Many consumers are overwhelmed by endless marketing emails and never get to read all of them. For that reason, we recommend measuring your “open rate” when trying to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. This metric looks at the ratio of customers opening your emails and tells you how your email campaigns perform with your target audience.
Open rate = (total unique opens ÷ (total recipients – bounced emails)) x 100
Using the given formula, you can calculate the open rate of your company emails. An open rate of 12-15% is considered successful. If your ratio is below 12%, you may want to consider a new strategy to increase your email open rate.
Steps To Increase Your Open Rate
To increase your email open rate, focus on what motivates your audience. You can analyze past emails and see what generates the highest open rates.
Segment Your Email List
You can segment your email list to target different consumer groups better. Factors including demographics, geographics, and psychographics influence what your customers are interested in. Create separate mailing lists for different customer segments to send emails with engaging and personalized messages.
Write Engaging Subject Lines
An efficient way to increase your open rate is to focus on the subject line. Relevant subject lines will engage your audience. After you have segmented your consumer groups, think about what subject lines will interest respective groups. Your subject lines should be creative and engaging to stand out against all other marketing emails customers receive.
Time Your Email Delivery Right
Focus on timing to increase your email open rate. It is worthwhile for you to research what times and days in the week your target audience spends reading emails. Content, age, occupation, and location influence peak times. For example, people prefer to check hobby-related emails before work and work-related ones during work hours.
Consider the Frequency of Your Emails
An important factor to consider to increase your email open rate is reducing the frequency of emails sent. Sending too many emails to your customers may be interpreted as spam, and customers will engage less with your content. You should consider how much mail your target audience wants to receive and tailor your frequency to that number.
Ask Questions in Your Emails
Engaging with your audience by asking questions can be helpful to improve your open rate. You can ask your audience for their opinions, interests, preferences, and thoughts about your products. You can either ask them to respond to the email with their opinions or link a survey they’ll get a reward for completing. This can help you target your readers better and increase your open rate.
Continuing To Improve Your Email Campaigns
Improving your email marketing strategy and personalizing it to your target audience is an effective approach to improving your open rate. However, this process tends to result in slow, long-term success, so you may have to wait before you see dramatic results. Email marketing also gives you space to experiment and find the right tactics that work best for your niche.
For more direction on how to increase your company open rate, reach out to an email marketing consultant.
