You’ve been doing quite right on sending your newsletters regularly. You’ve been diligent on maintaining the pace, and you feel fulfilled about it. That’s great. However, have you looked at how many people opened your emails? As mentioned before, analytics is quite essential. With this said, knowing if your open rate is performing well is quite crucial.

Let’s put it this way if you send hundreds of emails per year, but no one reads it and worse not even try to open it, wouldn’t that be such a waste of effort? Not to mention, your lead generation would undoubtedly plunge into oblivion if that happens. This is why maintaining a reasonable open rate is very important.

What is open rate anyway? To simply put, it is the percentage of contacts that opened the email you sent. Wow, you can measure that? It sounds like someone’s stalking them, is it? Well, it’s not anything like that. If you are using a CRM such as Ontraport, which measures the statistics of your email delivery through integrated tracking algorithms, you would be able to attain the data you need to have.

The open rate, in particular, is quite crucial because it would give you the following outcome:

• Learn which people are active on your list
  If you filtered out the people who have been opening your emails through your Open Rate data, you would be able to do your clean up and analyse which contact needs to be retained, or removed. This can also give you an idea which contacts are useful to chase or follow up for nurture emails.
• Learn which email is most appealing for them
  A most common habit for people when reading an email is looking at the subject line and who sent it. Given you have established your brand and name with your contact, some would not bother opening it if the email looks suspicious and or transactional. So if you will compare your emails with each other, the open rate can help you determine which email appeals to them the most. Reusing best practices can be an excellent strategy to do especially, maintaining loyal clients.
• Learn which campaign works best
  Similar to what was mentioned above, having a high open-rate can lead to more prospects and clients. Open rate is one factor that can determine if the approach you did on your campaign was practical.

• Learn your contact’s behaviour.
  If you would sum up the above mentions, this boils down to the behaviour of your contacts. If the contact didn’t open the email, there is a reason why. You would need to dig in further to the cause of this. Having this data could eventually lead you to more golden nuggets to attain your ultimate goal per campaign.

That seems to be quite a few considering such a simple number, isn’t it? Hold on to your seats because we’re not done yet. Let’s say some people did open your email, but the question is, is the percentage good enough? Now that’s a bit deeper than just looking at the numbers. A considerable “good” open rate depends on the industry as well. Yes, saw it right! Seems too troublesome? Fear not, we got you covered! Below are the open rates that are considered by some marketing leaders as a “good” to “great” percentage.

Now that you have your cheat sheet from us, it’s time for you to jump to the next level. As I said before, numbers just guide what you need to do next. In this case, you need to compare now if your current average open rate is meeting the criteria. 

What if yours didn’t reach the right percentage? What can you do next to increase it? The next items below are a few recommendations I can give to improve your numbers.

1. Do a monthly clean up of contacts
   You must be wondering, what does the number of contacts get to do with this? Well, it has a huge impact. How? Let’s do a simple math solution. When we say percentage, it means it’s the proportion of something as a whole. If your open rate is only 10% out of 100 contacts, out of those contacts 40 are inactive, that’s already almost half of your total recipients. If you do your monthly clean up and remove those 40 contacts, that would give you a total of 16.67% open rate. That’s a 6.67% increase already. Wouldn’t be handy to know?
2. Improve your current campaign flow
   If your current campaign flow does not give you a reasonable rate, there may be something within the steps that turns your contacts off. I highly suggest reconsidering or recreating your campaign flow. On some occasions, a campaign was targeted; the results can vary. Some contacts may get disgruntled with your emails, and worse is reporting it as spam. This involves the fact when you send it, how you send it and whom you send it to. So studying your overall campaign flow may need to be done.
3. Target the correct audience
   In connection with the above mentioned, some marketer’s lousy habit is data mining insignificant contacts. People tend to buy services on other people to send them a huge list of emails. That will be awesome if those contacts are the right contacts you need. The common mistake is using those contacts that are not the correct target of your campaign or product. Not everyone is equal in taste and preference. You would have to think twice before doing such practices. One thing you would avoid is making people tag your newsletters as phishing emails.
4. Improve your subject line
   And here we are again with subject lines. I cannot reiterate enough how important this is. To open a closed door, you need the “RIGHT” key. And ladies and gentlemen, your subject line should be that key. Make sense?
5. Check your spam rate per email
   All right, this seems to be new to you, but how does this have any connection? Well for starters, if your email has a significant spam rate, CRMs like Ontraport would not send it through. And let’s say it was sent, your next problem is the email server security system. If the email looks suspicious at first glance, it would either automatically block it or send it to the Spam box. Hence, it will never get open, probably forever.

So to sum it up, having a high open-rate will always give you more window of opportunities to get more leads and possibly higher sales. As a marketer, you would need to consider how your audience behaves and metrics like this matters.

For more assistance and clarification, feel free to message us and let’s talk about how we can work together to improve your scores. You can check our client’s testimonials on how we have helped them achieve their goals.