Boost Email Open Rates: A Guide for Small Businesses

When you’re designing & creating email campaigns, you need to make sure that your users are also opening your emails. After all, there’s no point in spending time and effort producing engaging emails if no one opens them!

That’s why the email open rate is such an important metric. If your emails generate low open rates, the email content simply won’t reach your marketing campaign expectations. That’s why focusing on email open rates is essential.

However, crafting effective email marketing campaigns can be challenging for small companies. That’s why we’ve put together this quick guide to help you increase your email open rates. Read on to find out more.

What is an Email Open Rate and Why is it Important?

An email open rate is simply a way of calculating how many people look at your email. It looks at the percentage of people who opened an email message from the overall number of recipients in your email list.

When you’re running a business, you’ll come across dozens of different metrics and KPIs, from recruiter metrics to customer lifetime value or email bounce rates. One of the most important and easiest to understand is the email open rate.

This is a crucial metric if you’re evaluating the effectiveness of your average email campaign. Think about the number of different emails that come into your inbox, only to be instantly deleted or ignored forever. You need to be confident that your emails are not suffering the same fate, and email open rates are the best way to measure that.

By looking at your email open rates, you’ll be able to see what is working with regard to your subject lines, email content and sender reputation. Using this information, you’ll be able to improve your emails. Meaning that better open rates have a clear link to better conversion rates.

What is a Good Email Open Rate?

To understand email deliverability a bit better, you must first know what a good email open rate looks like. That is why comparing your open rates with those of competitors can help you define your need to prioritize email open rates.

As with all email marketing metrics, average open rates will vary drastically according to industry, location, and company size. Indeed, small companies often do well in this area. By having a closer relationship with their customers, they are less likely to have their emails ignored.

However, research shows that the average email open rate across industries is 36.5%. While you’ll need to find data specific to your industry or business context, you should know that any open rate over this value is generally okay.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you should be happy with an open rate around the average. If you truly want to level up your small business, you should strive to improve your email open rate.

How to Improve Your Email Open Rates

Now that you know what email open rates are and why they’re so important for small businesses, let’s explore practical tips to improve them.

Here is how to make your customers more likely to open your emails:

1. Hook Recipients With the Subject Line

The subject line is the first thing your recipients see. The most effective thing you can do to improve your email open rates is to work on your subject lines. Let’s say that you’re a customer receiving an email newsletter on choosing an ad network. Would you open this email if the subject line did not reference the email content?

Your subject line should be clear and relevant to email content at a glance. These subject lines should hook your subscribers in – making sure they stand out from the average email.

With a service like SiteGround Email Marketing, you can also use an AI Email Writer. Leveraging this cutting-edge technology, you can create attention-grabbing, relevant subject lines tailored to your audience’s interests. This will help you improve open rates, promoting higher subscriber engagement.

However, you should avoid overly promotional emails in your email marketing. Be sure that you’re always relevant and clear. At the same time, strive to use a conversational tone to make your email subscribers feel like they’re receiving messages from a trusted friend.

2. Stay On Top of Your Contact List

There’s no point sending out emails to an inactive subscriber, is there? This means that you must clean your subscriber list regularly to remove outdated email addresses. This will quickly reduce your bounce rates, as your emails will no longer be sent straight back from email service providers.

Make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe or update their preferences. This will reduce spam complaints and maintain a healthy, engaged subscriber list.

Of course, you’ll want to be careful not to inadvertently lose any genuine contacts. If you think an email address is outdated but you have other means of contact, you could use a voice call to update their email address.

Maintaining a clean list of contacts, you ensure that your subscribers have a genuine interest in your email content. This will significantly improve your email open rates and overall email marketing effectiveness.

3. Use a Segmented List

Besides removing outdated email addresses, you should also segment your email list. This is a great practice for improving any email marketing strategy but is especially important for elevating your open rates.

Segmenting your email list allows you to send targeted and relevant emails to specific groups of customers with certain demographics or interests. This increases the chances of your recipients to open your emails.

You can group your subscribers based on where recipients are in the customer lifecycle, like new subscribers, leads, or long-term customers. For example, users in recruitment could receive emails on high volume hiring, which they’ll be very likely to open.

Segment your list based on age, gender, income level, or education. Tailor content to demographic characteristics to ensure it resonates with each group.

Another way to segment your subscribers’ list is by geographic location. Send location-specific offers, event invitations, or updates relevant to where the recipient lives.

Also, you can segment your subscribers based on their lifestyle, values, interests, or personality traits. So, you can create content that aligns with the recipient’s values and interests.

Using these segmentation techniques, recipients will be more likely to open your emails, improving your email open rates.

4. Personalize Your Emails

Personalization is a great way to quickly engage your customers. It can be as simple as including the recipient’s name in the first line of your email content or in the subject line. This ensures that your email newsletters are conversational and friendly from the first time a customer sees them.

Email personalization can also take other forms. One example is sending targeted emails from a segmented list. You might also use very specific targeting, such as sending reminders to customers who have been browsing certain products.

Another example of personalization is customizing your email content based on the recipient’s preferences, behavior, or past interactions. This could include product recommendations or tailored messages.

You can also personalize emails by sending special offers or greetings on the recipient’s birthday or anniversary with your company. Celebratory emails nurture a personal connection and boost engagement.

Using these personalization tactics, you can show relevance and make your customers more likely to open your email.

5. Avoid Spam Filters

Emails ending up in the spam folder is probably the biggest pitfall in email marketing. Failing to avoid spam filters impacts all of your email marketing efforts and has a huge impact on email deliverability and open rates.

To avoid being seen as spam, you should carefully monitor the frequency of your emails. The ideal frequency will depend on your industry and customer profiles. Still, try not to send more than 3 emails a week. Make sure you send enough to be a recognizable sender but not so many to be marked as spam.

Avoiding spam can be made much easier by using automation to send emails. This means that certain events by the customer can trigger emails, like a welcome email for new subscribers. By engaging customers on these occasions, they’ll likely open your email and signal that you’re not sending spam.

6. Optimize Send Times

The timing of your email sends can greatly impact open rates. Sending emails when your subscribers are most likely to check their inboxes increases the chances of your email being opened. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, general trends can guide you.

To implement such optimization, look at your previous email campaigns to identify trends in open rates based on send times. That will help you define which time of day you get better open rates and target these times. You can also use automation to schedule your email sending in these specific time stamps.

Using send times optimization for your emails, you are making sure that your messages reach your audience when they are most likely to engage. As a result, you get to enjoy better email open rates.

7. Use A/B Testing to See What Works

A/B testing allows you to compare different versions of an email to see what works best. Ultimately, much of what will improve your open rates will depend on your specific business context. Every customer list is vastly different, and each customer within it will have different reasons for opening or ignoring emails.

That’s why you should conduct your own research to find out what works best for your business. A/B testing is a simple way to achieve this.

Begin by sending an email to your subscriber list before finding and analyzing the open rate for that email. Then, send an email with the same content to the same list a few weeks later. It’s crucial that you use the same topic, so an original pitchmaker email can’t suddenly be about marketing tips!

However, you should change a small part of the email: a great place to start is with the subject line. By trying out a different technique in this email, like including an emoji in the subject line, you’ll be able to compare the open rate of this email with the earlier one.

This A/B testing is a brilliant way to learn from your open rates and turn them into an action that can move your emails forward to be as engaging as possible.

Wrap Up

As a small business, you’re most likely constantly looking for ways to grow your business. Achieving this is possible with a strong grasp of your digital marketing strategy, a core component of which is your emails. Taking advantage of SiteGround Email Marketing you can create impactful email campaigns that build trust and engagement with your subscribers.

But ensuring recipients are actually opening your email marketing messages is crucial.

Follow the tips in our guide, like integrating personalization into your email subject lines and content or using A/B testing to determine your most effective email techniques. Implementing these strategies, monitoring the results, and making tweaks as you go will help you quickly boost your open rates. Start reaching out for more effective emails today!