5 Major Factors Affecting Your Email Open Rates

Has the nightmare of low Open Rates started haunting you in your waking life too? 

First, check the clock to make sure you’re not dreaming right now. If you’re seeing numbers floating away, better get back to sleep.

If everything’s looking normal, let’s see the 5 major factors that bring this ephialtes to life. 

In other words, let’s get down to nuts and bolts to showcase the 5 areas you need to work on to put a break on your Open Rate’s downtrend.

1. List Segmentation

The most important, yet often overlooked factor affecting your Open Rates: your email list segmentation.

By List Segmentation, we mean categorizing your customers based on specific criteria that influence their buying behavior. 

Why bother segmenting your email list? Because we live in the era of personalized content. 

People are bombarded with tons of messages, offers, and whatnot, every single minute. If your content doesn’t resonate with them, they won’t care about it, and thus will stay away from opening your campaigns.

In simpler terms, the more relevant your content is to your buyers’ wants and needs, the higher the engagement. 

The 5 most important criteria to categorize your audience by are:

• Buying Frequency
• Average Order Value
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Product Preferences
• Email Engagement

2. Sending Times

The second element affecting your Open Rate: Sending Times.

Take a second and think about this: do you have a specific time in the day that you log in to your email client and check the pile of messages that’s been stacking the whole day?

Just like you, your customers have a busy time trying to balance their work and personal life. If you’re sending your emails at times they're not physically or mentally available, the chances are that they’re not going to open your campaigns.

• A/B test sending your campaigns at different times of the day
• Only test send time on emails that are not time-sensitive
• Test non-time-sensitive emails using Klaviyo’s built-in Smart Send Time

3. Subject Line

Now that we’re done with the technical aspects impacting your email campaigns' performance, let’s dive into the content stuff by starting with Subject Lines.

Essentially, Subject Lines are the hook that’s going to catch your buyers' attention and lure them into opening your campaigns. 

An impressive 47% of email recipients open their emails solely based on the subject line. That means that if you want to spiral your rates, you have to work on crafting compelling lines that readers can’t resist opening.

If the subject line doesn’t move your recipients, they’re not going to even think about opening it. It’s a decision that happens in milliseconds, so your messaging needs to be really strong.

• Vague
• Curiosity
• Reminder/Nudge
• FOMO/Urgency
• Flattery

4. Preview Text 

Is the Subject Line the only “email estate” you can take advantage of and incentivize your buyers to tap on your email notification? Thankfully, it’s not.

Preview Text works exceptionally well as a following, one-two punchline. 

Don’t just describe what your email is about. Better use the Preview Text to knock out the voice in your recipients’ heads saying “Don’t open this bs”.

Be brief, to the point, and try to compel without using a lot of words. Like most things, less is more.

• Mention the offer
• Ask a question
• Link with the subject line
• Create urgency with a deadline
• Start with the recipient’s name

5. Sender Name

The last ingredient of your email-success recipe: Sender Name.

If you think that this factor has zero impact on your email open rate, you really should reconsider.

Sender Name is an attribute that can do wonders for making your business feel more human and personal.

To be more engaged, people want to feel like they’re interacting with a real person and not a faceless brand.

By using the actual sender’s name, you instantly provide a more personal touch to your email campaigns, making people more likely to open them.

Pivot your Open Rate course upwards

Why keep staying up late at night, trying to figure out how to boost your email open rate?

Every issue has an expert to solve it, and when it comes to email marketing, we’re not shy to take pride in our abilities.