How to Improve Your Email Open Rates

With spam inces­santly inun­dat­ing our inboxes and people’s atten­tion spans con­stantly shrink­ing, some have claimed that email mar­ket­ing is on the way out.

I say “nonsense.”

In fact, it’s because of those very rea­sons that email mar­ket­ing is now stronger than ever before. I per­son­ally know of some mar­keters who have made lit­er­ally mil­lions of dol­lars with email mar­ket­ing alone in recent weeks.

I’m talk­ing about legit­i­mate, law-​​compliant, optin email.

Remem­ber, the most com­mon use of the Inter­net is still email — not instant mes­sen­g­ing, social net­work­ing, or brows­ing web­sites. It’s often the very first thing peo­ple do when they log onto the web.

Granted, the biggest stum­bling block is to increase your “open rate” (i.e., the per­cent­age of peo­ple who actu­ally open your emails). And to do so you first need to get your emails deliv­ered and over­come overzeal­ous spam fil­ters.

But once they do reach your read­ers’ inboxes, the most impor­tant step in get­ting your mes­sages through to your audi­ence is with good copy. And like a good head­line in sales copy, it all starts with the sub­ject line.

One thing you may have noticed, par­tic­u­larly of late, are clever head­lines spam­mers use.

Spam sub­ject lines are often a lazy tac­tic to improve open rates. How many times have you seen a head­line in your inbox, only to real­ize that the email is try­ing to sell you some sleazy, snake-​​oil aphrodisiac?

In other words, you get emails with head­lines that may seem legit­i­mate, but the moment you open them your “Delete” but­ton gets the brunt of your index finger.

Sure, curios­ity may get you to open the email. But they usu­ally end up in the trash if they’re not in your spam folder already.

That said, how­ever, spammy head­lines do have some­thing to teach us.

You can improve your open rates using some of the same tac­tics spam­mers use, but in legit­i­mate, confidence-​​inspiring ways that will increase read­er­ship and, of course, response.

Here are three of my favorite and eas­i­est tac­tics I use to increase my open rates.

1. Urgency

Urgency says it all. It’s when your sub­ject line com­mu­ni­cates some­thing time-​​sensitive or quantity-​​bound, which sim­ply can’t be ignored.

Some of the most prof­itable email cam­paigns have sub­ject lines that have some ele­ment of scarcity. You see this with sub­ject lines like, “It ends tonight at mid­night!”, “There are only 4 left”, “One spot just opened up”, etc.

While the above are exam­ples of direct scarcity (i.e., the limit is directly stated in the sub­ject line), indi­rect scarcity works well, too — such as an upcom­ing event, hol­i­day, sale, launch, con­test, sea­son, news item, etc.

But don’t just limit your­self to an event. You can also use sit­u­a­tions to com­mu­ni­cate fear of loss, which inher­ently cre­ates ten­sion. For example:

• “When she learned my secrets…”
• “Unless you do this, you are lost!”
• “The sneaky mind trick they use on you”
• “You are los­ing money right now!”
• “Are you aware of these 5 dan­ger signs?”
• “Avoid these 7 mis­takes at all costs!”

Fear of loss is one of our biggest moti­va­tors as human beings. While the urgency may be indi­rectly stated, it’s com­pounded: there’s urgency in the topic itself, as well as urgency in miss­ing out or fail­ing to at least know about it.

Speak­ing of “need to know,” this leads me to my sec­ond point…

2. Curiosity

Curios­ity pulls them in. And the eas­i­est way — it’s not the best way but it’s effec­tive nonethe­less — to use this win­ning tac­tic is to start a sen­tence, add an ellipse, and con­tinue the rest of the sen­tence in your email.

These teasers can often drive response rates through the roof. Based on the Zeir­gar­nik effect, peo­ple are intrin­si­cally curi­ous, and an unfin­ished idea will cre­ate a cer­tain ten­sion that will force read­ers to seek closure.

For exam­ple, the sub­ject line starts with “It all started when…” and in the body of the email, it goes on with “… She told me about this web­site!” The sub­ject says “I’ve never had a chance to…” fol­lowed in the email by “… tell you about this amaz­ing secret!” Or the sub­ject says “Don’t leave me…” con­tin­ued with “… hang­ing by not respond­ing to this offer.” You get the picture.

How­ever, an impor­tant caveat.

Subject-​​line teasers need to be han­dled very care­fully. It’s easy to lose cred­i­bil­ity. They can come off too spammy and, if your email doesn’t fol­low through on the sub­ject line, then you’ve lost credibility.

That’s why the best curios­ity sub­ject lines are those that really tease not by omis­sion but by impli­ca­tion. In fact, one curiosity-​​building tac­tic that works quite well is to tempt an open by imply­ing that the answer to a ques­tion is within your email.

To help you, take a look at the head­lines on the cov­ers of tabloids and grocery-​​rack mag­a­zines, such as Van­ity Fair, Cosmo, National Enquirer, etc. Here’s one from Women’s World mag­a­zine, sit­ting right now on my wife’s desk: “I lost 19 pounds eat­ing choco­late!” Other exam­ples include:

• “The real rea­son peo­ple gain weight”
• “No joke! Shock­ing study proves laugh­ter is dangerous”
• “Is he cheat­ing? Find out with these 6 tell-​​tale tips”
• “7 med­ical myths even doc­tors believe”

That last exam­ple uses the third com­mon tactic…

3. Controversy

Con­tro­versy is another pow­er­ful tac­tic. The word “con­tro­ver­sial,” by def­i­n­i­tion, means “of a diverg­ing view­point,” “opin­ion­ated,” “dis­puted,” “arguable,” “con­tentious,” etc. Being con­tro­ver­sial sim­ply means to be different.

While your sub­ject line may raise eye­brows and con­vey sur­prise, dis­may, even anger, it doesn’t need to, and prob­a­bly shouldn’t offend. Instead, tie your sub­ject line to a cur­rent event, news item, or hot topic.

You don’t have to limit your­self to your indus­try. You can use con­tro­ver­sial top­ics out­side of it, as long as you link them to some­thing rel­e­vant to your read­ers and pro­vide com­pelling rea­sons why in your email to jus­tify its use.

One of my email coach­ing stu­dents, John Rit­skowitz, in an email about the power of head­lines, used “Dead Man Wakes Up Under Autopsy Knife.”

This was pulled from an actual, recent news story. And John used that head­line to show the power of head­lines in a small video tuto­r­ial for a new copy­writ­ing tool he was promoting.

(If you want to know more about it, check out John’s prod­uct, “The Copy­writ­ers Toolkit.” I highly rec­om­mend it. You’ll have access to the above tool as well as many others.)

Take a look at some of the head­lines I’ve used over the years on this very blog…

• The Death of The Salesletter
• Order­ing Offline Boosts Online Sales?
• For­get Ben­e­fits And You Will Sell More
• Stop Set­ting Goals to Achieve Success
• Mar­keter Exposes Her­self For Charity
• Want a Sticky Site? For­get Content!

Speak­ing of being con­tro­ver­sial, another suc­cess­ful tac­tic I’ve seen — and con­trary to com­mon knowl­edge — is to NOT include the email recipient’s name in the sub­ject line.

There are many ben­e­fits to per­son­al­iz­ing emails, and I still rec­om­mend it with email body copy — or any copy, for that matter.

But like with any mar­ket­ing tac­tic, once a win­ning strat­egy is overused we tend to become desen­si­tized to it.

I sus­pect that the recipient’s name in the sub­ject line is often an indi­ca­tion that it is a sales mes­sage, and the email will likely hit the trash can faster than you can say “spam!”

By the way, Larry Chase’s “Web Digest For Mar­keters,” an ezine I’ve been sub­scribed to for many years, has an inter­est­ing arti­cle on 13 tips for craft­ing sub­ject lines.

Bot­tom line, observe what spam­mers are doing, and apply some of the same tac­tics to your email mar­ket­ing efforts. But don’t be clever or misleading.

In the long run, you’re bet­ter off to spend a lit­tle time using what we can learn from spam and cre­at­ing a sub­ject line that will really work. The key is to be rel­e­vant — to your email mes­sage, and more impor­tantly, to your readers.

About the Author

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