That’s quite a number to sift through looking for which one should get opened. As a business owner, how are you going to make sure customers always choose your emails over others to click on which means having a high email open rate?

A business often gets an average of 17% of their emails opened. This rate can get much higher if you know how to customize and deliver your emails in the right way. In fact, you don’t have to be a big corporation to have great email open rates and here are 6 simple hacks to prove you why.

Now let’s start getting more eyeballs on your emails and get higher email open rate.

1. Say no to impersonal “From” field

We all know personalization increases customer engagement. Why has someone still sent their emails from vague address like info, general or no-reply? Like a normal conversation, people only respond if they know who they are interacting with. Since you definitely don’t want to have low response rates, you better put a specific name in your “from” field.

Whose name should it be? It could be the CEO, marketing director or anyone that your recipients are familiar with. The more familiar the sender is, the higher open rates you will get. You can make it more personal by addressing subscribers by their name in the subject line and grab their interest at the first sight.

2. Create an irresistible subject line for getting higher email open rate

Before you get all eager to craft something creative for your email title, don’t accidentally make it sound like a spam or junk mail. Avoid using words like “free”, “for just $”, “only $”, “xx percent off”, etc., or putting them in capital letters with an exclamation mark. Even if your emails manage to get past spam filters, very few recipients are likely to read those.

Now here comes the creative part. Ingredients for a compelling subject line may vary but one thing is certain: people don’t want to hear about you, they want to hear about themselves. They don’t care if you are going to launch a new product or what. They only care about what’s in it for them if they click on that subject line.

So instead of saying you are launching this, you are upgrading that, try to sneak in some benefits, interesting facts or even jokes that may pique your subscribers’ interest.

Want something more specific? Read this 100 Inspiring Email Subject Lines from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to pump up your inspiration.

Whatever title you may come up with, don’t use the clickbait type. You should have good content to back up your provocative subject line, or else, people won’t trust you next time and your open rate will drop eventually.

3. Make use of the snippet text

Snippet or pre-header text is the first sentence in your email that gets displayed after the subject line. “View this email in your browser” is a typical snippet. But it doesn’t tell subscribers anything about your email purpose or offer it is going to promise.

Are you going to waste a valuable space just like that? Why not make use of snippet to attract more eyeballs to your emails?

A well-crafted snippet is a good way to extend your subject line and gets more clicks. It acts as an introduction or teaser of your content. You can put your deal or offer here (e.g., Get xx% off today with this coupon code) without the fear of being labeled as spam.

4. Send your emails at the right time

According to WordStream, the general advice for sending email is to send on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Monday is always hectic with lots of meetings and people tend to get more business emails so they are less likely to check your newsletters. On Friday, people are more itchy to leave their office early and weekend is the worst sending time when people go out to have fun instead of sticking to their computer.

The research also states that the best hour to send emails is 9-11am and 1-3pm in your recipients’ time zone. However, that’s only the general practice. It may not resonate with some certain businesses and targeted audience.

Therefore, it’s best that you analyze your own engagement metrics to figure out which time and day gets you the most open rates.

5. Segment your email list

When you have a perfectly-crafted subject line but your open rate is not quite positive, it’s very likely that you are sending your email to the wrong persons. Some subscribers want to hear about every of your updates while some prefer to receive discount offer only and some just want to follow up with useful content from your blog posts, etc.

Since targeting the right audience gets you a higher and more accurate response rate, segmenting your email list is crucial. You can divide your subscribers into smaller lists based on their interest, subscription preference or certain demographic as sex, location, income, etc. Your email content will then resonate better with your audience.

6. Use A/B testing

Coming up with an optimal email campaign is hard. You have to figure out which works the best: what to write in the subject line and snippet text, what time to send, how many percentage off to offer, how to address the recipients, which call to action to use, etc.

When you can’t decide on which email version will have higher open rate, use A/B testing. It lets you test the performance of two versions to see which one has better results. Most email softwares like Mailchimp provide A/B testing as a built-in feature.

In case your email software doesn’t support A/B testing, you can send two versions of your email to two separated lists and manually compare their result report later.

Which tactic are you using to grow your email open rates? Let’s comment and share with us. We’d love to hear your story.