I’m officially calling August the month of Open Rates!
Yes! Yes! YES!
What makes me qualified to declare a whole month dedicated to one small part of email strategy?
I declared it. So it is so.
Marketing secret UNLOCKED.
Since open rates are the first metric most people look at on how their audience is engaging with their brand, we’re gonna go for it all month long.
4 parts to increasing your open rates.
These aren’t gimmicks (well, most of them aren’t.) 😉
These are methods I have tested with other brands and seen with my own eyeballs, their success.
So here’s what we’ll be covering this month:
1. What open rates really mean for your overall strategy.
2. How to boost your open rates on the next email you send.
3. Write a subject line that will make your subscribers open your emails.
4. This one change has been tested and proven to DRAMATICALLY increase open rates.
WEEK 1: WHAT OPEN RATES REALLY MEAN ABOUT YOUR OVERALL STRATEGY
BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!?!?!?
Let’s break it down.
The open rate on your email is calculated by taking the number of people you sent your emails to divided by the unique number of contacts who opened your email.
OPEN RATE = # CONTACTS SENT THE EMAIL/# OF UNIQUE OPENS
So what does that mean for your email?
It means you put A LOT of hard work into creating a content/offer rich email with lots of pretty words and graphics. And guess how many people opened it? Some of them. Very specific, no?
So what’s a good open rate on an email?
You’re gonna hate this answer. Ready?
It depends.
Averages range across industries.
From what I see in email, a HEY-I-AM-KIND-OF-KILLING-THIS-EMAIL-THING rate is over 20%.
But that can always be improved on.
An open rate that makes me raise a couple of eyebrows and wonder what you’re doing with your email program is anything under 10%.
WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR OPEN RATES?
When an email program isn’t performing as well as people hope, the first thing they look at is the open rate.
Why? Well, it’s the most readily available metric for email.
We also make the assumption that the more people who open our emails, the more likely we are to make a sale. (More on that assumption in a later post).
So there tends to be reactive approach to dwindling marketing efforts on this ONE metric.
Is it a useful piece of info?
For sure.
Is it going to be a game changer for your email marketing if opens increase?
Yes, but not the immediate bump that most people hope for.
SO WHAT DOES AN OPEN RATE MEAN ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE?
Let’s say you have a list of about 5,000 (aspirational for some of you, I know).
Your average open rate is somewhere around 15%.
That means for every email you are sending out, 750 people are opening.
The next week (or a few days or months later), you send out your next email.
Again, 15% open rate and 750 open.
That means 4,250 people did not read your emails.
That can be very discouraging for some people.
BUT! There is hope!
That also means that 4,250 did not see the content in your last email.
Awesome, right!?
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.
.
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Ha. Yes, let explain.
That means that you do not have to re-invent the wheel for every email you send out.
SUPER EMAIL HACK ALERT
You can send the SAME email out AGAIN with a different subject line and maybe a few copy tweaks here or there.
Yes, the same people who read your first email may open the next one again. BUT they also may have not read everything in the first email.
IS YOUR MIND BLOWN!?
It should be.
RECYCLE YOUR EMAILS! It’s good for the earth…or something.
DOES A HIGHER OPEN RATE MORE PEOPLE ARE READING YOUR EMAILS?
Not necessarily. There is a lot that goes into the percentage of people who open your emails.
We’re gonna take a look at that next week.