What’s a Good Email Open Rate & One Simple Trick that could improve yours

Imagine dedicating hours, days, and weeks striving for the ultimate pinnacle of content-creation genius; working tirelessly to strike the right chord for that perfect, beautiful, incredible, amazing email. You send it out, but for some bizarre reason, your open rate is low. 

You’ve written amazing content, dotted some great photographs and videos throughout the email, included valuable links to important content, or even plugged a new product.

The perfect email has been moulded, but then the soul-destroying reality sinks in when you send out the email, and see your open rate slowly decline, and diminish to a level that is just plain unfair.

Email open rates show you what percentage of email subscribers have opened your email. This is a great way of finding out whether or not your email strategy is successful.

(READ: Why an E-Newsletter can IMPROVE User Engagement and BUILD Brand Authority)

A low open rate isn’t ideal.

Fear not, for we need to keep an open mind, and not focus on what hasn’t worked, but rather, what can be amended next time.

Perhaps you’re wondering, what is a good open rate for an email newsletter?

The average email open rate in 2019 was 18.7, according to research from Campaign Monitor.

With the right elbow grease, you can achieve a number better than this.

And we’ve got just the tip to get you there.

So, just how do you increase your email open rate?

Consider whether your email might be too big. If it is, we need to fix this. 

(READ: 6 Awesome Ways to Increase Facebook Engagement)

This might sound like a simple, somewhat obvious solution, but when there’s a lot of text and content bundled into one email, the email might be clipped. This is especially the case for Gmail users, because Gmail will clip the email if it is bigger than 102kb. That means, the email will arrive within the recipient’s inbox with a ‘View Entire Message’ Button.

Unless the viewer clicks this link, the email will not count as an opened email. And thus, down and down does your email open rate go.

With over 1.5 billion Gmail users, this is something you must consider. After all, you want your email to reach as many people as possible.

If history tells us anything, it’s that users won’t want to click the ‘View Entire Message’ button. Makes sense too. After all, one of the most important rules of content creation is to never create content that requires your reader (or audience) to WORK to engage with the content, so why should they have to take another step to read your email?

The next time you work on an email, consider all components of it. Think about the images, spacing, amount of text you’re including, videos; everything. Consider ways you can reduce the size of your email. Do you really need four sentences to get that point across? Maybe you could do it in two sentences! Do you really need three or four videos? Can you compress your images without compromising on image quality?

HINT – Don’t forget to send yourself a test email, and check how big the email itself will be before you send it out to all of your contacts.

Make the change, and see how it affects your open rates.

(READ: How To Create Awesome Content that’ll Win Customers)

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