Hi! Welcome to Snovio!
In this video we are going to discuss the most effective tips
for increasing your email open rate.
Whether your campaign is doing great or not heavily depends on your email open rate
- if no one opens your emails, then you cannot make a profit from your campaigns.
So, what is a good email open rate?
How do you measure the success of your email campaigns?
And how can you increase your email open rate?
Generally, the email open rate is calculated by taking the number
of people who open the email
and dividing it by the number of emails sent that did not bounce.
For example, if you send 110 emails,
10 of them bounce, 20 are opened, your email open rate is 20%.
Once you calculate your email open rate,
it’s important to analyze whether it is good.
That depends on your industry and country.
The average open rate across all industries is 21%.
However the average rate should not be your definitive benchmark.
For example, for non-profit organizations, it’s 25%,
while for the automotive and aerospace industries, it’s only 12,6%.
One of the best markers
you can take into consideration when analyzing your email open rate
is the performance of your previous campaigns:
look at your campaigns you’ve sent over recent months,
outline your email opens in a graph, and add other metrics
like click-through rate and unsubscribes
for each campaign for a more in-depth look into your performance.
By combining these two indicators - the average industry open rate
and the past performance
- you can fairly judge your current email open rate and work on increasing it.
So how can you increase your open rate?
By following these 9 best practices:
Qualify your email lists
The main and the most obvious advice for boosting your email open rate
is to only send emails to people who are likely to be interested.
To qualify your leads, pay attention to their source
like whether the lead has subscribed to your content through a form
or was collected for cold outreach
to better define the lead’s stage in the pipeline.
Your target is to build a list of contacts that actively engage with your content,
so they must fit your ideal customer profile as closely as possible
and receive the content relevant to their stage that they’ll want to open.
Segment your lists
Segmentation is basically grouping your leads based on common interests,
needs, and preferences.
The main purpose of customer segmentation is to personalize messages so you can
target and sell to these segments better.
You can divide your lead base based on:
Their geographical position like country, region, state, city.
Demographic data like sex, age, occupation, etc.
Customer behavioral factors like attitude towards an issue,
product/service usage rate, performance, and engagement.
And psychography, that is the lead’s personal activities, interests,
and opinions aka customer AIOs.
At Snov.io we segment our audience by location
to provide content in the customer’s native language as well as edit our approach
according to cultural differences.
And we’re always in their inbox at the right time
thanks to time-zone relevant schedules.
This helped us analyze our country-specific campaigns better: for example,
we saw that our average open rate in Brazil is 50% higher than in America.
Plus, this allowed us to create country-specific improvements.
We were able to create country-specific A/B tests
and grow and sometimes even double
the open rate of individual campaign emails for Brazil.
Use a personal sender name
Sender name is the second most important part of the email preview
besides the subject line, it plays a huge role in your open rate.
It’s your first opportunity to build trust with the lead -
an email with a personal sender name looks more human and important
and is more likely to be opened.
This is confirmed by a LinkedIn poll we recently ran
You can use your first name and last name
or your name plus company name: for example Kseniia from Snov.io.
And never use your email address as a sender name.
There’s few things that look spammier than that.
Create a catchy subject line
Your subject line should work like a hook that catched your recipients` attention.
It should indicate strong value or
trigger curiosity - either will push your recipients to open the email.
Here are some things you need to consider while working on a converting subject line:
Optimize your subject line for mobile devices -
it should be seen on a small screen.
Bear in mind your recipients will see only 4 to 5 words.
Add odd numbers to your subject lines.
Numerals are easy attention-grabbers.
But you may wonder - why is it better to use odd numbers rather than even?
Simply because our minds subconsciously group numbers,
and even numbers are easier to ignore as they are already symmetrical.
Odd numbers however hold our attention for just a little bit longer.
This small psychological trick can help you occupy
a bit more time in your recipient’s mind.
Use emotional power words.
As you may guess from the name,
these power words trigger an emotional reaction in your recipients,
making them excited to see what’s inside the email.
You can use power words to evoke all kinds of emotions:
trust, fear, surprise, sadness disgust, anger, anticipation.
You can find more power words by checking our article in the video description.
There you’ll also find a downloadable list.
Keep your subject lines short.
This doesn’t mean long subject lines don’t work - they absolutely do.
However, the longer it takes to read the subject line -
the less likely your lead will have attention to do it.
As we’ve mentioned, more and more people check their mail on their phone,
meaning the long subject lines get cut, leaving the lead guessing.
We always recommend A/B testing your subject lines
to see what works best with your audience -
both in terms of the length and the content.
Most email senders allow to A/B test your emails, and Snov.io does too.
That’s what we did in our own campaign -
the shortest subject line got about 25% more opens than the longest one.
Ask questions in your subject lines.
Questions evoke the need for an answer,
especially if it’s a question your lead may have been wondering about themselves.
For example, why do humans exist?...
Use meaningful preheader text.
Preheader text is often underrated.
However, it can also be used to intrigue recipients
and engage them to open the email.
If your sender allows for custom preheader text,
try using it as a logical continuation of your subject line.
Get personal.
“An offer for you”,“Limited-time offer”, “Don’t miss your chance” -
these subject line cliches should be working,
but they miss one important element - a personal touch.
Add personalization that goes beyond the person’s name and the company name -
and your recipient’s will be pleasantly surprised.
Choose the right timing.
The low open rate can be explained simply by the wrong timing.
Send your emails when your targeted audience is active at most -
segmenting by location should help you.
Keep an eye on your sender reputation
Whether your emails will be opened or not
also depends where your email will land - the inbox, or the spam.
It all depends on your sender reputation.
In our guide on how to improve your sender reputation you will find out
what a good sender reputation is and how to maintain it.
You will find it in the top right corner
and the link to it in the video description.
Clean up inactive recipients.
Passive contacts inevitably damage your deliverability
so remove them from your list.
Try using a list cleaning service
or do it manually by filtering them by engagement or email status.
If you like a challenge, you can try winning these inactive recipients back.
If you haven’t seen any reaction from a contact,
try sending a win-back email sequence to re-engage them.
If you still don’t see any reaction from them,
don’t hesitate to erase them from your list.
Email open rate is one of the most important
metrics for analyzing your campaign,
and growing it directly affects your conversion rate.
We hope these tips help you create truly engaging campaigns.
But if you’re having a hard time landing in the inbox in the first place,
make sure to check out our series on spam filters
and how to deal with them while growing your outreach.
As always, like, subscribe and hit the notification bell
to stay tuned on our latest sales and marketing growth guides.
See you!