Improving Your Email Open Rate

Ineffective subject line

Your subject line is one of the most important elements of your email campaign. It's got to be relevant and compelling to each and every one of your recipients. You should be spending a significant amount of time writing your subject line (don't just slap this on right before you send). Practice by splitting your list in half, then testing different subject lines on each group, to see which gets opened more. Your recipients get hundreds of emails a day. Why should they open yours? Here's a study where we examined 43 million email subject lines to see what works and what doesn't.

Bad timing

Experiment by sending your campaign on different days (and times). If you're trying to promote a weekend event, you might get better results with a Thursday campaign than a Monday campaign. If you're sending to corporate recipients, you might avoid the morning email flood, and send just after people have deleted their usual early-morning spam. Restaurant? Why not try just before lunch?

It could be that your recipients are opening your emails just fine, but their email applications are simply blocking images to protect their privacy (this would block the tracker images, thereby lowering your open rates). Check your click rates too---if you're getting tons of clicks, but low opens, you'll know they're just not displaying your images. Some email applications will turn images on by default, if the sender is in the address book (AOL does this). You might place a tiny line of text near the top of your email, asking people to "add our email address to your address book." You should also place this instructional message on your opt-in confirmation screen, and all welcome emails that you send.

Perhaps you're sending your campaigns too frequently, and people are just tired of hearing from you. You could send a little less often, or offer different types of communications (daily vs. weekly vs. monthly) that they can sign up for.

If you're using a very old list of customers, a lot of the addresses on your list have probably gone bad. People change their email addresses all the time, such as when they start receiving too much spam, or when they switch ISPs, or when they sign up for services that offer free addresses. We've seen some customers collecting opt-in lists on their website, but they wait too long before sending their emails.

If you've purchased or rented a list, shame on you. Those people didn't give you their permission to email them. That's why they're not opening your emails (and also why they're probably reporting you as a spammer).

People get tons of email. Why should they read yours? If you're not providing compelling, useful content in your emails, they're not going to open it. People don't want to just hear from you. They want something useful from you.

It could be that nobody is opening your emails because their spam filters are mistakenly throwing them into their junk folders! The thing to remember here is that spam filters look for clues in your email to determine if you're friend or foe. You should design your email and write your content with spam filters in mind, and keep the "spaminess" down to an absolute minimum. Don't use spammy phrases, and don't scream with all caps, like "CLICK HERE NOW!!!" or, "LIMITED TIME OFFER!" There are tons of factors that spam filters look for (too many to list here), so it's better to learn how they think, rather than try to memorize all the little things they consider to be "spammy." For help with this, read our article: How Spam Filters Think.