How To Increase Email Open Rate & Click Through Rate

Whether you have a team or you’re operating as a solopreneur, your time resources are limited. So you want to be sure that you’re not wasting any of your precious time and money…

These days, there’s a lot of emphasis on chatbots, influencer marketing, and all the other shiny new opportunities to reach customers.

But don’t let this distract you from one of the oldest and yet most effective messaging channels — email.

If you’re wondering whether email is still a worthwhile marketing strategy in 2020 – Email still has one of the highest average return on investments from any marketing channel.

In fact, studies have shown that on average, email generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is a crazy 3,800% ROI!!

If you’ve tried email marketing in the past but haven’t got the results, open rates, or click-through rates you were hoping for, keep on reading…

We’re going to break down some of our top tips to help you get the most from your email marketing as well as 14 ways you can increase your email open rates & click through rates.

Tip 1 — Keep it simple

There’s nothing that screams promotional email more than fancy HTML templates with flashy banners and bright colors everywhere.

Whilst these can be nice from time to time, try to keep some of your emails simple and written in plain text.

Not only will this make people more likely to read them because they don’t instantly feel like they’re being sold to. But it can also help to keep you out of the spam filters! 

Tip 2 — Experiment with your subject lines

One of the biggest factors that will determine the open rates of your email is your subject line. Be sure to experiment with this and test lots of different styles to see what is most effective. Try sending emails with and without the recipients first name, maybe even try injecting some curiosity into the subject line. Whatever you do, it’s important to monitor the results of these emails over time so you can get an idea of what’s working and what isn’t.

Tip 3 — Always check the formatting of your emails

Be sure to always test your emails before sending them and check they display well on both mobile and laptop devices.

People aren’t short on emails to choose from so if your emails are difficult to read or don’t display correctly, don’t expect the readers to stick around.

Try experimenting with different fonts and font sizes to find what works best in terms of readability.

Tip 4 — Make it fun and easy to read

People tend to scan emails like they do most things these days so it’s important to make sure your email flows and is easy to read.

Avoid long-sentences where possible and consider that setntences will appear much longer on mobile than laptop due to the smaller screen size.

Tip 5 — Don’t be afraid to use your personality

There’s nothing that will kill your open rates more than dull, boring emails.

Once you have a reputation for being dull and boring, it’s hard to break out of that!

Does that mean you need to be crazy and eccentric??

Absolutely not! But just inject some personality in your emails and most importantly, make it human. People don’t like to feel like they’re being lectured by a robot.

Tip 6 — Add personalisation wherever possible

Personalisation is key to improving click-through and open rates. 

Emails that start with “hey guys” tend to feel very generic and cold. If you collect the first name from your leads be sure to use this in your emails as it will go a long way to making it feel more personal.

Regardless of how big your email list is, try to write your emails as if they were speaking to one person only! You’ll get a much more positive response that way.

Tip 7 — Have a strong call to action (CTA)

Make sure you have a clear call to action in your emails.

This doesn’t mean you always need to be selling to your audience (please don’t do this!) but you might want to drive customers to a recent blog post, or podcast for example. This will help keep you and your brand front of mind and may even help to drive additional sales!

Oh, and make it enticing too!

Let people know why they should click and what awesome things they can look forward to on the other side!

Tip 8 — Don’t go too crazy with the CTA’s though

Option paralysis is a very real thing!

If you give people too many options, they will usually just leave without taking any.

If you have a lot of things to tell your potential customers about, try breaking it down into multiple different emails.

Try to keep each email as specific as possible and focused on one or two CTA’s at most.

Tip 9 — Use scarcity & urgency (when it’s real)

If you’re running a sale or have a limited number of tickets available for an event, be sure to mention this in your emails!

Scarcity and urgency are powerful triggers in getting people to take action!

Tip 10 — Test your sending times

Experiment with sending your emails at different times of day.

You might find that some times of day get a high open rate but low click through rate, whereas others might have the opposite.

Play about with this and see what works for you and your audience.

Tip 11 — Follow up with the people who didn’t open

Depending on which email auto-responder or CRM system you use, you may have the ability to tag people who didn’t open an email. 

Creating an automated follow up email later in the day or the following day to the people who didn’t read the original email can be a great way to increase visibility and overall results.

Tip 12 — Use segmentation wherever possible

A lot of businesses will have different customer avatars or maybe just customers that fall into 2 or 3 different buckets/categories.

Wherever possible, try to tag your audience and segment your emails to each bucket so they’re as relevant as possible to the recipient.

Tip 13 — Keep you list clean

If you have people on your list that haven’t opened an email from you in several months, it may be time to remove them.

Your average open rate can actually damage your long-term email deliverability so be sure to keep an eye on this over time.

If you have emails that are constantly bouncing or not getting through to the sender, be sure to remove these from your list.

Tip 14 — Don’t underestimate the P.S

Most people have a tendency of scrolling straight to the bottom of an email or article to get the low-down (you may have even done it with this blog post)

For that reason,  be sure to occasionally include a P.S sign off in your emails with a nice juicy call to action for anybody who might have missed it in the email body.