How Can I Get More Contacts to Open My Emails?
If you have viewed your open rate, and it doesn’t compare to your industry’s average open rates, you might want to improve it. To increase your open rate, you need to re-evaluate three things:
1. Content
2. Delivery day and time
3. Contact list quality and age
Let’s explore these a bit more…
1. Check your content:
- Use a recognizable “From” name. Make sure you use a “From” name and address that includes your name, company, product, or service name – whichever the recipient will know best. When you repeatedly brand the “From” line like this over time, you assure the recipient that the email is coming from a reliable and trusted source and builds familiarity and credibility.
- Grab them with the “Subject” line. Most e-mail providers can accommodate a subject line of up to 60 characters but make sure the subject is short and to the point, between 30 and 40 characters and no more than 5-8 words, and state a clear benefit to opening the email. Make sure the subject line does not look like spam.
- Target your audience. Review the click rates or send a short survey to learn more about your audience. You can then segment your audience by saving respondents with similar interests and preferences into new contact lists.
2. Consider your delivery day and time: Industry statistics suggest that recipients are more receptive to offers in the mid-day, mid-week timeframe. However, the best time to send varies by audience demographics.
3. Evaluate your list: Sometimes your email or survey content is good but, if you are getting a lot of bounced emails or any spam reports, your contact list needs cleaning.
Be aware that Constant Contact and other email marketing service providers cannot track every contact who opens your email. While they do provide information about who opens mail, the data is not always complete.
The not so-good news is that non-HTML emails or text emails are not tracked and some email reading applications do not allow Constant Contact to report opens. Also, some email readers let the recipient choose to allow open tracking as a personal setting. But the good news is that for all these reasons, it is likely that your actual open rate is higher than what is reported!