Increase Your Email Open Rate Using These Tips

Are you having trouble retaining engaged subscribers or struggling to get subscribers to open your emails?

Perhaps you thought that since they subscribed to your emails that maintaining a high open rate would be effortless. It probably seemed hard enough to get those subscribers, but now starts the challenge of creating emails that subscribers want to open. Keep these three tips in mind to increase your email open rate, clean up your data and avoid spam complaints.

SUBJECT LINE

We all receive a ton of emails. As a result, many simply scan the subject line before deleting. However, there are some things that can be done to lower that risk and increase your open rate.

• Keep your subject lines short and to the point—keep it to 21-40 characters or 4-6 words.

• Include actionable words or hint at the value the email is providing, and cut out filler words that take up space.

• Avoid using all caps because it reads as yelling. Also avoid excessive punctuation and emojis.

• Determine whether you use title case or sentence case in your subject lines. Title case conveys authority and appears formal. Sentence case conveys a conversation and is argued to come off as friendlier, more approachable and easier to read.

DIRTY DATA

It's important to keep lists clean and up to date, whether they are in-house generated, purchased or organic. This can be done one of two ways:

• The first option is checking to ensure contacts are within your target audiences. You're wasting your time if the email is leading to someone who is not interested in your product. This dirty data can damage your email sender reputation and can put you at risk with email service providers, who could blacklist your company.

• The second option is structuring a re-engagement campaign. To do this, isolate the unengaged emails. These are individuals who haven't opened an email from you in the last three months. Next, structure a series of three emails to go out to the members of this list, encouraging them to engage, while mentioning that if they failed to do so, you will remove them from your mailing list. While your list may lose subscribers, you will see a significant rise in unique open rates.

SPAM COMPLAINTS

Another factor that could be negatively affecting your open rate is spam complaints. These are reports made by email recipients against emails they don't want in their inbox. Email recipients click spam for various reasons, but common ones include being unable to find an unsubscribe link or they may not know who you are or why you're emailing them. In order to prevent complaints, keep a permission-based list instead of buying a subscriber list. Letting your subscribers know how often they'll be receiving an email from you can also help, but don't overwhelm them with too many emails. At the same time, don't let them forget you by sending too few—there's a delicate balance!

Courtesy of Groups Today.

A version of this article originally appeared at Serendipity Media.