How to Increase Open Rate?

An email open rate is the percentage of people who opened and looked inside the email. It is considered to be one of the most important metrics of email marketing because it eventually tells you how interested the subscribers are in your emails and how many people looked at them.

Factors that influence email open rate:

• Technical deliverability (depends on quality of the email list)


• Qualitative deliverability (depends on getting into the Inbox)


• Email subject and sender’s name


• Time and frequency of email sending

How do you know that people open your emails?

We recommend you place a unique beacon HTML tracking code inside the email (our bulk email sender does this for you), thus you will know when it has been opened. The tiny image, a beacon, signals that the email has been delivered. The statistic is then inserted into the database. Only delivered emails must be counted, because bounced emails are shown in the statistics as the bounce-rate.

How to increase email open rate?

The most important step that you should do first to increase email open rate is to clean up the email list. By cleaning up the email list you will avoid sending emails to non-existent addresses, and it can save a great deal of time and money. Our email list cleaning software, Atomic Mail Verifier, does this in 3 steps:

1. Syntax test the email addresses. Emails that don’t correspond to the program’s standard will be excluded from the list.
   
   


2. Verify the existence of the recipient’s domain name. If there isn’t a domain, there is no email address. Therefore, it is not allowed into the third stage of testing.
   
   


3. Thoroughly check an email that has passed the two previous steps. The program looks for a SMTP-server that corresponds to the domain and checks the existence of the user.
   
   

This list, which contains four email addresses, has one invalid address. Just imagine how many non-existent and invalid addresses Atomic Mail Verifier will find checking a large email list. If the list contains invalid or non-existent addresses, the emails will not be delivered and they will reduce the email open rate. Therefore, your email campaign will not be so successful.

Cleaning up your email list with Atomic Mail Verifier will take you a little time, but it will check and clean all the addresses that would otherwise be wasted. It will also reduce spam complaints and reputation risks, save wasted money, and improve campaign results (higher inbox placement rates mean higher email open rate).

• Create an engaging subject line. The first thing every subscriber pays attention to is the subject line. You should test and optimize it all the time, otherwise it will be wasting money.


• Personalize your emails. Subscribers will be happy to open an email that has been written directly to them. Use the recipient’s first name at the start of the email and create the body text as if you have written it to one person only.


• Write qualitative content. If you will send informative, interesting and engaging emails, your open rate will increase.


• Send emails from a person, not a company. When the recipient receives an email, he always checks the sender and then decide to open it or not. If the letter is from a company, it often gets marked as an advertisement and deleted.


• Send at the right time. If you send the email on the wrong day or even the wrong time, it will have a negative effect on your email open rate. Are you promoting an event that takes place the weekend? So, send all the emails on Tuesday, because as most email marketers approve, midweek emails increase the open rates.


• Avoid getting into spam. Email filters are becoming more and more sophisticated, and you should try your best to stay out of them. Don’t use such words as “sale,” “free,” “rich” or “deal” in a subject line to avoid spam filters.


• Segment your list carefully. Segment your email list and your content will be relevant, emails will be highly focused and engaging, and it will improve your open rates in the process.

There are many suggestions for improving email open rates, and these are some great starting points. Emails’ content and sending practices will be customized and differ to suit every business’ needs, and there is no assured way to improve open rates for all email marketing campaigns — but following these suggestions might be all you need to make your email campaigns more effective.

However, don’t forget about the first important step to increase email open rate: to take care of your email address list, to clean it with the reliable assistant, Atomic Mail Verifier. This refined list is your guarantee of a high open rate!