What is the open rate?
Open rate is an email marketing metric used to calculate the percentage of opened emails in response to a marketing campaign. Analyzing your open rate can help you determine the effectiveness of your email subject lines and whether your emails landed in the recipient’s inbox or went to the spam folder.
How to calculate your open rate?
You can calculate your email open rate by dividing the number of emails opened by the total emails delivered and multiplying the result by 100.
Open rate = No. of emails opened/total emails delivered * 100
Emails delivered refer to the emails that reached your recipient’s inbox. Subtract the number of undelivered (bounced) emails from the total emails sent to determine the total emails delivered.
How to increase your open rate?
Here are some things you can do to improve your email open rate:
Refine your list
By refining, we mean doing a clean-up so you can remove inactive subscribers from your list. If some people haven’t checked your emails for the last six months, then it is best to remove them from the list. Sending them messages will not be advantageous because you will not get a true picture of how many people click and open your emails. So get cleaning.
Craft captivating subject lines
The email subject line is like the heading of an article. Many people decide whether to open or ignore an email just by reading the subject line. So, put some time and effort into crafting a subject line that will catch subscribers’ attention. For example, you could use emojis before or after the subject line text to make people notice your emails.
Target segments
By segmenting your email list, you create groups of like-minded subscribers. This lets you tailor your campaigns to individual groups rather than to the entire list. Segmented campaigns typically have a higher open rate than non-segmented ones as the emails are more aligned with the interests of recipients.
Test your campaigns
A/B testing is a process through which you can send two versions of the same email to a subset of your subscribers. The email that gets more hits can be sent to your entire list. This can help improve your open rate because you’ll be sending out emails that captivate the recipients.