By Suzana Is Your Open Rate Disappointing You? Read These Tips
If you do marketing online, you probably have a database of subscribers, customers or clients to whom you send emails – regular newsletters, special offers, promotions and others, and you are probably monitoring your email open rate. If one day you discover that your open rate is getting worse, here are a few tips you can follow to boost the subscriber’s interest into your messages:
Think about what you send.
Look at your emails content and think if you send the information that your subscribers expect from you. As with the frequency, respect the subscriber’s preferences and don’t send them what they did not request. If they chose to get news and tips from you, don’t send them promotions. Or, at least make casual mention of your offers somewhere in the middle of the email, or at the end, or in P.S while writing the whole email in an informational tone.
Change your sending time.
One of the reasons why people don’t open your emails may be the wrong sending time. You can test your sending time by splitting your list in half. Send the email to one half at your regular time/day and to the second half – at a different time/day. Then watch your open rate report to find out what time works best for you.
Also, you can try to find the best sending time simply by looking at the email addresses on your list. People who provided you with their personal email addresses, for example from Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, are more likely to read email in the evening when the work day is over. If you have business or corporate emails on the list, so the best time to send to those people is probably during the work day. Again, you can separate personal and business emails into two groups and send to each group at different times.
Segment your list and test your email before sending.
Think about the possibility to segment your list into smaller groups and send more relevant emails to each group. If you have any additional information about your subscribers except their emails and names, you can segment the list by their interests, hobbies, gender, name of the product or service they purchased from you and so on.
If such segmentation is not possible with your list, consider the idea of testing different versions of your email on a part of the list and then send the winner email version which gets more opens to the rest of the list. This capability is called A/B Split testing. You simply prepare two or more slightly different versions of the email (you may alter the Subject line, for instance) and send them to say 20% of your list. You define yourself the time period to determine the winner version, for example, 3 hours. When the time period is over, you send the best performing version to the rest of the list.
Well, probably some of the above tips are not new to you but I thought it was reasonable to repeat them. Anyway, you lose nothing if you revise your email sending program one more time and maybe make some adjustments. Even a small change can bring you additional opens and show you that you are on the right way.
