of people and gradually increase it each day. Ideally, you can accomplish maximum deliverability by 8 to 12 weeks and an email deliverability tool like InboxAlly can help you get there much faster.

From my own experience, inserting over 2 links within the email body can significantly increase the spam rate (based on tests I performed through different spam test software

You [can] track the opening rate of your emails based on times and locations, so utilize that information! What time do your consumers typically open emails?

Email marketing statistics have also shown that the best day to send email campaigns is Tuesday. However, if you send two emails a week, schedule it on Thursday for your second day to increase your email open rates.

I thought our mailing list was garbage until we recently sent out a free social media course – and a ton of people signed up. Maybe our list wasn’t as dead [as I] thought, we just needed a better offer and a better headline announcing that offer.

The more the content in each email aligns with a recipient’s interests, the more trust your emails will garner over time…It validates to subscribers that your content is reliable–whatever niche or topic or content you’re supplying

I check them out on LinkedIn and let them know in the email that ‘I see we also have # connections in common’ to make me seem more familiar to them. Then I explain why I would like to connect to bridge the intro and suggest we set up a call at their convenience

Hitting on a pain point resonates with the customer.” So, his advice is to highlight this in the email subject line. “For example, ‘Why you’re not getting a 25% email open rate’ (or whatever the industry-standard open rate is, since it varies.)

Email open rate differs across all industries. However, the average email marketing benchmark (open rate) is 18.0%, based on data provided by Campaign Monitor.

failing to optimize your email layout would lead to lower open rates. If they do manage to open them, [but] your email layout is all over the place due to incompatibility with mobile devices, readers would just delete them without getting to read your message.

Cravo is on point with this email strategy as many mobile gadgets now account for 60% of email engagement.

Creating surveys that will allow them to share their feedback on your current email marketing strategies will help you make improvements and strengthen your email marketing strategy

says Simon Elkjær, the Chief Marketing Officer of avXperten.

You may also leave your readers the opportunity to submit open-ended feedback or just gauge customer satisfaction or loyalty by asking: “How likely would you recommend us to a friend. All you have to do is click on a number.” Then, provide numbers 1 to 10, as an example.

This process will help you increase your sender reputation, and ESPs are more likely to trust the emails you send.

Besides having a clean list, having an unsubscribe link in your emails will also help avoid customer frustration. When that happens, your spam complaints are kept to a minimum.

By sending to a healthy list of your most engaged contacts, you’ll be less likely to land in spam and email service providers, like Gmail, will see that users are actually engaging with your message.

To scrub your email list, you need to segment your list, re-engage your newly cleaned segment, remove bad addresses from your email list, and check the automated responses of your campaigns.

Email service providers look at engagement levels and recipient behavior to decide if your emails are inbox worthy or doomed to the spam folder.

So, if you want to connect with your audiences on a personal level and drive customer conversion, you can do segmented campaigns. Some marketers segment their list by user behavior. These include the benefits sought by the subscribers, the occasion, usage rate, user status, buyer readiness stage, and brand loyalty status.

Segment your email lists by both:

• buyer persona (who the recipient is and what they care about)
• buyer’s journey stage (where the recipient is in their research and decision-making process)

Consider splitting your database into two segments and adjusting the sending frequency in one segment. Don’t change the frequency of the other segment. Look at the email open and click rates after a while. Does it make a difference?

Look at what your data is telling you. For example, if certain content areas are getting higher clicks than others, look at what they have in common: is it a style of writing, use of image, or the color of your CTA’s?

If people have shown an interest in a particular product/service, keep emailing them about that but drop the other stuff [and just] reintroduce it at a later date. [Simply focus] on what you know they’re interested in…. Test, test, and test again.

When you come in from the angle of non-selling and just being friendly, it will boost [your] inbox rate.

However, avoid being too casual as well because some recipients may feel a potential disrespect. If you’re still unsure of how to write a professional but cordial email, just think of the person reading the email first before you write and keep your message clear and concise.

Sending a long email filled with all sorts of information is going to confuse your customers as well as probably be flagged as spam. [That’s why you should] keep your email marketing brief, sleek, and refined.

So, if you want to connect with your audiences on a personal level and drive customer conversion, you can do segmented campaigns. Some marketers segment their list by user behavior. These include the benefits sought by the subscribers, the occasion, usage rate, user status, buyer readiness stage, and brand loyalty status.

Focus on subscriber’s interests and offer something which adds value to their life rather than just pushing your marketing message into their inbox

This just means that if you’re a fashion site, you can share fashion tips. If you’re in the technology sector, you can share an interesting feature of software or best practices.

Using humor will drastically improve your email open rates and give you a better chance of having your email read promptly. [So,] have fun with it, get creative, and watch your email open rates increase

I’ve discovered that including a relevant question in your subject line helps lead a reader into a story loop. Thus, creating that itch that they now have to scratch

Aside from an email campaign, you can also use an open-loop when creating a blog post, social media post, video, website content, webinar, podcast, and a product launch.

The vast majority of people nowadays tend to have an internal radar that automatically tunes out advertising. Using all lowercase breaks this pattern and causes people to subconsciously pay attention to your subject line

to prevent [emails from landing in spam], I recommend utilizing a reputable email provider as it will help improve email open rates [and] get into prospect’s main inbox.

Keep your reputation in the best of health with Engagement tools like InboxAlly. The interactions will help protect and repair IP reputation and Sender Domain reputation which can be seen with higher open rates and improved ROI.