To grow your brand online, you need to market it effectively. This requires you to leverage various forms of marketing.
One of the most reliable forms of marketing is email marketing. There are over 4 billion email users around the world and that makes it a great medium to reach out to a massive audience.
However, for your email marketing campaigns to be effective, you need to ensure that your audience not only receives your emails but also opens them. It’s only then that you can get them to take your desired actions and convert.
Thus, your email open rate is critical for conversion rate optimization. If you can’t achieve a high open-rate, the chances are that your email marketing campaign will not be successful.
So, how can you increase your email open rate?
Let’s find out.
How to Boost Your Email Open Rates
Here’s how you can increase your email open rates.
1. Short Subject Lines
Email subject lines are perhaps the most important part of any email marketing campaign. If you don’t get them right, the chances are that your receivers may never open your email. This would mean that all of the other content of your email will be wasted.
The subject lines need to catch the attention of your receivers and should prompt them to click on your email to open it.
So, here’s a trick – the email subject line also needs to be short.
But why?
Because many of your receivers may check their emails on their smartphones. In fact, about 42% of all email opens are on mobiles.
Image via Litmus
Owing to their smaller screen size, smartphones tend to display shorter subject lines. So, if you write a long subject line, the chances are that the receivers may not be able to read it completely. This may reduce the possibility of them opening your email.
That’s why about 82% of experts prefer to use short email subject lines that are less than 60 characters long.
What’s more?
The above-mentioned study also found that the average length of email subject lines is just 43.85 characters.
Yet another reason for keeping your subject lines short is that email apps stop displaying lines longer than 30-40 characters.
2. Subject Line Content
Length isn’t everything, however. The content of your subject line is also important.
While the copywriting has to be on point, you can improve the chances of your receivers spotting your subject lines by adding emojis to them. They can make your subject lines appear unique as only about 6.9% of email subject lines have emojis in them.
To test the efficiency of the subject lines, you can use tracking tools and figure out the impact of the emojis on your subject lines.
Image via AWeber
You could also try to vary the capitalization of your email subject lines to make it appear more unique.
The most common case used is sentence-case with about 60% of subject lines using it. However, only 6% of them are written in lowercase completely. This strategy might come in handy and could help you boost your open rates.
These strategies, of course, don’t apply to transactional emails which may be opened by your customers regardless of the subject line.
3. Segment Your List
One of the most important things you can do to improve your open rate is keeping your email list fresh and segmenting it well. A fresh and well-segmented email list means that only those who’re interested in receiving your emails will get them.
What’s more?
Segmentation means that you can personalize your subject lines and emails for each segment separately. As a result, the emails will seem more relevant to them. Due to this, they’ll be more likely to open your emails to check them out, hence improving your open rates.
Segmentation can be done based on their purchase behavior, demographics, locations, and interests. For instance, you can send emails depending upon the types of products that they’ve purchased from you and suggest similar products to them.
Final Thoughts
Improving your open rate is crucial for the success of your email marketing campaigns. To get your subscribers to take action, you need to get them to open your emails. For this, you can come up with crisp and attractive subject lines.
You can also add emojis to your subject lines and change their case to make them more unique. Lastly, you should keep your email list fresh by removing inactive accounts and segment it so that you can send out more personalized emails to your subscribers. You can also increase your email subscribers by combining your email marketing with social media marketing strategies using social media marketing tools.
Do you have any questions about the tips above or need help boosting your email open rate? Let me know in the comments.
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