SlowOpenRatesThe opening rate, together with the click rate, is one of the classic KPIs in email marketing and provides information about the performance of your strategy over time. However, you will always have the greatest success in email marketing if you offer relevant content with added value and send the content as specifically as possible. So, if you want to see an improvement in open rate quickly, try these simple tricks:

Optimize the subject line of your email – The subject line is crucial for the reader opening the email and ideally also reading it. Your subject line should be concise and intriguing. In addition, the reader should identify with the content and recognize added value. Keep it short so that the topic can be understood immediately and convince the recipient with no more than twenty exciting characters.

Use a real person as the sender – After all, who likes to receive emails from an office@ address or even no-reply@? Your customer wants to identify you as a company and communicate with you, ideally even recognize the name, so use this knowledge to your advantage! The sender can be personalized with a variable database field, so that each recipient is written to by their actual contact person, and the open rate of your email will go up.

Send at the right time – The day of the week and the time you send your email marketing campaign are more important than you think – as is the frequency of your emails. On average, most emails are opened at 8am, with a higher CTR occurring at 5pm. However, it also depends on your customers and the products and services you offer them. The best time to reach B2B customers is from Tuesday to Thursday, early in the morning. Friday and Saturday afternoons as well as Sunday mornings are considered good times for end customers. Depending on the software used, there are also tools that support shipping to different time zones. In fact, there's a lot of wiggle room, and you're bound to do well if you use trial and error to gauge your target audience's reachability. The best thing to do is to observe your own statistics and the activities of other competitors and then draw your own conclusions. This also applies to your sending frequency. In general, it is advisable to send no more than one email per week in B2C and no less than once a month in B2B.

Use the pre-header – Often the email pre-header is underused, although it can really help to get more opens. Here, and in the subject line, you could provide content that will persuade your recipients to open your email by giving your readers a taste of what to expect. The preview line in the inbox reveals something about your exciting offer, your added value, and creates curiosity. The use of the pre-header also helps to stand out in crowded inboxes. Try using emojis when it makes sense or address your recipients by name or location. You have 50 to 130 characters (recipient display varies by device) to accommodate your impactful call-to-action.

Run A/B tests – You can optimize the open rate for a single mailing by A/B testing on the subject line, mailing timing, pre-header, or sender. Be sure to examine only one aspect per test to be able to draw logical conclusions. Segment your mailing list into three groups. Two of them receive the respective variant A or B. Then it can be automatically set that the third segmentation, with the largest amount of data, receives the winning variant. Make sure that you have enough newsletter recipients and that the A/B testing groups are not too small. Of course, A/B testing can also be used to examine CTAs and optimize the click rate.

By MediaBUZZ