Email marketing is a part of every successful online business and many offline as well. It is not enough to just send out emails and hope for the best. You need to track your email open rates.
You need your audience to open your emails and, of course, act on what’s inside. But first, they must open them. If they’re not opening them, no one can take advantage of your amazing problem-solving offers.
Email Open Rates![email tracking]()
You must understand that for an email to be counted as opened, your audience member will have to click a link inside the email, enable images, or open the preview pane to read the email further.
Without some action, the email is not counted as opened, even if they read the information inside the preview pane but take no other action.
Understand the Averages
Before you can concern yourself with email open rates, it helps to understand the overall average of open rates as well as the average in your specific industry. If you have a basic idea of the open rate averages, then you have something with which to base your idea of success on from day one of starting your email marketing campaigns.
Currently, email open rates overall average at about 18 to 35 percent depending on the country you’re targeting, with the USA being most likely to open the email and people in the UK being less likely.
Know the Problems
Understand that even delivering an email can be a problem. The open rates depend on the fact that your email gets to the inbox of your recipient, or, it might not.
It might go to SPAM folders, or you may not have created a compelling enough subject line to get your audience to notice. Many factors come into play that you need to know about concerning your situation.
Fix the Problems
Use double opt-in emails to avoid problems with spam and delivery.
Ask readers to give you a functional email address and don’t accept obvious ‘trash’ emails as subscribes for freebies. Send the link to the freebie in the email so if they want it they have to give you a functional email.
Keep your email list hygienic by sending emails often, deleting email addresses that never open emails, and practicing making better subject lines to get them to see them and open the messages.
Ensure your email messages and website, for that matter, work on mobile devices.
Collect Statistics
Using your email autoresponder software metrics, you can figure out when the best time to send an email is to get more people to open it.
You can also use the stats from your website to find out the types of devices your ideal audience uses. You cannot ignore the fact that more people are using mobile, for example, than PCs for many online purchases.
If your site, shopping cart, and information cannot be accessed entirely using a tablet or smartphone, you are going to miss out. You can know for sure by looking at this information in your analytics.
Work on Increasing Open Rates
Work on making your email open rate higher by focusing on what we already know works:
- Clean your list regularly
- Craft compelling and targeted subject lines
- Segment your audience
- Send only useful and valuable emails
- Live up to your promises
- Respect your customers by not emailing unless you have something valuable and vital to say
- Sending emails regularly and often.
It will take time to figure out what works best for you audience. This may change over time but your tracking will tell you when something is not working.
It’s clear that following a basic process of creating a compelling headline of six to ten words, using a suitable return address, segmenting, sending email campaigns at the right time that are personalized and compelling, will increase open rates and probably put you much higher than the average open rate because most people aren’t doing the work that needs to be done to increase their email open rates.
