One of the most important metric in any email campaign is the number of recipients who have opened the email. The open rate is the ratio of the number of recipients who opened or read the mail to the number of recipients the email campaign was sent to. The recipient open or read is tracked by embedding a single pixel image in the message, which when opened (by image enabled email clients either manual or automatic) is recorded in the email server as an open. There are other indirect techniques as well.
How to make your recipients open the message, when they see the mail in their inbox?
1. Improve your email open rates
SUBJECT LINES
Many factors affect how an email is viewed such as frequency, sender, the nature of the message, third party
campaigns to readers etc. Yet one of the chief factors that contribute to open rates is subject lines.
Short, expressive, and something that gives the reader a reason to explore the message makes a good
subject line. More often than not, attempts to stand out in the inbox with loud or cheesy phrases gets the
emails to be ignored.
Some good practices:
1. Localization helps. Apart from personalizing subject lines such as including recipient’s first or last name,
localization such as including city name helps.
2. When working with promotional mails one should keep the subject line straightforward, avoid splashy
promotional phrases, CAPS, or exclamation marks in your subject lines.
3. Test your subject lines. Not all subject lines will work for your campaigns, so split-test your campaign with
multiple subject lines to see what appeals to your recipients.
A good way to test is to make a list of all the people who opened an email from you in the last 85 days and
divide it in two. Using the same email content for both groups, send one subject line to the first group and a
second, different subject line to the other group. Then compare open and click-through rates to see which
subject line performed best. One subject line could be more generic and the second could be more engaging.
See which approach works best for your audience and pattern your future subject lines after that one (you
can work with multiple subject lines / groups).
5. Segment your list and tailor your subject lines accordingly. If you have a portion of your subscriber file that
has never responded to “free shipping” in a subject line, continuing to send them free-shipping offers is
probably an exercise in futility. Try sending them a brand-oriented subject line instead. Or you may want to
limit promotional subject lines to prospects or customers you’re trying to reactivate.