Email Open Rate Tips: 3 Easy Fixes

by    Ron Gomez

Email open rates are the measures used by bulk email marketers to know if their bulk email marketing campaigns are really going anywhere. The measure works by embedding a tag in a bulk email mailer, which corresponds to an image. When this image is clicked on, or is opened by default, or the user allows a download of images to view the mail, the server that contains this message registers a hit indicating that the user did open this mail. There is some debate in the online world of whether this is really a good measure to analyze effectiveness. The reason for this is that some email clients block out images and this means that the mailer doesn’t receive a fair chance in front of the customer. On the other hand, some email clients do not block images and this means that the customer could just be scanning through his or her mailbox and not really reading a mail. Nevertheless, most email marketers suffer from low rates it is their continuous endeavor to improve email open rates.

The first step to doing this is to correct the first bit of text that a recipient sees when the mail arrives in one’s inbox – the subject line. Most email marketers and spammers alike are quite silly when it comes to writing subject lines and will write lines that make them susceptible to spam filters. To try and overcome this, people sometimes write lines like “you owe me money.” This is even more ridiculous. The best subject line is one that is honest. One that says, in a newsreel format, that your company now sells the following product.

The next step to ensure better email open rates and to improve email open rates is to ensure that your mail makes it into an inbox in the first place. This can be done by ensure that your email is not trapped in a spam filter. Spam filters work by finding many occurrences of a suspicious word or phrase set in a mail. Again, this comes down to some sensible, professional writing where you do not repeat words continuously as has become the standard for web writing. Write as you would talk.

The final step is to get your prospective customers to actually opt in to receive updates. If you are sending unsolicited mail like a spammer would, there is no need to expect the recipients to ever open that mail. This is necessary to get any kind of response in your email open rates.

It is a long journey before you can get a hundred percent open rate and an even longer journey to improving email open rates in general but you need to make a start immediately so that the effects can be seen. There is a lot of tweaking to mailer content that happens subsequent to this exercise so you must draw correct inferences from the data that you acquire. You must also think just like your target market to know what attracts them.