Most people won’t read your emails
It’s disappointing I know, but it’s true.
In fact, as your email reports will show you, a lot of people won’t even open them.
Even with a highly targeted list, and even when they have specifically requested information from you, there is always a percentage of people who simply won’t open your email.
For example, I have an email course on How to build your mailing list. People signup for this course themselves, and they have to confirm they wish to receive it before they get anything, so they are pretty motivated.
Nevertheless some people never open even the first part.
Even though they asked for it.
In fact in this particular example, only 72.9% of people open the email that they asked for! 27.1% of people who requested this email, don’t open it.
There are many reasons for this. They could have been distracted, deleted it by mistake, just not seen it, or any of a host of other reasons…
And that’s with a very fresh, confirmed email list where you are giving somebody something they have asked for. As you can imagine, with a less engaged or less recent list, the open rate will drop still further.
[ctt tweet=”Most people won’t even open your emails, let alone read them…” coverup=”usbFS”]
What is the average email open rate?
People are always asking what the average email open rate is so that they can benchmark themselves against others. Usually this question is prompted by disappointment in their open rates, which are almost always much lower than you think they should be!
There is no ‘average open rate’, even in the same industry.
Email open rates depend upon so many things, including:
- Age of mailing list
- Past relationship with list — do they know and trust you?
- Relevance
- Time of day and day of week
- Industry/market
- Frequency of mailing
- Subject line — is it well written and enticing?
- Timeliness for the recipient
Any one of those factors can skew open rates massively. When you take them all into account, it’s clear that comparing your open rates with those of other people, with different mailing lists, is a pointless exercise. There are just too many variables.
What you need to do instead, is to concentrate on improving your own open rate.
All of your hard work in carefully writing the copy is wasted unless people actually open the email!
How you can improve email open rates
This little tip will increase the number of people who open your email by somewhere around 20% — 40%. In a recent test I ran, it improved my email open rate by 37%.
Here’s how you do it:
Your email service (eg AWeber or MailChimp), will show you a list of people who have, and who haven’t, opened your email.
Make a segment (sub-list) of the people who didn’t open your email, change the subject line, and send it again just to that segment.
You’ll find that some of those people will now open your email.
These are all people who didn’t open the first mail, so these are 100% incremental viewers who would otherwise have been lost.
It’s dead simple, but incredibly effective.
So make this a standard practice — every time you send a broadcast email or newsletter now, follow this process:
- A few days after sending, make a segment of the people who didn’t open it
- Write a new subject line
- Send the email again to that segment
I guarantee you will get more of your emails read.
[ctt tweet=”Here is a really easy way to get more people to open your emails…” coverup=”usbFS”]
Let me know how you get on with this technique. And if you have any questions, drop me a line, I’ll be happy to help.