How to Boost Your Email Open Rates February 28, 2018, | Posted by Erin

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As experts in the field of email marketing--and in digital advertising in general--we at Site Impact are constantly working to get the best information possible, to update everything we know about how to get better results and higher revenues for our clients. The biggest, broadest goal of email marketing is to get people to open and read the email; while, of course, it’s important that those who read the email go on to buy a product, they aren’t going to buy if they don’t read first. So the prime importance in all email efforts will always be increasing open rates--and at Site Impact, we’ve identified several ways to make that happen.

It may seem strange to think that there is a science to crafting an optimized email marketing campaign, but where things are done in high quantity, there is always data; and where there is data, there is the opportunity to do things scientifically. The best way to boost your email open rates is to look at what the data say. For example, did you know that emails sent on Tuesdays and Fridays have almost twice the chance of being opened as emails sent on Saturdays? That fact might surprise you until you think about how people engage with their emails: increasingly, consumers open emails on their devices--and on the go, in between doing other things. The work week is a better time to send messages, because people are more likely to be looking. During the weekends, everyone wants to wind down and ignore the larger world in favor of friends and families; they’re more likely to delete without opening, skimming for emails that aren’t relevant to what they’re doing that day, or even to just ignore their email altogether.

We at Site Impact know from experience and data that there are not just days, but times of day that will improve the chance of your email being opened. Data from around the world suggests that 3pm--local time, obviously--is the peak hour for email opens. In general, subscribers are more likely to open emails after 12 pm; and it’s also important to know that most emails are opened within an hour of delivery (thanks to mobile email access), and that after 24 hours, any given email has a less than 1% chance of being opened. So targeting your deliveries for the time when the most people on your list are going to be likely to look at them is an easy--but hugely impactful--way to increase open rates.

 

Another important factor to chase down is subject lines. As consumers become more demanding of effective and efficient email marketing--their time is their money, after all--subject lines become more and more important. Most people decide very, very quickly based on the subject line whether or not they’re going to open the email you’ve sent--so that first impression has to be strong. Personalization can provide a major boost to open rates, and automation makes it really easy to include first, or even first and last names, to an email. Time sensitive language in the subject line also increases open rates; but the word “free” seems to have an almost opposite effect. Of course, making every email an urgent one will dissipate that effect--so make sure to use that language wisely. Perhaps most interesting is the recent finding that emails with subject lines between 6 and 10 words total had a higher open rate than ones with more or less than that range. If this all seems like way more depth than your brand is willing to go into in order to engage with customers through email marketing, there is good news: experts at Site Impact make it a point to keep up to date on the cutting edge of the data, the tech, and the trends in email marketing, which means that we already know how to optimize your campaigns. Contact us (954-982-7900/info@siteimpact.com) today to find out what we can do for you.