How to Increase Your Email Open Rates by 10% in 2 Minutes
As you probably already know your race email list is one of the most powerful marketing tools that you have. If you’ve built it correctly it will be full of people who have run your race in the past and/or are interested in receiving updates from you about your future events. So, when you email over a special announcement, promotion, or offer you obviously want to max out that open rate.
At RunGuides we use a simple method that consistently increases our open rates by 10% – 15% with no affect on unsubscribe numbers or abuse complaints. The best part? It takes about 2 minutes to do and anyone can do it.
Sounds Great! Tell me how!!
Sure! Here’s what you do:
1 – Send out your regular email campaign
Nothing too crazy here. Just send out your regular campaign. With us that usually means we’ll send an email out to a city with a list of cool upcoming running races.
2 – Replicate your campaign, send to non-openers
We know that 99% of people that open our campaigns will do so within about 4 days (review your emails to find out what the case is for you).
So, immediately after sending out our first campaign we schedule a second campaign to go out 5 or 6 days after the first one (sometimes that means editing the content a bit, but usually not).
Make sure you use these restrictions:
- User must have been sent the first campaign
- User must not have opened the campaign
It’s also a good idea to try out some new subject lines in these as well (you do split test your subject lines right? If not, start now!).
3 – Watch your opens soar/dish out high fives
That’s it! Now you just sit back and watch as your second email goes out to people who missed opening the first one.
Our first emails typically open at around 40%, with us we find that around 15 – 25% of people open the second email, which increases our campaign open rate by around 10%. That can mean hundreds more opens, more conversions, and more event registrations faster.
Not bad for 2 minutes of effort!