By Jenna Devinney Marketing Specialist, Webbula
An email marketer spends countless hours perfecting their email messaging, visuals and subject lines and the last thing you expect after hitting send is a low email open rate. An email marketers’ worst nightmare. Why isn’t my audience reading the email?
You are not alone. Many email marketers struggle with not only low open rates, but click-through and deliverability issues. According the
Hubspot, the overall average open rate across all industries is 32%. Out of the 28 industries, Marketing and Advertising companies have the lowest email open rates.
It’s important to understand these metrics in order to solve this issue. Let's go over what could be causing the open rate issues.
- Your subscribers just aren’t interested anymore
It’s quite possible that your subscribers just aren’t interested in your content anymore. In that case, its better if they hit the unsubscribe button, to help with your open rates. Read Love your unsubscribers to learn more.
- Your subscriber list has aged
You heard it right. Are your subscribers real? You could be hitting zombies threats, which can make your open rates suffer. Why is that? Zombies are deceased individuals and no one is behind the email to open it. People also move, change emails, or stop using them. This is why it’s a best practice to regularly clean your email data.
Did you know that your subject lines could be causing your emails to go straight to the spam folder? ISPs are becoming better at filtering out certain phrases that look like spam content. If you’re using all caps or words such as RISK FREE, FREE, become debt free today, or even using too many exclamation points!!!!!!. A big no no. If it sounds like spam, it’s likely to be considered spam.
- Sending to hidden dangerous threats
Sending to email threats such as spam traps, honeypots, zombies, bots and much more can most certainly hurt your open rate. It’s best to avoid all email threats and keep your data clean.
If you’re not segmenting your lists and sending to a mass amount of people who are not interested in your content will cause a lower in open rates. List segmentation can drastically improve your email marketing efforts. Not all of your subscribers are the same, so don’t send them the same messaging.
3 Ways to improve your open rate
Now that we’ve gone through all the why’s, we can finally get to HOW to solve an email open rate issue. Let’s take a look at 3 ways to improve your open rates.
- Target Audience & List Segmentation
Sending out mass emails is probably not a good idea. Without segmentation, your engagement rates will suffer, open rates will suffer, and you will start to see your unsubscriber rates increase. Sales will not increase if you’re sending to a mass list of disengaged people.
List Segmentation can drastically improve your email marketing campaigns. Your audience is not all the same, and you know that. People have different likes and interests, so why target to them all the same if they’re completely different?
Here are some ways you can segment your lists according to
sleeknote.com,
Segment based on...
- Engagement History
- Subscribers interests and preferences
- Success Milestones of Subscribers
- Point of Sign Up
- Geography and Demographics
- Sales Funnel and Lead Score
- Level of disengagement
- Email Hygiene
Email Hygiene is the most important key to keep in mind when it comes to improving open rates. If you’re sending to inactive users, hard or soft bounces, or hidden email threats many things could happen to you. Most of them bad.
Email Hygiene is the process of identifying active and inactive email threats in your email data.
Hidden threats such as spam traps, moles, bots, honeypots, seeded trackers and more. (
Check out our recent intelligence report to learn more about the hidden threats in your emails).
People change jobs, pass away, and abandon old email address regularly, so it is imperative that you keep up with good email hygiene practices. There are even threats in your data like disposable domains, that are only temporary emails that can explode after a certain amount of time has passed. Spam traps are another threat, which are a type of tool used by organizations to identify spammers. If you have them in your list and send to them you could damage your sender reputation, or permanently be placed on a blacklist.
Guess what? Verification alone cannot detect the spam traps either, this is why email hygiene is a must before you hit the send button on your next campaign. Email verification detects active threats, like bounces. But only Email Hygiene can detect inactive and fraudulent threats that can receive, open, click and track your campaign.
The most important tip for improving open rates? Ensure your list is cleaned with Webbula Email Hygiene and your emails will be landing in customer inboxes up to 95% more often.
- Data Appends
A Data Solutions Provider like Webbula can help you personalize the content experience, and fill in the missing pieces of your customer data through our third party data. With Webbula data you will truly understand who your customers are, and their interests to better personalize and segment for your next email campaigns.
How so? Well you can refresh and expand upon existing audiences by gender, address, demographic, automotive, b2b, political, financial, interest/lifestyle data and more. With this data you can take a deeper look into each category to build an audience that goes beyond demographics and delivers relevant messaging based on actual hobbies, online behaviors, donations, politics, income, education and much more.
How can you use our data to better target your customers?
- Fill in the gaps of your first party data
- Broaden your Audience
- Discover new audiences
Are you ready to improve your open rate with Webbula? If you’re in need of Email Hygiene visit our
free trial page. In need of more customer data? Check out our
taxonomy.
Read Webbula's last article on
click farms here.