Six Proven ways to increase Email Open and Click Rates – “A river cuts through the rock not because of its power, but its perseverance” – The quote applies perfectly in the context of Digital marketing. It is all about making continuous efforts to cultivate our targets through various channels and campaign designs we have planned. In particular, email marketing is all about patience and . we need to be confident and believe in what we are doing.
Why Email Open rates and Click rates are important in Email Marketing
The two most important metrics in Email Marketing are Open Rate & Click-through Rate. While conversion is the ultimate result we are looking to achieve, Open Rate & Click-through Rate are the guidance performance metric that we are on the right track.
Open rate is a measure of how many people on an email list open (or view) a particular email campaign. The open rate is normally expressed as a percentage. So a 20% open rate would mean that of every 10 emails delivered to the inbox, 2 were actually opened.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who open (or view) an email. This is also represented as a percentage.
The report from smart insights shows the Open and Click rates by industry. This shows the Travel and Tourism industry has the top open and click rates compared to all other industries. It is important that you benchmark your campaign performance against your industry to understand how well your campaign works.
How to improve Open and Click rates for your Email campaigns
1.Keep your lists fresh and segment it properly
Sending an Email campaign to the user who are no interest about your product will make your results look poor. A good way always is to build a list of people who are interested in your products or services. Always do research about the Email ids on your list on a regular basis to understand their interest and engagement to your campaigns. If you find a bunch of users not interested either in your product or in your campaign, it is best to take them off the list and if you still want to experiment with them, build a separate list for low active users. Then you would be able to measure the active and low active users separately. It might also be a good idea to reach out through a different channel to the low active users to understand why they are not showing interest.
2.Make Your Subject Line Stand Out
Work on the Email subject lines always make them crisp and create curiosity to the user to open it. But never spoil your reputation by giving false statements, it’ll build a wrong perception about you and your brand. Negative perceptions are hard to change.
3.Test your email marketing with A/B split campaigns
Always be in the quest to find out “What your users like” and “What they hate” about your email campaigns. Find out from the emails opened, what time is the best time to reach your target list. Try different times, styles of writing, video embeds etc., to know your customer taste. This will help you increase both Open and Click-through rates.
4.Write Like a Friend
Always compose the Email with a human tone don’t write them like automatically generated Texts. Make it personalised in a manner your user looks forward to your email and jumps on it :). This way your engagement rates are pretty good – This is easier said that done. However, this is where A/B Testing, Perseverance and Experience will help you.
5.Use the Power of Automation
One of the ways to improve user engagement is to understand user behaviour and based on your learning automate different paths for your customers based on their behaviour. This is very powerful but very difficult to be done manually. For example, if you are a travel site and you have a new user who has signed up to your portal, send them a welcome email. You can set an automation flow in a manner that if the user does not open the email in 3 days, send them a beautiful reminder or an offer. If they had opened the email and clicked on a link to understand travel packages to Europe, send them a customised offer for a European trip.
6.Optimise it well for Mobile users
The latest report from marketing and tells that nearly 68 percent of emails were opened on a mobile device. The iPhone was the dominant device, generating 42 percent of all email opens. The desktop saw just over 32 percent of email opens. So it’s important to draft your emails which the mobile users can’t neglect to open.
