How to improve your email marketing open rates
Email marketing, if used correctly can be a cost effective way to generate sales for your business. In order to achieve strong engagement with your email subscribers, you’ll need to achieve and maintain good open rates - if people aren’t reading your email marketing, then they aren't going to be buying from you.
There are many ideas and theories out there as to the best way to achieve good open rates. Here at Email Blaster, we see thousands of email marketing campaigns each week. Great successful campaigns all follow as set of guidelines that achieve consistently good email marketing open rates.
#1 Verify your sending domain
Verifying your sending domain is very important if you are using third party email marketing software. When using email marketing software, your email will appear to your recipients as being from you, but it is being sent via the network of your email marketing software company. This can cause spam filters to class it as spam, because it looks like it is from one person, but is really from someone else.
This is why it’s very important to verify your sending domain, verifying your domain, means adding a seal of authentication to effectively ‘tell’ your recipients that it’s ok to accept your email. Verifying your sending domain is dome by adding an SPF record and a DKIM signature to your company domain. It’s very easy to do this and should only take a few minutes. Here at Email Blaster, we have a handy guide explaining how to do this.
#2 Split test your email marketing
You can split test your email marketing by sending different variants of it to small groups of recipients - and then evaluating the results to see which variant performed the best.
The most effective way to do this is with variants of the subject header line. The subject header line is the first thing that your recipients see and as such is hugely influential on improving your email marketing open rates. This is because if the subject header line doesn’t grab your email subscribers, then they won’t engage with it. Under performing subject header lines are one of the most common reasons for poor email marketing open rates.
Different variants can have hugely varying results - so it’s always a good idea to split test your email marketing before you send it out to your entire subscriber database.
#3 Ensure that your email database is cleansed regularly
As we’ve previously discussed, poor engagement and delivery results in a poor sender reputation. A poor sender reputation means that delivery rates and subsequently email marketing open rates will be very low.It’s worth double checking that your email marketing software company has a good list cleaning engine that will delete any bad data from your database. Here at Email Blaster, we have an inbuilt app called “List Ai” that auto scans every database as it’s imported and removes any bad data. Removing bad data before you send any emails really has a huge impact on delivery rates. Good delivery rates put you a step closer to achieving good email open rates.
#4 Only send your email marketing so qualified, oped in email subscribers
Making sure that your recipients are the right demographic and they have asked to receive your marketing is very important when it comes to maintaining strong email marketing delivery rates.
So, again, it’s really important to make sure that everybody on your list is there because they have asked to be there. Always avoid the temptation to purchase a lists, unqualified, un-opted in data is the fastest route to poor email open rates.