Email Marketing Open Rates
Open rates are one of the best ways to tell whether your email strategy is working. This number shows what percentage of your audience opens the emails you send them. If you have a higher open rate, it usually means your subject lines resonate with your audience.
How are open rates calculated?
Open Rate = (Emails Opened/Emails Sent) x 100
Tips to improve open rates
- A low open rate generally indicates one of these things:
- Your subject line is not relevant or interesting enough
- Your audience is composed of a wide variety of subscribers
- You may be sending too many or too few campaigns
- Test your subject line
Test your subject line
The best way to know what resonates with your subscribers is to try different things in your marketing emails. An effective subject line clearly describes what's inside your campaign, but you'll want to test a few variations to find out what works best for your audience to get higher open rates.
Draft two or three subject lines that differ slightly, for example, "Company B Weekly Newsletter" and "This Week's News from Company B," and set them up in an A/B testing campaign. A/B testing should be a part of your email marketing strategy not only to improve your email marketing statistics but to deliver email users the content they want in a way that is appealing to them.
Tips for subject lines that you should include in your digital marketing strategy
Writing a good email marketing subject line can be intimidating, especially if you don’t know where to start. Follow these subject line best practices to ensure that you're on the right track when drafting your email marketing campaign.
Personalized subject lines
Use merge tags to personalize your subject lines with each recipient's name or location. Personalized emails are shown to increase open rates for most users, and may work well when combined with marketing automation in transactional emails, such as birthday deals, post-purchase follow-ups or promotional emails.
Be descriptive
Sometimes, it's better to be direct and descriptive than trendy. Seasonal slogans such as "Fall into savings" or "Sizzling summer bargains" are popular but don't offer a specific hook. Instead, try to communicate the benefits of your promotions, or call attention to specific deals.
Keep it short
For many recipients, especially those reading your emails on mobile devices, shorter is often better. We recommend you use no more than 9 words and 60 characters.
Limit punctuation
Our research shows that it’s best to use no more than 3 punctuation marks per subject line. Too many punctuation marks can make your email look like spam, especially if you use a lot of special characters.
Use emojis carefully
Using an emoji picker is a fun and easy way to add some visual pizazz to your subject lines. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when you use emojis.
According to our research, you should use no more than 1 emoji at a time.
Use emojis to supplement words rather than replace them, to make sure your main message gets across.
Different operating systems render different versions of emojis, so it’s important to test.
Segment your audience
Think about who your subscribers are, and what kind of information is most useful to them. If sales reps, store owners, and consumers all receive the same campaign, some could become frustrated by irrelevant content and stop opening your emails. You can use subscriber location, interests, or activity to segment campaigns, so you can send the right content to the right people. Segmentation helps you create stronger campaigns and build trust with your subscribers. Segmenting your audience will increase the conversion rate and you'll get better email results than sending generic emails.
There are many other actions you can take to improve your campaign open rates, but these should get you started.
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