BtoB Marketing

Email marketing would be so much more rewarding if people actually opened my emails!

Sound familiar? As marketers rely more and more on email to deliver a brand’s message and sell products, getting recipients to open their email once it’s been delivered has become critical to the success of any campaign. Regardless of how clever the creative and how well the email is designed, unless people open your email, it’s as if it was never sent at all and all of the time you invested was wasted energy. 

What is an open rate? It’s the percentage of delivered emails that recipients open. Below are a few tips you can use to increase this critical metric: 

Your list: If you consistently send to an in-house opt-in list, be sure to practice list hygiene.

• Segment the email addresses for people who have not opened your email in 90 days and ask them to update their profiles. This will either prompt them to opt-out or specify what type of information they want to receive from you.
• Only send emails that are relevant to the type of information the recipient has opted-in to.
• Remove all email addresses that have never opened your emails. Removing these people may decrease the size of your database, but will leave you with a more responsive list.

Open rates are not 100% accurate: Different email clients (Outlook vs. Gmail) and email formats (Text vs. HTML) will affect your open rate. Here are some of the discrepancies you should be aware of:

• Many email service providers (ESPs) place an invisible pixel in each HTML email and when this pixel is displayed, it reports back to the ESP that the email was opened. This poses a problem for text only emails because they don’t include this pixel. Although people may be reading the text email, they are not being counted.
• Microsoft Outlook counts an open in the preview pane (reader does not have to actually double click and open)
• Web email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) actually has to be opened to count as an open. Additionally, email clients usually have image blocking on default. If recipients view your emails in Gmail but don’t “download images,” it does not count as an open

Your Subject line and “from” field: Your subject line and “from” field is the first thing your recipient sees. Therefore it’s extremely important to make them relevant:

 From Field:

• Your “from” field should be a name your recipient will recognize and trust, such as the company name or maybe the company’s CEO’s name.
• Keep the “from” field consistent for specific types of email communications (i.e. survey vs. sales email vs. customer service email, etc.)

 Subject line:

• Make sure your subject line is relevant to the type of information they’ve opted-in to.
• Craft your subject line to peak their interest – don’t be vague
• Avoid words that commonly get flagged as spam in your subject line.
• Be honest – do not try to “trick” your recipient into opening your email
• When possible, use a mail merge (such as their name, etc.) in the subject line
• Test, test, test – whenever you send out an email, split your list segment in two and test two different subject lines (short vs. long, mail merge vs. no mail merge, etc.)
• If your testing subject lines, be sure to go back and analyze your results

Date and time your email is sent

You will often hear people say that either Tuesday or Thursday is the best day to send a marketing email because studies show emails sent on these days receive the highest open rates. I would advise you to take this information with a large grain of salt. If everyone followed this advice, it would mean seriously overcrowded inboxes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Do you really want to add to this clutter?

The only way to find out when your subscribers are most likely to read your emails is to perform your own tests to see which day performs better. Start off by testing days of the week and once you’ve identified a trend start testing the time of day.