Increase your email open rate with this one (simple) step
As a marketer, trying to get emails opened is a very large part of what I do for my clients. At first, you might assume it comes down to writing lots of ‘good stuff’ that gets people’s attention. And yes that is true. But there are a lot of technical things that can help you to increase your email open rate.
If you have an email list – I’m betting the chances are you’ve never cleaned it? Not properly anyway.
So why is it important to clean your email list? I mean we’ve got enough to do already right? Well, I’m going to tell you exactly why you MUST clean your list, and do it regularly so that you can increase your email open rate.
Why you need to clean your email list
Often, for no reason you can fathom, your email will hit someone’s spam box when they first sign up. If they never see it or open it, your email will continue to go into their spam.
Short of knocking on their door and letting them know that they are missing out (which might come across as a bit desperate) they are never going to look at it – often spam folders are automatically emptied anyway.
When you are being labelled as spam it’s not looking good for you.
The email providers look at the rating of your email address when deciding whether or not to send your email to spam. And this includes looking at your engagement. If your email address is not getting good opens (engagement) then it starts to look a bit pants and your emails will end up in a vicious cycle of not being seen.
That’s NOT what you want. So apart from doing all you can to hit your audience’s inbox the first time around, the biggest and easiest thing you can do right now is clean your email list to increase your engagement rate, and show those email providers just how amazing and relevant you are.
Setting up a segment for your ‘unopeners’ audience to clean your email list
Before you do this you need to consider whether you want to set up a win-back type sequence BEORE cleaning your list. A win-back sequence is a way of getting some engagement from people that HAVE previously engaged with or bought from you, but perhaps it was some time ago now.
So if you are a product-based business you might email an offer to previous purchasers who have stopped opening emails. This step is totally personal and up to you.
To set up an ‘unopeners’ segment
Decide on the ‘unopened’ period of time. How often you email people will determine this. For example. I send an email out every week. If I set my time period to ‘people who haven’t opened emails in the last 4 months’ then that means they haven’t opened the last 16 emails at least. (that doesn’t even include any campaign emails I may have been sending). If they aren’t opening emails I think it’s safe to say either they don’t see them, or they are totally tuning me out. All they are doing now is harming my engagement rating.
Make sure you include a rule that says ‘has been on your email list for at least the same amount of time.’ You don’t want people who are new to your list ending up in there because they haven’t opened an email yet.
Once you’ve set this segment up, then it should auto-populate every day.
Decide on how often you are going to ‘clear’ those people. I think quarterly is a good time. You might want to do it every 6 months.
Send those people who have populated into that segment an email to give them one ‘last chance’ to engage. Here is an example email which you can re-use and edit as you need to.
Example Email
Subject: (first name) do you still want to hear from us? 🤔 No problem just let us know...
Hey (first name)
We've noticed that you've not opened any emails for a while now.
And that's fine! We absolutely don't want to clog up your inbox with unwanted emails.
Want to unsubscribe?
If you want to unsubscribe then just hit the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email.
Want to stay on the list?
If you opened this email and want to stay on the list to continue to get our weekly advice and tips about all things digital marketing then you don't need to do anything. 😍
If you haven't opened this email within the next 7 days then we will take you off the mailing list but you can re-subscribe at any time by heading to our website www.sammilburndigitalmarketing.com
Have a brilliant week!
As you can see it puts the ball in their court. If they open the email then it will immediately take them OUT of your ‘unopeners’ segment.
Next - schedule yourself a task for 7 days time to go back into your email marketing software and unsubscribe the people who were sent the email but never opened it.
Next -sit back and watch the open rate of your next email increase because you got rid of all that dead wood!
There are lots of other things you can do to improve your open rate (from the day someone signs up!)
That’s where I come in. If you want some help with your email marketing – maybe a power hour? Or some one-off project work to get your emails all tidied up and some advice on what you could be doing better? Then you can book a free discovery call here to see how we can work together.
