Improving Email Open Rates | smbelal.com

1
IMPROVING EMAIL OPEN RATES
2
Agenda
02
03
04
01

• Introduction

• Getting more emails delivered

• Conclusion

• Increasing email open rates

3
Introduction

• Email open rate is a measure which indicates
  a percentage of opened emails for a
  certain email marketing campaign.
•  Email open rate usually shows how well you were
  able to catch subscriber's attention with the
  subject line or whether your emails reached the
  inbox or went to the spam folder.

4
Average email open rate

• Given that B2B email marketing has been
  the most popular marketing channel for several
  years and that the average number of promotional
  emails sent to readers continues to increase, you
  would think that email open rate is on the
  decline.
• But, thats not the case.
• Except for a drop in email open
  rate between 2013 to 2014, the average open rate
  for email continues to improve year over year
  albeit slowly   reaching 24.88 in 2018 (an
  increase of 0.3 compared to 2017).
• This is of course good news as it means
  that email is still a powerful marketing channel
  you can use to communicate with your prospects or
  customers.
• Before you get more people to read your
  emails, you first need to understand where you
  stand.
• How many people currently ready your
  emails? What is your current email open rate?
• This is where industry benchmark open
  rate reports comes in.

5
Comparing to the industry average

• Benchmark reports are important in understanding
  of how the industry is changing on the whole and
  you should find out your own benchmark based on
  your email campaign performance. You should be
  able to pull this number from your email service
  provider.
• In 2018, the average open rate across all
  industries is 24.8.
• If you have an open rate of 25 or higher, then
  youre doing great!
• If not, dont worry. You know your email
  subscribers better than anyone else. For example,
  if you consistently reach a 15 open rate, which
  is below average yet your campaign is delivering
  results, its obvious that you are not under
  performing even if the industry average says
  you are.
• The first challenge you need to work on is
  getting your email to your subscriber list. Its
  no use spending hours crafting a perfectly
  optimized campaign if it ends up in your readers
  spam folder, is it?

6
Tips on how you can increase delivery rates

• Cleanse your email list

• Use double opt-in

• Ask your readers to add you to their trusted
  address book

• You do this by simply asking your readers to add
  the from email address to their contact lists,
  you can increase the number of emails delivered.

•  If a subscriber does not open an email from you
  three times in a row, the chances are that she is
  no longer interested in your company. Gmail and
  Yahoo Mail are smart enough to understand this so
  if you continue to send emails to subscribers who
  do not open them, they might be directed to the
  spam folder, so consider cleansing your list.

• Double opt-in means that the subscriber will
  verify that she wants to receive emails from
  your. You dont want to send emails to people who
  dont particularly care about them otherwise,
  they will not read them and lower your open rates.

7
How do people read my email campaigns?

• The way people read emails can provide key
  insights in how you create your email marketing
  campaigns.
• For example, the type of device they read it on.
• Today, 61 of all emails are now opened and read
  on mobile devices.
• Can you guess what your readers do when you send
  them an email that isnt optimized for mobile?
• They delete it. In fact, 70 delete the email
  immediately!
• And yet, only 11 of email campaigns use
  responsive design to optimize their email layout.
• Worse still, our own email marketing benchmark
  report found that only 20 of email.

8
When should I send my email campaign?

• Timing is important to open rates. To know when
  to send your email campaigns, you have to know
  your audience.
• f you sell software, most of your customers will
  be enjoying family time on the weekends. That
  means sending an email campaign on the weekend
  will lead to fewer opens, if any at all!
• So when should you send your email? Research
  shows that the best day to send emails in order
  to get the highest open rate is Tuesday. Now that
  you know on which day to send your emails, what
  about the time of day?
• Further research shows that readers are more
  likely to open emails after 12 p.m. And that 23
  of all email opens occur during the first hour
  after delivery. After 24 hours, an emails chance
  of being opened drops below 1!  If you send it
  on a day when people are less likely to read your
  email, then you could be missing out on a lot of
  interested customers. So, when it comes to
  sending out your email campaign, Tuesday, after
  12 p.m. is your best bet. 

9
How to increase email open rates

• The sender name and subject line of your
  emails are the most important factors in getting
  them opened and read.
• For example, 64 of subscribers say they
  are likely to read your email because of who its
  from, and 47 of email recipients open an email
  based on the subject line.
• What sender name do you use?
• Do you send your emails from company XYZ,
  or do you use a specific persons name?
• Believe it or not, but this can make a
  huge difference!
• Research from Pinpointe marketing found
  that by using a specific personal name, rather
  than a general email address or company name, you
  can increase open rates by as much as 35!
• Which is why its surprising to find
  that that our own B2B email marketing research
  found that 89 of email marketing campaigns are
  sent from a company name.

10

• When it comes to subject lines, have you
  heard the phrase you should spend as much time
  writing your headline as you spend on writing the
  content?
• Well, the exact same phrase applies to
  your subject line.
• A well crafted subject line shouldnt be
  the first thing you think of. Instead, it should
  take time. And you should use research and data
  to help guide you.
• A report by Retention Science found that
  subject lines with 6 to 10 words deliver the
  highest open rate, making 8 words an ideal number
  for a subject line. If a subject line is too
  long, it will get cut off and your reader will
  not know what the email is about (and could
  ignore it).
• This is especially important for mobile
  readers as the subject line character length is
  even shorter!
• If you link to a video within your
  email, you can also include the word video in
  your subject line.
• Here are some tips on which words to use
  and which to avoid in the subject line
• Most clicked-on emails include these words in the
  subject line secrets, e-sales and awesome.
• Emails mostly reported as spam included the words
  confirm, features and upgrade.
• People are less likely to open emails that
  include a question mark (?) or a hashtag ().

11

• Conclusion

• So there you have it!
• Ive provided the science behind email
  open rates and the ways you can use the data to
  make actionable decisions about your email
  marketing. You can start with the data provided
  in this post and use the science to guide you to
  more get more emails opened.

12
Thanks!

• Does anyone have any questions?
• hello_at_smbelal.com
• smbelal.com