3 Ways to Increase Email Open Rates

More people opening your emails is a good thing. Nothing I’m about to describe is rocket science, but I sometimes have conversations with people who aren’t experimenting with these tactics.

In a previous job, I drove open rates up by 20% for a weekly newsletter with the first two methods below. The third is an approach I’ve used to bump up open rates for multiple standalone emails.

Constant Contact is the email marketing platform I used for these, but many programs have the tools you need to do these simple things.

1. Make Your “From” Line Work for You

Let’s say your company is named XYZ, and you put out a newsletter each Tuesday. If you do what some companies do, you’ll send the email out so it shows up in people’s inboxes as being from “XYZ Company,” with a subject line of “Weekly newsletter” or “April 3 newsletter.”

This approach might work for a bit or keep your most loyal customers coming back. But, there’s a better option if you want to give more people a reason to open what you’re sending.

Try changing the “From” line to “XYZ Newsletter,” so you free up more space in your subject line. Long subject lines run off the page in some email programs, and you don’t need to waste any of that valuable real estate to say the word “newsletter” when the “From” line has space.

With this now-blank canvas, use your subject line to highlight an interesting topic or two from within the newsletter to make readers curious. For example, “We’re in the Wall Street Journal” or “Save 25% with this promo code” is much better than “March 3 newsletter.”

2. Change Up the Subject Line on the Auto-Resend

Constant Contact comes with a feature?allowing you to automatically resend an email some days later to anyone who didn’t open it the first time.

I wouldn’t suggest using auto-resend for every email, especially if you’re a high-volume sender, as it can quickly put a lot more emails in inboxes. But, it’s absolutely worth experimenting with.

The default setting on the Constant Contact re-send feature places the word “Reminder” at the start of the subject line on the version being re-sent. So, “Free marketing webinar Tuesday” becomes “Reminder: Free marketing webinar Tuesday” the second time.

The “Reminder” subject line can be effective at times, but it’s also good to completely mix it up, as different people respond to different things.

For example, maybe in the original email, you use “Free marketing webinar Tuesday,” and then on the re-send you try “Learn from our panel of experts” or “New marketing tactics for 2020.”

The key is to highlight something else interesting from the body of your email that might get a group of non-openers engaged the second time around.

3. Make Some Emails From a Person Occasionally

Even with solid subject lines, you might have some readers who tune your emails out at times. They see it’s from XYZ and think they know everything you have going on. Or, you’ve become less important to them than you once were. This is why it’s good to mix it up every so often and surprise people.

Keep your newsletter from “XYZ Company” but, when you have something else you need to announce, try using your CEO or another employee’s name in the “From” line.

I’ve used this tactic multiple times to bump up an open rate well past the company average. But, don’t use it too often, or in ways that might come across as misleading. Then, you may find the open rates for this style of email dropping back down toward your average.

A Final Thought: Don’t Forget About the Content

Even when deploying the above tactics,?focus on what’s inside your emails to keep people coming back.?The greatest subject lines in the world won’t result in stronger open email rates long-term if people are disappointed too often by the content they find within.

If you don’t have enough to say in a weekly newsletter, maybe it should only be done monthly. Make sure the stories inside are short and well-written.

Three to five brief blurbs in an email are often more likely to generate clicks than something lengthy. Drive people to your website to get the full content, whether it’s a longer article, a podcast or a video.

The email doesn’t always need to tell the full story. It often just needs to generate the clicks to get people to the content that interests them.