Email Marketing Newsletters – Improve Your Open Rates

The average open rate for a mature email marketing newsletter campaign is between 20 and 30 percent. Although open rates can and will fluctuate depending on the type of business or the time of year or holiday season.

To make sure that you’re maximizing the chances that your email marketing newsletter will be consistently opened by your subscribers there are a few things you can do:

Use trusted web-based permission email marketing solutions as a first best step to ensuring your email marketing newsletters are received by your subscribers. A variety of email marketing companies offer web-based email marketing software. They also offer html email marketing templates that render perfectly in all the most popular email applications.

Subject lines are a first impression – and if it doesn’t make a good first impression – your email newsletter will be a victim of the delete button. Take some time to create a subject line for your email marketing newsletters that is a call to action and relevant to the context of your promotion or the information included. Try splitting up your subscriber list and send each group the same email marketing newsletter with different subject lines. In this way you can compare open rates and determine what works and what doesn’t.

You may also want to experiment with delivery on different days of the week and times of the day. If your customers are mostly from the corporate world the chance of getting your email marketing newsletter deleted with the morning inbox flood are high, so you might want to choose an early afternoon delivery instead.

Open rates are also gauged by the way email applications block or allow images, in turn effecting tracking software. You may find that you have a disproportionate number of clicks compared to your open rates. If the email address for your email marketing newsletter is not part of your subscriber’s safe sender list then images are usually blocked. To avoid this situation, include a message on your opt-in permission sign-up form for your new subscribers to add your email address to their safe sender list. It is also a good idea to add this message above the header in each of your email marketing newsletters as well.

Make sure you keep your subscriber lists up to date. Most email marketing companies offer subscriber maintenance features that help you weed out the email addresses that are no longer valid. If that feature isn’t offered with the email marketing company you are currently using – you may want to look for another one that does.

And last but not least, make sure you aren’t inducing email fatigue on your subscribers by sending your email marketing newsletters too often. If you are sending more than once a week, you may want to scale that back to weekly or bi-weekly.