How to Increase Email Open Rates in 10 Practical Steps

The main factors that influence the number of email opens are:

1. Email Deliverability
2. Email list hygiene
3. Audience Segmentation
4. SPAM-filter awareness
5. Great timing
6. Content value
7. Gripping subject lines
8. An engaging welcome
9. Personalization and friendliness
10. Mobile-first policy

If you’re set on improving your deliverability by yourself, here are some things you can do:

• Add a double opt-in: At sign-up, double opt-in ensures that the subscriber will verify their email address, meaning they genuinely want to receive your emails. Sending emails to people who want them is the first step towards better deliverability and – open rates.
• Motivate email replies: Get your audience to reply to an email. To motivate them, you can offer them a bonus case study, special access, or a coupon code as an incentive if they do, which will automatically improve future deliverability.
• Become a trusted sender: Ask your subscribers to add you to their address book and mark you as a trusted sender. This action should keep your emails out of their spam and inside your contacts’ primary inboxes, increasing your chances of regular opens.
• Clean your email list! It’s more challenging than it sounds. Read on as we discuss this in the next step.

Working on your email list, you should consider the following:

• Email list quality: While quantity is important, quality trumps it. This means your list should have subscribers who opted in voluntarily – people who want your emails and are interested in your product. If every subscriber is genuine, you can achieve more with less.
• Never, ever purchase an email list! If you want a quality contact list, you must never — yes, never — buy a list of random addresses who might not know who you are or what your business is about. If you decide to purchase a list anyway, know it can ruin your sender reputation, mess up your deliverability and leave you frustrated and without revenue.
• Re-engagement with your audience: Run regular re-engagement campaigns targeting your less-responsive subscribers to check if they still want your messages. This will help your list remain clean.
• Inactive contacts removal: Inactive subscribers contribute to lower open rates and can negatively affect your campaigns. After making sure they are and will remain inactive after six months of no action, remove them and move on. Additionally, such good riddance will help you segment your list well — more in the next step.

In short – give the people what they want, and here’s how:

• Filter by engagement: Opens and clicks indicate who’s engaged and how recently. Filtering by engagement helps you can learn who is interested in which aspect of your business and keep them engaged with relevant content and enticing offers.
• Nurture recently engaged contacts: After removing the inactive contacts, focus on the ones who opened your emails in the past 30 days. This will boost open and click rates and improve your sender reputation with the ISPs. Doing so creates a positive feedback loop that improves deliverability for future subscribers, which makes the recently engaged audience larger.
• Group by interest: You must stay relevant to keep your contacts interested. Not every aspect of your business is relevant to every subscriber, so be sure to differentiate and target specific audiences on specific topics. You can do this by using tags.
• Use tags: By using tags you create in your email service provider tag functionality, you can easily differentiate between segments of your larger audience. Tags are a powerful tool because they allow you to build virtually unlimited segments within larger, broader audiences on your email list.

Your messages absolutely MUST abide by the CAN-SPAM Act, and here are some of the actions you can take:

• Keep your list organic: Be sure your subscribers opted in voluntarily. And — we will repeat this — do not purchase email lists!
• Verify your domains: Prove you are who you say you are, so ISPs (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.) know that any content you send you also own. This increases trust as you live with the good and the bad from what you send.
• Use a clean IP address: You should be sure nobody used your IP to send spam before. Still, know that being among other good senders is often better than a low-volume sender using a dedicated IP.
• Keep your HTML clean: Unoptimized code can negatively affect inbox placement, giving your less chance to get to the subscriber.
• Personalize: Use dynamic tags to personalize the “To:” field and the emails.
• Time emails well: If you don’t want to be flagged as spam, don’t act spammy! Send your emails in reasonable time sequences — 100 emails in a day to a single subscriber is not a good idea.
• Don’t Lie: No deception, clickbait, or phishing attempt will go unpunished. Don’t go there.
• Write a Good Subject Line: Use lowercase letters, don’t use overly aggressive, salesy language or use words such as “free” – all of this can mark your emails as spam.
• Be transparent: Include your business name, clear information, and location. Be transparent about your offer.
• Allow people to unsubscribe: Make the unsubscribe button easy to access. Ideally, show the unsubscribe link at the bottom and top of your emails to make unsubscribing easy. It’s far better for you if someone unsubscribes than if they report you or file a complaint.

While both timing and frequency vary greatly depending on the industry, product lines, but also email campaign types, there are several general rules to keep in mind:

• Start with one email a week: It’s best to start sending one email a week unless you’re following up on a specific, time-sensitive behavior. This is not spammy, whereas consistency will always keep your brand on your customer’s mind. Over time, you can increase your frequency to one email a day, but the best strategy overall is to stay consistent.
• Work days over weekends: People don’t look at emails over the weekend as much, so you should pick a work day to launch your promotions.
• Any work day will do: There is no preference. Test and see what works best for you.
• Mornings first: Higher open rates happen in the morning between 8 and 10 am, approximately. However, this can also depend on the product and approach, as better click-through rates can occur in the afternoon since people have more time to spend on casual interests.
• Location: Time your campaigns according to the recipients’ locations. Nobody reads an email they get at 2 am, and it can easily get lost between other unread messages.
• Demographics: People of different ages, occupations, and interests will likely open emails at different times. Again, know your audience to determine the best time for them.

There are several creative and technical ways to make your subject line stand out:

• Give clues: Make your contacts curious about your content without giving them too much information or being overly mysterious. You’re not selling top-secret stuff (we presume); no need for over-the-top drama. But a charming hook will make a person click.
• Use numbers: People like to see numbers. How many people are happy with your product, you say? Put it in the subject line, but explain why that is so in the email.
• Watch the length: You should make your subject line the perfect length for the message and give the gist of your message. If in doubt – shorten it. Less than 40 characters for desktops and 25-30 for mobile devices works best. You should know that some of the best-performing emails have really short subject lines, so sometimes – one perfect word can be enough.
• Be friendly: But without actually calling your subscribers’ friends’. That’s a bit too familiar and can feel creepy.
• Have fun: Don’t shy away from humor, slang, or casual language – this is where you can make it work.
• Personalize: Personalize the subject line whenever possible to make the subscribers feel appreciated. People are more likely to open an email with a personalized subject.
• Don’t sell: Steer clear from sales words like “free, discount, subscribe, pay.” They’re a spam trigger.
• No clickbait: Never clickbait the contact; maintain honesty. Words like “shocking, quickest, top secret, must-see” can make your subject line feel sleazy and trigger another spam filter.
• Announcements are OK: You can announce a sale or sale ending and create urgency that way but in a transparent and accurate manner.
• Test and then test again: If you’re building your email marketing strategy from scratch, you should test everything. The same goes for subject lines.

Your new subscriber should know the following:

• Types of emails you will send,
• Time and frequency of your emails,
• What they will get from being on your list (discounts, bonus points, gifts, etc.),
• How you will use their information,
• How to get in touch with your customer support and,
• How to unsubscribe.

To enhance this response, personalize your messages:

• Use clear “From,” “To,” and “Reply to” to identify yourself: Avoid “No-reply” emails or obscure sender names.
• Add first names to the subject line: People are more likely to open an email addressing them directly.
• Use geo-targeting and consider weather conditions: If it applies to your brand, you can send special offers during different times of the year or bad weather.
• Send birthday offers or gifts: Congratulate your subscribers and make them feel special on their special day. They will remember.
• Be natural: Keep your approach natural, friendly, but professional. Too much familiarity can get weird fast.

While we’re still dealing with customers, several technicalities remain:

• Mobile devices have smaller screens, and you should be careful about your subject lines (25-30 characters for mobile, remember?) and make your content responsive.
• Also, keep in mind how people interact with mobile devices: they tap. Make your content tappable! For example, create a large, thumb-sized call-to-action button at the end of your message. Or make room between links, so people can tap on each separately.
• Use simple formatting and keep the width under 600px for better readability.
• Adjust the font size for better visibility — larger fonts look better on mobile.
• Don’t rely on images because Android can turn them off automatically. Make good-looking content without them.