How to improve email open rates

With more reports indicating that email open rates and click-through rates continue to drop, SubscriberMail has come up with a few guidelines that could help increase the open rates of your email campaigns.

by Kristina Knight

According to a recent MailerMail.com report, email open rates for January to June 2007 are down 3% from the same period in 2006. Another report, this one from CommTouch, reports that about 95% of all email sent in Q3 2007 was spam. With such high instances of spam, it is no wonder that email open and click-through rates have fallen off.

SubscriberMail, though, reports that open rates may not have fallen off as much as reported by some metric firms. Because many email servers use "images off" as a default setting, many opened emails aren't reported. In order for an email to be considered "opened" it must display an image and if images are turned off, those emails will not be counted as opened and read.

There are steps email marketers can take to help the instance of open rates.

First, marketers should optimize the "From" name with the actual business name instead of displaying a product name or a salesperson's name. Both product and sales names may not be recognized by some who receive the email and the message could be automatically deleted.

Next, maximize the preview pane so that the text displayed in that small area intrigues the recipient to read on or click through.

Finally, check the content in an email messages for Spam triggers. There are certain words or phrases that can lead to a legitimate email being sent directly to the Spam/Junk folder and never read.