Email open rate is one of the primary email metrics that email marketers look at in order to determine how well a campaign or a brand’s email marketing strategy as a whole is doing. A good open rate effectively points to many other aspects of a campaign and your brand as a whole from consumer trust to your deliverability rate. Thus, a dwindling open rate is certainly something no company would welcome. All email campaigns are different and can vary greatly from company to company, but there are certain key aspects that if not checked could have the potential to have a negative impact on open rates.
Are you suffering from drooping email rates? If yes, then you must be thinking how effectively can you correct this. The answer is simple: improve the quality of your free gift. But you must also recognize that not everyone is going to like your style, not everyone is going to like your free gift. So instead of trying to be everything to all people, you have a great product that works for the most, and is exactly what the squeeze page said it would be, and accept a certain level of email open rate drop-off after the first email.
So what are other reasons why people stop opening your emails after the first one, and hence your email open rate goes down?
1) They do not feel you are delivering useful content. To correct this, improve the quality and substantiveness of your content. Only send your subscribers your very best. But even the best content will not do much good if it is not relevant to the person who receives it. This is where list segmentation and by extension personalised campaigns become of vital importance. Serving the right content to the right people will not only ensure more engagement from your subscribers.
2) They no longer trust you, because you misrepresented a link. This can also happen when they FEEL as though you misrepresented a link. Sometimes they will understand something you say to mean one thing, then they get to the page you send them to and it is not what you expected. Although you can work to improve the exactness of what you write, and certainly avoid all hype, you cannot correct all of this – but the more careful you are to accurately represent everything that you promote, the less the dropoff in email open rates will be.
3) They are bombarded with offers from others and from you and simply become tired of the emails. Although there is not much you can do about the competitions’ emails, and although if you decrease your mailing frequency, you decrease total response (although open rate may remain a little higher), about the only thing you can do here is to make sure that you are being differentiated from all the other emails out there by offering superior content and recommendations.
If you can put stress on these parameters, then certainly you will recover from your dropping email open rates.