Email is one of the most effective direct channels of communication with your customers. Unfortunately, it also has the downfall of being completely invalidated if your recipients never open the message! This makes the point of the “open rate” the single most critical moment in any eCommerce email campaign.
There’s no real silver bullet to email marketing and you can only hope to increase your open rate by using smarter practices for coordinated email messaging. We can test and should test our email subject lines and spam rates but at the end of the day every customer is different and will perceive your message in a different way. Let’s take a look at 3 proven ways to help increase your email’s appeal and what can be done to help prompt a higher rate of opens with each message you send:
- Segmentize and personalize your lists!
This cannot be overstated and is the single most important and effective thing you can do for increasing opens. The premise is that your customers are more willing to open emails that have content they know will be appealing to them. Sending general emails to the masses lowers this appeal and conditions your recipients to ignore your emails. On the flipside, sending targeted emails that are specific in content and focus to recipients who will appreciate them subsequently boosts the value of your email and prompts opens more often. Read more about email segmentation from our blog post “10 Ways to Segment eMails for Commerce.” 
- Format for mobile!
Did you know that roughly 3/4 of customers opening your email are doing it from a smartphone or tablet? If your email isn’t optimized for these devices and able to responsively resize itself, readers are going to be left with a garbled mess. Recipients will quickly lose incentive to open your emails if they know you’re not optimizing for mobile, which can lead to a lower open rate or worse: unsubscribes. New York & Co. reported to the InternetRetailer.com that 70% of their Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails were opened on mobile devices with 45% of their online shoppers using mobile!
- Send at the right time!
Using a platform like Remarkety to gauge when the majority of your email opens take place can go a long way in helping you decide the best time to disseminate messages. Sending emails too early can leave them buried under other messages that come in after; sending them too late can give the perception of spam. Figure out when people are opening and send your messages when they’re most likely to give them the time of day.
BONUS: Write an engaging subject line!
The subject line is a sneak peek at the body of your email message—if it’s dull, uninformative or doesn’t make sense, it’s a signal to readers that your email isn’t worth their time. A personal, smart, witty, informative or appealing subject line has the inverse effect and gets a reader excited about what you might have to say.
You spend a lot of time crafting the perfect email message… but if it’s never opened, your work is all for nothing! It’s important to spend the same amount of time (or more) in preparing for your message to be opened. Paying attention to the peripheral details like who it’s going to, how it’s addressed, when it’s disseminating and more, can all help ensure an open.
Remarkety can help you track some of the most critical data regarding your open rates, to give you insight as to where emails might be falling flat. Once you have this data, you can take steps to act on it, improving your open rate and creating a domino effect towards visitors and conversions.
