Increase Your Newsletter Open-Rate Without Spammy Headlines!

We often subscribe to emails but end up never opening newsletters after the first couple of times. We simply look at the subject line and either send it to the bin or just ignore it — unless our eyes fixate on something intriguing.

That’s the key when it comes to sending off newsletters to your subscribers. Without offering them something exciting to read about in the subject line, they’re not going to click on your email. And if they don’t even open it, how will they read your amazing blog posts or see the discounts and offers? Increasing your newsletter open rate has to be your primary concern when you draft the emails.

MailChimp’s analysis shows that the average newsletter open rate is nearly 21%. If your open rate is below average (which reduces engagement), here are some tips to increase your newsletter open rate without being spammy and untrustworthy.

1. Use intriguing subject lines

Without an intriguing subject line, your subscribers aren’t going to even open your email. That’s why it’s advised to put more thought into crafting a subject line than into writing the content of your email.

But that doesn’t mean you can trick your readers into opening your emails either. You cannot offer something in the subject line and then have something underwhelming in the body of your email — I have personally unsubscribed from such newsletters because I felt scammed.

Make sure the subject line is relevant, with top performing keywords and unique language. In fact, using movie and song titles in your subject line increases your newsletter’s open-rate by about 26%, according to a study conducted by Retention Science!

2. Personalize your emails

Starting your email by personally addressing the recipient has been found to increase the open rate by 2.6%, says Retention Science. It makes sense — none of us wants to be addressed as “valued subscriber”, and we’re not going to open emails that call us that.

Personalization can be done by simply adding the recipient’s name in the subject line or the first line of the body of the email. Or even by sending personalized offers and anniversary gifts by making note of when the recipient subscribed to your email list.

3. Avoid spam-like words

When writing your subject line, or the body of your email, some words will perform well while others will automatically send your email directly to spam — which means your subscribers are never even going to see it.

According to another study, emails that are mostly reported as spam include words like “confirm”, “features”, “deals,”  and “upgrade”. These words are often considered to be spammy, hence never even making it to your recipient’s inbox.

Even having too many links in your email can classify it as spam!

4. Find the best time of day

Sometimes, even if you did everything perfectly — with the catchiest subject line, most intriguing email body, personalization, etc. — you still have a below average open-rate. One reason for this could be because you send your emails out at the wrong time of day.

For instance, sending emails on Sundays when everybody’s enjoying their weekends off and not checking emails is definitely not the time to send them. According to MailChimp, Monday-Thursday have pretty much the same open rates, with the optimal time being around 10 AM. There is a slight drop off on Friday and a larger drop off over the weekend.

5. A/B test your emails before sending

When you send your emails through a good email marketing platform, you can easily split test (or A/B test) your emails. A/B testing is a way to compare different versions of an email to see what’s best, before you send them off to your subscribers. 

You can use this feedback from A/B testing to make your email campaign better and more efficient, drastically increasing the open-rate and then, ultimately, the click-through rate of your emails.