How to Increase Email Open Rates

by Infinity Concepts | Jul 26, 2016 | Creative, Digital

Countless hours go into writing the perfect subject line for each new email. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but subject lines do get much of the focus. Why? Because a well written subject line can increase the open rate, and typical open rates are only 20-30%. (Source: https://mailchimp.com/en/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/)

With the right strategy, email preview text can also give recipients another reason to open the email. Let’s look at how this works in more detail.

Email preview text is the short line of text that shows up underneath or beside the email subject line. (It is also sometimes referred to as pre-headers or snippets.)

By default, most email clients (Gmail, Outlook, iPhone Mail, etc.) will pull the first line of text found in the email as the preview text. Sometimes this works. However, many times it displays the description or links from the email header. It would be much better to display a customized line of text that actually gives recipient valuable content.

There are many ways to accomplish this. Simply adding the text at the above the email template will work. Yet, when the email is opened, the placement of this text may look awkward to the recipient. Another way is to remove any header elements that include text. This will result in the first line of the email being used as the preview text. Best of all, there are a variety of ways to hide the text so that it is only displayed as preview text.

Whatever option is chosen, it is best to write a unique line of text for every email that is created.