Why Your Email Open Rate Is Going Down and How You Can Stop It: 6 Important Tips

Are your campaigns seeing strong performance when it comes to engagement and open rate? While every industry has different benchmark response rates, there is always room for improvement. If you feel as if your average email open rate is going down, the following six tips will help you get engagement back up again.

1. Provide Value

While your end goal with email marketing is ultimately to make sales, it is possible to come across as too pushy and salesy. Sending one promotional email after another can cause subscribers to lose interest. Some will automatically begin to delete your emails without even opening them. Make sure that you are providing enough value in your emails. Write interesting content that contains useful tips for consumers in your industry.

2. Use Automation and Workflows

Workflow automation allows you to send content that is more personalized for each subscriber. You can set up an automated workflow in which different emails get sent to subscribers based on their activity. For example, you can send different versions of emails to various segments of recipients based on actions, such as people who opened an email and clicked on a link, people who opened the email and didn’t click on the link, people who didn’t open the email at all, and people who made a purchase as a result of the email. This can help increase effectiveness of your email campaigns.

3. Build Credibility and Use Social Proof

Lack of brand credibility and trust can lead to lower conversion and open rates. There are a number of ways to improve your brand credibility. Let’s go through some tips:

• Become an authority in the industry by becoming a source of valuable information. This can be done by constantly posting informative blog posts and sending out informative newsletters.
• Publish thought leadership content, such as infographics. Be sure to back up your data with credible sources, and you can also conduct and publish original research about matters pertaining to your industry.
• Include stories and testimonials from customers who have benefited from your product or services on your website and in your email campaigns.
• Showcase recommendations from other business owners or trusted names in your industry.
• Mention numbers in your emails – how many subscribers you have, how many social media followers you have, how many users you have, or how many customers you have.

4. Use Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is a great way to improve your email open rate. You can tap into what is known as FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”) in order to get more engagement. Here are some ways to create urgency:

• Create time-limited offers, flash sales, discounts, and promotions that will expire soon.
• Write subject lines to promote the sense of urgency of your limited offers and promotions. You can even embed countdown timers in your emails.

Use scarcity. Make an offer available to only the first certain number of people who take advantage of it.

5. Have a Clear Call-To-Action

You would be surprised by how many people write emails without a clear call-to-action. You should be utilizing every email to include some sort of call-to-action (even if just to like your page on Facebook). If not, you are leaving money on the table.

Your CTA should be clear and to the point. Consider using colored buttons to make your calls-to-action stand out.

Another tip is not to write content that is too drawn out.Get to the point. Most people don’t have time to scroll through emails that never seem to end.

6. Test and Analyze Data

Constantly testing your results is the best way to ensure that you get the best response rate possible. Take a look at metrics such as your open rates and click-through rates. See which kinds of subject lines perform better than others and which kinds of offers get more clicks. By constantly analyzing your data, you can figure out what your subscribers are actually interested in to improve your average email open rate and overall campaign engagement in the future.

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