Using emails is one of the best ways to grow your business and generate more sales.
Your goal is to encourage recipients to open your emails. Once they open, you already have one foot in their door.
But what do you do if they don’t open your emails?
In this post, we’ll discuss the reasons why recipients don’t open your emails. We’ll also talk about tips on how to improve your email open rates.
What is the benchmark for email open rates?
Let’s be realistic here: not everybody will open your emails. You can also expect a small percentage of your subscribers to click on them.
At the same time, email open rates vary from industry to industry.
According to a report, 27.35% of emails about hobbies get opened. This is followed by government emails with an open rate of 26.52% and arts emails with 26.03%.
Their click rates, though, falls way lower at 4.78%, 3.65%, and 2.66%, respectively.
Emails about religion take the fourth spot with 25.33% open rate, while non-profit emails have 24.11%. Unfortunately, online marketers got a bad rep as their emails are the least opened.
Marketing and advertising, ecommerce, and e-coupons have open rates of only 16.48%, 15.66%, and 14.92%, respectively. This shows that emails that are related to “advertisements” or businesses are the trickiest to convert. Thus, it makes sense for you to work on your email marketing skills.
There are lots of variables you need to manage with email marketing. Knowing these stats should help you curb your expectations with your open rates.
So why don’t my recipient open my emails?
If your open rate is below the industry average, then you might be committing the mistakes below:
Your emails bounce or go straight to the spam folder
Over 100 billion emails get flagged as spam daily. This is because most unsolicited emails contain viruses and promote illegal activities. To counteract this, there’s a good chance that your email program automatically filters them up for you.
One way of doing this is that your email provider checks for keywords commonly associated with spam. These include (and are not limited to):
- “free money”
- “earn per week”
- “big bucks”
- “no credit check”
- “MLM,”
- “Winning”
Avoid using these words so that your email won’t end up in your recipient’s spam folder.
Also, this problem persists if the deliverability rate of your email tool is low. If necessary, you must switch up your email platform to one that has a high deliverability rate.
Your subject line sucks
According to another report, 33% of emails get opened depending on their subject line. That’s how important subject lines are!
To improve your open rate, try asking a question in your subject. Be as specific as possible and create a sense of urgency.
Also, always keep it short, straight to the point, and use lower case. Personalize your subject line to increase its open rate by around 20%.
You can also conduct A/B testing on your subject lines. Compare the performance of two similar-content emails that have different subjects.
Lack of personalization
Customize your email by having the recipient’s full name, job title, and ensure your emails are free of errors by using a free marketing tool such as Grammarly. Personalizing your email has been proven to improve email open and click rates.
And it’s not just about using their names. You also need to use the data you gathered about your subscribers and integrate them into the email.
How can you increase your email open rates?
One of the best ways to increase your open rate is by using an email tool such as Wishpond. It has a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface that enables entrepreneurs to send personalized, relevant, and enticing emails to multiple recipients.
Its main goal is to improve subscriber engagement. It features numerous templates and follows an engagement-based segmentation. This helps deliver targeted content to a large list of subscribers efficiently.
Limit your subject line to not more than 10 words
Subject lines should be short and straight-forward. If possible, limit it to ten words or less. You don’t want your recipient to get bored reading long and redundant sentences.
Strategize your words. Make them compelling and enticing at the same time. They should provoke your recipient to open your emails
However, be careful not to make your subject line “click-bait-ish.” Doing so may cause your emails to go straight to your recipient’s spam folder and puts your entire campaign at risk.
Send emails to the right people
Don’t send emails randomly. It’s not about quantity here, but quality.
Segment your list to ensure that your recipients are interested with the email you’re sending. Sending 20 emails to potential clients is better than sending to 100 recipients who aren’t likely to respond.
Segmenting your list saves you time and energy. It also improves your relationship with your subscribers.
Schedule the sending of emails in a timely manner
Don’t go sending out emails any time of the day. According to a study, the best time to send emails is at 10 am. This is the time when people check their emails.
Recipients are likely to open a fresh and newly-received email instead of an email they received hours ago. You can also send emails at 6 am and 8 pm as these are the times when people check their emails before rising up and going to bed.
Email Design Tips To Boost Your Email Open Rates
Conclusion
Think of email open rates as your site’s web hosting.
If you settle on substandard web hosting, expect your site to load slower than your competitors. Your slow-loading site will drive away visitors. As a result, you won’t get a chance to show them your business.
The same thing goes for your email open rates.
If you don’t optimize your open rates, there won’t be any subscribers to convert! By following the tips above, you can convert subscribers into sales more effectively.
About the Author:
Kevin Payne is the Founder of Kevintpayne.com, an inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Partner that helps tech startup founders implement inbound marketing campaign sprints to increase their qualified leads.
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