How To Increase Your Open Rates (They're Wrong But…)

The Email Marketing Show

07-12-2022 • 37 mins

Want to know how to increase the open rate of your emails? We talked about open rates before. And you'll probably already know that we believe they're wrong.

But regardless of what the data says (and whether it's right or wrong), you still want people to open your emails.

So how do you do that?

Here you go.

You're welcome!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(0:11) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.

(5:23) Why your open rates are wrong.

(10:12) Your reputation is what gets people to open your emails.

(15:00) Create compound curiosity and use open loops.

(18:54) Write shorter emails.

(20:15) Be regular and become a habit in someone's life.

(25:48) Remove benefits from your subject lines.

(28:41) Build a list of people who want to read your emails.

(31:12) Vary the lenght of your subject lines and break patterns.

(35:36) Subject line of the week.

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Why your open rates are wrong

We’ve been talking for years about the fact that open rates are wrong, and now we're telling you how to improve them? Don't worry - we haven’t changed our minds. Generally speaking, open rates are wrong - they might be higher or lower than whatever number you see in your email marketing platform. It's probably lower, but it's hard to tell.


And you certainly should never make any decisions at the back of an individual subscriber opening (or not opening) an email. Because the technology used to track open rates is flawed. Some platforms (like Apple) tend to mark all emails as open and others (like Android) mark them all as unopened. So you can't trust that number.


But what you can do is look at the overarching number of emails sent over a certain period of time and work out whether the open rate was up or down relative to the previous day. Open rates are consistently inaccurate, but they're incorrect relative to one another.


Having said that, if you notice your open rates have gone up over the last few months, it may not mean you're doing something brilliantly. It could be because everyone's open rates have gone up in the reporting over the past few months. This is simply a change in the number displayed by your email platform - it doesn't mean more people are opening your emails.


But while we don't want to pay too much attention to that number, we do need people to open our emails. So let's talk about the strategies to your subscribers to do just that, regardless of what your open rates say.


Your reputation is what gets people to open your emails

The first thing we want you to realise is that what gets your emails opened is not your subject line – it’s your reputation. And the evidence of that is in the fact that if you get an email from a friend or family, you’ll open it – regardless of what’s in the subject line (or even if that’s empty). But if the email comes from a source that doesn’t sound trustworthy or beneficial to you, you'll leave it (and might even hit...