How to improve your email marketing open rates

Basically, open rates are the percentage of people, minus the hard bounces, who have opened your email newsletter, out of the total list you have sent it to.  They are used by most marketers as a key signifier of success.  At Matizmo, our email marketing system provides valuable tools and metrics to allow clients to analyse their email marketing campaigns. We believe that understanding open rates and what affects them does go some way to helping you improve them.

How are open rates measured?

You cannot measure 100% accurately the open rate of any email. This is because of how it is measured. Little pieces of image code – nothing which the client can see – are inserted into the newsletter. When this invisible image is called to be downloaded from our server, we track it as an open. By this way of counting, text only email opens will not register. Even so, this method of measuring the open rate is standard and does give a fairly accurate picture of how many people have opened – and therefore read – your email.

What is a good open rate?

No-one gets a 100% open rate or even 80% for that matter.  Striving for such numbers when you first start with email marketing is foolhardy. Open rates depend on a lot of factors for example, how big your list is, how fresh it is and what the email is about. You would tend to get a higher open rate for an newsletter that came from a small, niche organisation or community group where the information contained inside is highly personalised.

As an average – consider a good rate as anywhere between 20% and 40%.

How do I improve it?

1. Subject Lines – Many people underestimate the power of a subject line. Research over time suggests that the more boring the title, the better. Excessive capital letters, use of words like “sale”, “free”, “new” or expressives like !, % or ? tend to turn people – and their spam detectors – off.
2. Provide fresh multi-media content – don’t just fill your email newsletter with dry articles that are also available on your website. Make an effort to write new content for the email every time. If you have any video content or webinar clips you can use then do so.
3. Try different days and times to send it and watch how it affects open rates – for some markets Friday works best, and for others it is Monday or Thursday. Play around with different days and times of day to see what works for you.
4. Test different layouts and colours – if you have enough people that sign up for your email you can send out small tests to see which of the two emails people open more of. You can then use this information to send the best one to the whole database.

Understanding and improving open rates should be a priority for those keen to use email marketing as part of a wider marketing drive. At Matizmo, we give you the tools you’ll need to understand what is and isn’t working and where changes can and should be made.