5 Simple Hacks To Get Amazing Cold Email Open Rates

You choose the best email template, segment the database, and create the perfect follow-up flow of your cold email campaign. Finally, when you hit that “start campaign” button, you are so excited that you can hardly sleep as you want to see the results the next morning. When you actually open the dashboard the next morning, you realise that nobody actually cared to even open your email. If you are a cold email marketer, you probably have experienced this many times. After reading this blog, however, you will definitely see a difference in results in your future campaigns. Here are some of the simple yet effective tips you should follow to improve your email open rates.

1. Make sure your cold email campaigns avoid the SPAM folders

One of the most common reasons for low email open rates is your emails often end up in SPAM folders. In order to avoid getting into spam folders, one needs to make sure all email deliverability measures are taken care of. Email deliverability is nothing but your email’s ability to reach the recipient’s inbox. It is challenging but not impossible to achieve this. Emails with bad or low-quality content sent often to a non-interested audience give your email address a bad reputation. Now to increase your email reputation, it is very important to understand that the quality of your email is more important than the quantity or volume. You don’t want the recipients to mark your emails as spam. If your open rate is below 50% and bounce rate is above 5% you have an email deliverability problem. There are certain things you can do to improve your email deliverability i.e. update your DNS records with SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and MX record. You will see a great increase in your email deliverability once these steps are completed. You also want to set up a custom tracking domain in order to send cold emails. Custom tracking domain lets you control deliverability and your email reputation. You can check how the custom tracking domain is set up on SmartReach (here)

Every plan of SmartReach.io comes with a suite of features built to increase email deliverability called “Deliver4Sure”.

2. Boost Your Cold Email Open Rate With Email Warmup

If you have already thought of email deliverability, you might as well have stumbled upon the term email warmup and how important it is to warm up your email to improve email deliverability. Imagine an athlete going for a big tournament without any practice, that’s exactly what happens if the cold email campaign is started without email warmup. If you send 5 to 10 emails per day and suddenly you start an email campaign with 100 to 200 emails sent per day, email providers are going to get suspicious and will mark your email as promotional or spam. In order to not get the activity seen as suspicious by email providers email warm up is a must. Here, you could read about the importance of email warmup and how you can warm up campaigns in SmartReach.io.?

3. Subject Line of Your Email

Email subject line plays a key role in your email open rate. After all the struggle to reach prospect’s inbox, you don’t want your email to be totally ignored or not given importance to. You need a subject line that makes the recipient think about your email or gets him attracted to open the email to see what’s inside. Personalisation by using the name of the recipient or his company definitely helps open rates. Subject line should be short and sweet, it shouldn’t have any spammy words and most importantly it should convey the message clearly. It can be a question, a teaser, a value proposition or simply a pain point for the recipient’s business. Having a good subject line will increase your open rate exponentially.

4. Configure a Clean Email List

If your email lists consist of inactive email IDs, your email open rates will be as low as they can be. Even though permission-based marketing is essential, when it comes to emails, permission can expire. Consider removing or suppressing inactive users after a set time or automating a reconfirmation campaign. Removing invalid emails on a regular basis and re- confirming your inactive subscribers can help declutter your list.This activity will increase the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and improve open rate. Tools like SmartReach.io has this feature (Email Validation) built in its software wherein it auto validates every prospects email ID before starting the campaign.?

5. Provide Easy Unsubscribe Button

If you have been believing that users unsubscribing to your emails is a bad sign for your email marketing, you probably need to rethink about it. Users unsubscribing to your emails can help you clean the email lists and increase open rates. As your email lists are optimised and unwanted/uninterested users are out of your email lists you will see an upward trend in your email open rates. So do ensure that your emails have an unsubscribe option.

Email open rates are one of the most important parameters which can determine the success of your cold email campaigns. Higher email deliverability automatically increases the absolute number of emails opened and hence more? the chances of starting business communication with prospective clients. Once you make sure all the above points are taken care of, you will see a great improvement in your email open rates.

If you would like to add a few more hacks then do comment or write to me. Cheers