15 Ways to Ensure Your Customers Open Your Emails

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Sending an email and getting a respectable open rate is a bit of an art form. It requires some thought as to what you are sending, when you are sending it, and why you are sending it in the first place. According to a report by LaunchBit, a successful open rate should be around 20 percent. Getting this successful open rate needs to rely on good email techniques and not kitschy subject lines that are often ignored. That’s why we asked 15 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:

How can you successfully get customers to open your emails without deferring to kitschy subject lines?

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How to Ensure Your Customers Open Your Emails

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

1. Send Your Email Twice

“People neglect their inbox. You could send your email on a bad day, at a bad time, and it will never get opened. One way around bad timing? Send your email campaign twice. What we’ll do is send out the initial campaign, and then send out the same campaign with a different subject line to the audience who did not open the previous email. This approach will almost double your open rates.” ~ Brett Farmiloe, Markitors – Digital Marketing Company

2. Treat Their Inbox as You Treat Your Own

“No one likes being bombarded with useless emails with kitschy subject lines. Gain your users’ trust by only sending them content that will actually be useful for them: Tailor your offers according to your target audience, and make sure it’s information you would like to receive, too. If you stick to this, users will learn that when you send them an email, it will be worth opening.” ~ David Tomas, Cyberclick

3. Know Your Sequence

“It really depends on your context and your brand. Your initial emails may have to have those kinds of subject lines. It’s to be expected in the start of your sequence, but if you have a unique offering then you can also have a unique voice in how you create your emails. The two often do go hand in hand.” ~ Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now

4. Play the Long Game

“The answers all sound cliche because they’ve been repeated so many times, but the long game wins every time. If you have built a quality list of opt-in subscribers, you are careful to provide good content or at least relevant content, and you don’t over email, your open rate should always be high. It is also worthwhile to clean your email list regularly.” ~ Alisha Navarro, 2 Hounds Design

5. Build Trust

“If your customers trust you to only send them important or useful information, they’ll open your emails. If you breach that trust by sending them content they aren’t interested in or that makes unwarranted calls on their attention, they’ll send your mail straight to the spam folder. Be careful about what you send and give customers an easy way to opt out.” ~ Vik Patel, Future Hosting

6. Time for Your Specific Market

“You can have a catchy headline that speaks directly to your audience, but if you’re sending your emails at the wrong time (or day), your results won’t be optimal. One tip is to delve into your site stats and identify those times and days where the traffic is consistently high. This would be a great time to send an email to your customers as clearly your market is very engaged at these moments.” ~ Alex Miller, Upgraded Points

7. List Their Pain Points

“Get their attention by noting that you know what’s been bugging them and that you have the medicine for it. You can also note that you have a promotion to help them solve their particular issue.” ~ Zach Binder, Ipseity Inc

8. Try to Build Relationships

“To connect better with the people on your mailing list — at least the ones with which you share an industry — try to build relationships with them in other ways. Follow them on social media. Make sure that you’re interacting with them and sharing/liking the things they’re having conversations about.” ~ Adam Steele, The Magistrate

9. Give Them Something Valuable

“This isn’t rocket science. If your emails are worth reading, people will read them. If you bombard people with content they haven’t the slightest interest in, they won’t open your emails. Research your audience and invest in compelling content that they won’t want to miss.” ~ Justin Blanchard, ServerMania Inc.

10. Be of Interest

“If your company is not interesting to the receiver, it is almost irrelevant what tricks you use to have them open an email. I know that if I am interested in a product or service, I will open most of their emails when time allows it, based on priorities.” ~ Adrian Ghila, Luxe RV, Inc.

11. Ensure the Audience Is Right

“When focusing on email campaign improvements, oftentimes the performance numbers (e.g. open rates) are muddied due to the fact that the audience you’ve developed may not be the right fit. The best course of action is to experiment targeting finding new customer types by building hyper-targeted customer segments in your marketing efforts, using channels like Twitter or Facebook.” ~ Corey Eulas, Factorial Digital

12. Make Your First Email Mindblowing

“People receive hundreds of emails a day and remember very few of them. When I get onto a newsletter, it’s usually generic information and pitches. However, when a marketer bucks that trend, and gives me something that actually delivers real, unique value? I’m a voracious reader for life.” ~ Ajay Paghdal, OutreachMama

13. Personalize

“Any time you are sending out an email you never want to sound spammy. Therefore personalization of an email title and content is key. Reference a conversation you had or bring up a press piece related to them, their company, or product. Show genuine interest in building the relationship. Then offer content that fits their needs and interest.” ~ Kevin Hong, The Outlier Approach

14. Use Humor

“People appreciate a sense of humor in their inbox, and many successful companies have built brands around being funny. If you can make someone smile when reading your subject line, you’re almost always guaranteed an open. Just make sure the content is interesting!” ~ Jared Atchison, WPForms

15. Build a Solid Reputation

“In our own A/B testing, we’ve found that, while the more kitschy titles do have a slightly higher open rate, the click-through rate is actually higher with our more straightforward titles. We’ve focused on creating content we know will be valuable to our readers, and our consistency in that effort has given us a good rep among our audience, who has continued to open our emails week after week.” ~ John Scheer, Herman-Scheer

Man Reads Email Photo via Shutterstock

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