If your subscribers are not opening your emails, you won’t be able to increase your income because they’re going to forget you exist. As a followup to our previous post “Why Email Open Rates Matter” here are 3 tweaks you can use to help improve email open rates.
Email marketing is a very lucrative marketing method that works better than almost any other type of marketing ever known. Because of that, it’s imperative that you use email marketing and that you optimize it to get more opens.
1. Create Compelling and Telling Subject Lines
With peoples’ inboxes overflowing these days, you need to make your email stand out from the crowd.
The first thing to test when trying to improve email open rates is the subject line. It is the very first thing your audience sees along with several other subject lines from other emails. If you’re to get them to open it, the subject line should make them curious.
Here are some tips for creating your subject lines:
- Use between six and ten words, no more than 50 characters
- Ask a question
- Personalize it
- Elicit fear of missing out (FOMO)
- Use capital letters and words wisely
- Put keywords first
- Keep it simple and straightforward
You’ll want to practice writing subject lines and test at least two of your creations. It’s best if you write at least ten different subject lines for each one that you’re going to use to find just the right one.
Remember how the subject line is viewed on the devices your audience uses. In most cases, you want to keep the subject line character count under 50 so that words aren’t cut off oddly.
If you want more ideas for subject lines, pick up our free report “101 Email Subject Lines” that give you fill in the blank subject line ideas that you can use in any niche.
2. Optimize Everything for Mobile
At this point, there is no excuse for not ensuring that everything you do works as equally well on mobile 
devices as on a PC. The main reason is that mobile devices are and have been outselling PCs for years and will continue to.
Most of your audience likely uses mobile, with few exceptions. You can look at your analytics on Google to find out what devices are being used.
Most of the larger autoresponders now send emails that display well on mobile by default but it is always a good idea to look at the email yourself before sending it.
3. Send Only Valuable and Useful Messages
The very best thing you can do from day one is to use every single message, especially transactional 
messages, to demonstrate and showcase your value to your audience.
What this means is that you must answer this question before sending an email, “What’s in it for my ideal customer?” Also, ensure that the email message delivers on your goal by crafting a persuasive message that motivates them to answer your calls to action.
One final bonus tip that you can use to improve email open rates, assuming you’ve paid close attention to everything else, is to always build up anticipation for the next email. Mention the subject line, and of course, always open up your email for replies. In fact, if you ask for an answer and get them, it will increase your open rate, too, because it builds trust and signals to the technology that you’re safe.
