This is a guest post from Maria Fintanidou. Maria is a copywriter for email marketing automation software Moosend, having created the Help Articles (FAQs) and overseen the platform’s translations in Greek and Spanish. She loves exploring new cultures and ways of thinking through traveling, reading, and language learning.
Consumers nowadays are being bombarded with marketing messages and sales pitches. With their attention spans decreasing and the competition intensifying, digital marketing has turned into a battlefield. Amid these turbulent times, one channel remains intact: email marketing. Global email marketing revenue is expected to reach $17.9 billion by 2027.
But not all emails are created equal.
Customer-facing emails tend to perform better as people usually expect them (e.g., an onboarding campaign). Or they may offer an incentive such as a special discount or be highly personalized (e.g., cart abandonment emails). Newsletters, on the other hand, could get lost in stuffed inboxes.
Your newsletters can only be effective in fostering lasting relationships if your subscribers open them. And this means creating newsletters that your audience can’t wait to read.
In this blog post, we’ll explore strategies to boost your newsletter open rate, ensuring your messages hit a soft spot for everyone on your list. But let’s kick things off with the definitions.
What is a newsletter?
A newsletter is an email campaign sent out regularly to inform subscribers about what’s happening in a business, industry, or product. It may include a wide range of information, such as business news, company updates, or industry trends, and can be sent daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly depending on your business type and objectives.
By sending newsletters to your subscribers, you make sure your business and services remain top of mind. But this isn’t easy if your subscribers don’t open your emails. That means your newsletter success is directly linked to its open rate.
What is a newsletter open rate?
A newsletter open rate indicates the percentage of recipients that opened a specific email campaign. This metric helps you understand whether your emails catch your readers’ attention and lure them to your email content. Here’s how to calculate it:
Open Rate = [Number of Emails Read / Number of Emails Sent] x 100
This is a crucial email marketing metric to track if you want to improve your newsletter performance. You can monitor newsletter open rate and other important metrics with a robust email marketing solution.
Mailchimp, for example, is among the most reputable tools in terms of analytics. With Mailchimp, you can keep historical data and compare how your newsletter performs against past emails. Also, its A/B testing capabilities allow you to test different email versions to find the one that gets the higher open rates.
Tip: If you want access to custom and comparative reporting and harness its full potential, list segmentation, and mobile optimization without breaking the bank, check out Moosend for an effective and budget-friendly Mailchimp alternative.
7 Strategies for higher newsletter open rates
When recipients don’t open your newsletters, your brand is just another sender name in their inbox, at best. Worst case scenario, your newsletters end up in the spam folder. To prevent that from happening, we’ll list the best practices to boost your newsletter open rate and turn subscribers into loyal fans.
1) Bring in the right leads
A newsletter isn’t effective without a list of engaged recipients who anticipate your email content. To boost your open rate, just focusing on more signups won’t cut it. You need to make sure that you bring the right people in. That’s where a nice newsletter signup form comes in.
First, ensure it’s user-friendly, clear, and simple. Adding too many form fields could lead to form abandonment—even with visitors interested in your news. Mention the benefits that come from subscribing to your newsletter. Your signup form needs to be clear on the value that your newsletters deliver.
Your subscription form should be clear about what you’ll share, why, and how often to set expectations from subscribers.
In the example above, the company is clear about what they share and a weekly delivery cadence. The form is simple, just one field, and their description shares that 5,000 other professionals in the industry trusts their content.
Another method to attract subscribers is by giving them personalization options. Allow them to choose their email preferences, meaning the type and frequency of email messages they receive. Delivering your newsletters precisely at the time subscribers expect them ensures they open and further engage with your content.
Tip: Consider a double opt-in signup process. This requires all users who subscribe to your email list to receive a confirmation email and click on it to show they consent to receiving your emails. You may lose some users during this process, but you should remember that the goal is to attract qualified leads instead of more leads. By asking people to confirm their subscription, you don’t add to your list people who subscribed by accident, which, in turn, results in decreased open rates.
2) Keep your email list healthy
Maintaining a healthy email list goes hand-in-hand with increased open rates. Your list doesn’t need inactive and unengaged subscribers. It might sound counterintuitive, but a smaller email list of qualified contacts is a far better deal than a big list of recipients who are not interested in your brand.
Outdated lists probably contain subscribers who haven’t opened your newsletters in a while. The first step towards effective list cleaning is to remove these contacts. Also, you should check your database for email addresses with typos or fake ones using an email verification tool.
By regularly sanitizing your email list, you’ll only lose those subscribers who mark your email as spam, or whose addresses cause your newsletters to bounce back. All these measures help you stay in touch with your most qualified leads.
Never buy email lists, since this email practice can damage your reputation and land your emails in the spam folder. Instead of growing your list at all costs, focus your efforts on constant management to keep it healthy.
3) Optimize your subject line
You only have a few seconds to trigger your subscribers to open your email. If your subject line doesn’t capture their attention instantly, you lower the chances of them reading through your content.
To increase your open rates, you need strong subject lines:
- Make them quick-witted and relevant to your email content so your readers know what to expect.
- Use intriguing questions to spark interest and actionable language with power words to prompt action.
- Emojis, statistics, and humor work great to catch attention and stand out.
- If you want to create a sense of urgency or scarcity, use phrases like “Exclusive offer ends soon,” “X product’s running out of stock,” or “Final call.”
- Go for a subject line that is more personal and aligned with your recipients’ needs and pain points.
- Personalize your subject lines and keep it approachable.
- Test different subject lines to determine which ones your audience responds to best.
Try to avoid spam-triggering words, like “Free,” “Earn,” “Act now,” or “Open me.” All-caps or excessive punctuation won’t work either since they make your subject lines look outdated. On top of that, it’ll start to look more like a suspicious sales email rather than an information email newsletter.
4) Deliver quality content regularly
A good subject line may get subscribers to open a few emails. But if your content isn’t up to their standards, they won’t bother opening future emails. Remember, the point is to have subscribers who anticipate them and act on your message. Valuable content, clear CTAs, and a good UX design can bring high conversions after the open.
Remain true to your brand’s tone while delivering quality content that your subscribers won’t find elsewhere. It should be informative and valuable to your readers, providing solutions to their problems and addressing their needs. The higher the value of your message, the more customer loyalty you build.
Your goal is to entertain and educate readers. Avoid pushing a sale, but get creative by adding storytelling techniques and including a range of formats, such as visuals and interactive components.
Tip: Run a survey to determine your subscribers’ needs and gain insight into what kind of content your readers enjoy. You can later use this data to create better newsletters that meet your subscribers’ expectations.
It’s equally important to keep a consistent sending schedule. Sending newsletters at a specific time and frequency is key to keeping your subscribers excited and turning them into repeat customers.
The following email by Butter & Crust demonstrates compelling content. Their email subject line is clear and concise, letting readers know their favorite product is back in limited edition. There’s a mouthwatering product image filled with users’ comments. The email copy indicates that the brand relaunched the Crullers addressing their demand. We have clever copy, action-oriented CTAs, a discount on the first order, and a countdown timer evoking urgency. The brand even adds an authentic touch to its content by including a satisfied customer’s review.
5) Make data-driven decisions
There are a lot of statistics and tests out there that claim to know when the best time and day to send an email is. However, optimal delivery times differ depending on industry, type of email content, and campaign goal. You can use online statics as a guideline or starting point, but it’s still most important to run your own tests and measure your metrics.
Monitor your own data from your email marketing tool to understand when and how your audience engages with your emails. Use different metrics to determine where there’s room for improvement. For example;
- Open rates can shed light on time and date optimization, and what subject lines resonate
- Click rates can show you which type of content your subscribers find most interesting
- Conversion rates reveal areas for improvement in CTAs and email targeting
Running A/B tests is also a critical part of effective email marketing. A/B testing allows you to compare two email variants against each other to determine which works best. You can test several email components. For example, to boost your open rates, perhaps you should focus on subject lines, preheader texts, sender names, and sending times.
Based on the results, you can make data-driven decisions on what resonates with your readers and refine future newsletters.
Tip: Study the competition and see how your newsletter open rate compares to the industry’s average.
6) Optimize for mobile
Everyone knows how hectic the average daily routine is these days, so you need to make sure your emails can be viewed well even on-the-go. Campaign Monitor found that more emails are opened on a mobile device (33%) than desktop (28%) or webmail (27%). Design and build mobile-friendly newsletters that look attractive even on smaller screens. Mobile optimization ensures your subscribers can view and read your email properly, improving the user experience.
Keeping your email subject lines short, between 30-40 characters, ensures they won’t get cut off on smaller screens. For the same reason, it’s important to place the most crucial information at the beginning. If you use emojis to grab attention, they must be properly displayed across different devices.
Don’t neglect your preview texts either. Your newsletter preview text complements your subject line by providing additional information, and helps with your open rates. Use preview text to provide more context and entice readers to open your email. Aim for 40-50 characters to make it fully visible on mobile screens. To make sure everything works, use your email software to preview how your subject line and preview text appear on different devices.
When it comes to your newsletter’s overall design, responsive email templates ensure your emails render well on all devices. You’ll need to make sure that your newsletters load quickly on mobile, so use a clear layout with just the necessary elements to convey your message. Lastly, use enough white space and an organized structure to separate email sections.
7) Segment your list
Your business may appeal to a wide range of customer personas, each of them with their unique preferences, aspirations, and challenges. A busy parent will open an email at a different time than a business executive and expect different types of email content. What do they have in common? They need value and incentives that will make them think “This is exactly what I need.”
This is where list segmentation comes in handy. List segmentation helps you target all the different audiences in your list with relevant content. That way, you take their own personal needs into account and answer the one question that needs to be answered: “Why should I open this email in the first place?”
Divide your audience into groups using information like their behavioral patterns or engagement level to tailor newsletters accordingly. Also, your subscribers may be in different stages in your sales funnel. For your newsletter to hit its mark, you’ll need to consider what the next sales opportunity is for all the distinct types of buyers.
List segmentation also allows you to add dynamic content blocks to your newsletters. By using this option, you deliver different email versions to each recipient based on specific characteristics. For instance, an online bookstore could show different book suggestions to readers based on their browsing or buying history, e.g., fiction bestsellers to fiction enthusiasts and children’s literature to parents and kids. Such a personalized approach not only increases your newsletter open rate but also sets the foundation for customer retention.
Increase your newsletter open rate with smart list building and management
There are many ways to increase newsletter open rates. You can experiment with them to determine the ones that yield the desired results. The most effective way to know their preferences, though, is to ask your subscribers for feedback. Use your email campaigns to send surveys and discover where your audience thinks you could do better.
There are even more ways to increase your newsletter open rate, but also ensure that your techniques will give you the desired results. Whatever you decide to do, keep those basics in mind:
- A/B testing is always a good idea to determine what’s missing from your newsletters.
- Personalization goes a long way, as everyone loves the feeling of being special.
- Making sure that your leads are good and valid should be your number one priority, as your email strategy will be based on data from those leads.
- Keeping things fun and simple is the way to go-avoid long subject lines and complicated content.
- Your subscribers’ opinion is important. Make sure to ask them all the important questions.
Whatever you decide to do, keep in mind that creating impactful newsletters isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. Even when you get the desired results, keep testing your newsletter content to understand what sits well with your audience. Study this list, decide on your email strategy, and you’re all set to create outstanding newsletters that recipients open and read through.
Published: May 1, 2019
Updated: June 24, 2024