Three Quick Ways to Improve Mailchimp Open Rates

Email campaign open and click rates are the most commonly used measures when determining EDM effectiveness. These two measures are used to determine email marketing strategy, campaign design, content and much more. If your open and click rates are improving you’re going in the right direction. If the rates are below industry average or aren’t improving then a review is needed.

Here are three very quick ways to improve your open and click rates of your email marketing.

Delete or Unsubscribe Inactive Subscribers

A very quick way to improve your open and click rates is to remove all subscribers that aren’t opening your campaigns.

You may first want to send a re-engagement campaign by identifying inactive subscribers and sending a campaign to get them active again. After a few days you’ll be well placed to create a segment in your list of all subscribers that have a member rating of 1 and deleting those subscribers.

As campaign open and click rates are determined as percentages, by not sending to people that aren’t going to open or click, you’ll improve your results.

Review your Subject Line

Your subject lines have a direct influence on whether people will open your email. Of course if your subscribers aren’t even opening your email marketing then they definitely aren’t clicking.

As opening the email is a necessary first step for the marketing to be effective, revenue
critically depends on the open rates. Balakrishnan and Parekh

Short, descriptive and relevant subject lines work well and remember to include what you want the recipient to do if you have a call to action in your campaign body.

I haven’t seen any research to suggest that an emoji in a subject line will improve or lessen open rates however I like them as it makes email marketing messages stand out among the many messages most people have.

As an example, say you sell rain jackets and the weather forecast is for rain. A subject line of ‘How to keep dry in Sydney today ☔’ will work better than ‘We have new stock’.

Is your Content (always) Relevant?

Your content must always be relevant for each individual subscriber. For example there is no point in sending information about a local event in Brisbane to people in Adelaide. We make information relevant by using segmentation and sending a campaign only to segments that are relevant to our marketing message.

Content personalization too leads to increased interaction with your email marketing campaigns. Personalized emails get six times higher transaction rates. Adding a subscribers first name to a campaign is so incredibly quick and simple using merge tags that you’d be crazy not to greet every recipient by their first name.

Of course, to improve click rates, a nice clear call to action in the form of a button is always a great idea. We need to make it as easy as possible to recipients to know exactly what we want them to do when they open our email. Let then see a nice colourful and well worded button as they open your email so all they have to do is click!

Above are three ways to greatly improve your email marketing campaign open and click rates. Feel free to contact me if you would like assistance in improving your email marketing.