Decreasing Email Open Rate? Here's Why!

Preparing an email for any campaign or event and perfecting it from the start is a tedious task that requires a great deal of detail. When you finally hit the send button on every formal blast, after the hard-spent days, the feeling cannot be described in words. However, all the hopes come crumbling down when you see the open rate is low and continues to decrease progressively. Being a marketer, your heartbreaks. But don’t panic! We will share a few ways with you, and you will be back on track to get back the open rates that you used to see.

Let’s start with what happened!

You should know that this happens with almost every marketer, and at some point, the higher open rate goes down.

Here are 4 elementary problems that might be causing your email open rate to decrease and solutions for them are as follows -

Too Big Email
If all your emails have a good opening rate, but one particular email has tanked, then it could be fixed easily. When emails are bigger and lengthier, emails sent to Gmail addresses get clipped, and the entire email can be seen only after your receiver clicks the ‘View Entire Message’. This not only affects the readability and completeness of the mail but also unless the Gmail user clicks it, it is considered as not opened. Well, email receivers generally don’t prefer clicking the links.

In order to avoid the clipping of emails, it is highly recommended to keep your email less than 102kb. Send yourself a preview mail and check if your entire message is loading or not. Also, use HTML sizing tools to check how large your email is.

If your email is large, then remove individual blocks like text, images, spacers etc. and they can reduce the size of the email.

After fixing all these, try emailing again. If your open rate bounces back to the earlier one, then you know what the problem was.

Subject Lines Are Not Doing Their Right Job
Your subject lines are the key element that makes your receivers open the email. It is a must that you optimize your subject line at 41 characters or 7 words and makes it more punching.

Here are 5 email subject lines that tend to do the job for you –

  • Exciting Offers
  • Curious/Blind Lines
  • Self Interest Lines
  • Urgent Subject Lines
  • Relevance/Story Lines

If your subject line is on point then your email open rate will surely increase.

Using Too Many Spam Words
This is really something that you can encounter easily. If your email campaign content has too many spam words like affordable, click here, apply now, bonus, money, unlimited, promise, win, free access, urgent, purchase, open, trial, order now, take action then email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. put your email into the subscriber’s junk folder.

Remove as many of these spam words as possible and your emails will reach the right destination, and your open rate will increase.

Your Subscribers Have Lost the Excitement
Well, it might happen sometimes. But don’t get disheartened. It is time to run a survey and ask your readers what they want to read. Ask specific questions and give options to them and also don’t forget to ask them their suggestions.

Also check the deliverability rate, sender reputation and score and frequency of sending emails and see your decreased open rate will slowly improve.

A decreased open rate can be tackled easily if you partner with an expert. They will take care of all these issues and fix them from time to time.

Irrelevant Audience
Your email open rate might be decreasing for another reason. The message is right but it is landing to the wrong audience. Here comes the database aspect, which is important. And also, there are different personas within the same firm. For instance – Finance, Business, Operations and IT heads – belonging to the same firm will have different stakes and agendas. So, your messaging and subject lines have to be tweaked for the different personas every time, even if the product is same. If this is done correctly then your opening rates will be increasing, and it will create a positive impact on your business growth.

To conclude with, decreasing open email rate is not a good sign and needs instant attention so that problems could be fixed, and attrition could be avoided. And it is a good option to take expert help, who have more knowledge to take care of complicated situations better.

Targetorate Consulting, an expert in digital marketing who uses the latest technologies to run successful email campaigns with high opening rates. So, if you want an increased email campaign opening rate then, partner with us!

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