Email marketing is by far the most effective online marketing strategy. It should be the cornerstone of any digital marketing campaign, as it helps you build a relationship with your leads.
From capturing leads to nurturing hot prospects, email provides the tools every marketer needs to reach them.
The only problem is that with so many campaigns being sent out, it can often become difficult to get noticed in the inbox.
In this guide, I’ll share 7 actionable email marketing tips that you can use to increase your email open rates.
1. Personalize the subject line using the recipient’s name
One of the most overlooked aspects of email marketing is the subject line.
A great subject line can increase click-through rates, reduce unsubscribes, and increase engagement, which can ultimately affect your bottom line.
If you’re not using the recipient’s name in your subject line, that’s a big mistake.
Here are a few tips to help you personalize your subject line:
- Personalize the email address. Your recipient’s name is one of the first pieces of information they see when they open your email. Make it easy to recognize you by including their name in the subject line. Don’t use “Dear John.” Use something like “John Smith” or “John Doe” instead.
- Use additional information about the recipients in the subject line, such as first name and company. This will help them quickly identify with who they’re receiving the message and make it more personal and interesting.
- Use different words for each recipient — don’t just repeat your recipient’s name throughout the entire email. If you do this, it will be hard for recipients to tell who’s replying to whom and may cause some confusion as to who’s paying attention to whom.
The subject line is the first thing your subscribers see when they open their inbox.
It tells them what’s in store for them if they decide to read your email.
If your subject lines don’t grab people’s attention and make them want to open their email, your open rates will decrease.
Read More: How to Find Anyone’s Business Email Address
2. Improve your subject lines, so more people open them
Your email subject lines should be goal-oriented, fascinating, and actionable. Give people what they want and need to succeed with you.
One of the best ways to do that is by featuring statistics or real-life anecdotes in your subject lines.
People want information that will help them succeed, and they’ll act more on it if they have a strong emotional attachment to it.
For example, if you send someone a newsletter with a subject line that says, “Immediately grow your site’s traffic with these expert SEO strategies,” they’re 100 times more likely to click onto your email than if they read, “Here are some great SEO tips”.
Write email subject lines that convince the reader if they open the email, they will find information that will help them or provide them with value.
3. Have a compelling ‘from’ name
Customers are more likely to open an email from someone they know because they trust them.
If you’re sending out many emails, it makes sense that you want to make sure that your emails are seen by the people who are most likely to read them.
For this reason, it’s worth considering changing your ‘from’ name to something more personal and relevant.
Your ‘from’ name will show up in the sender’s address bar, so you need to ensure that it’s relevant enough for your customers to recognize.
You can use both first names and surnames for this purpose, but reading the email addresses of other companies is not recommended as this can give away vital information about your business.
4. Include an opt-out option
Open rates are the number of people who open your email.
If you’re sending an email to 10,000 people and only 2,000 open it, you’re not doing very well. It doesn’t matter how good your subject line or copy is — if nobody reads it, it’s not going to get results.
The best way to improve open rates is to reduce the amount of junk mail you send out and add a way to opt out for good.
If you have a newsletter with 1,000 subscribers and you want them to stay subscribed, then offer them a way to opt out.
Everyone likes an opt-out — no one likes getting emails they don’t want — and having an opt-out can boost your open rate by up to 20 percent.
5. A/B test your emails
A/B testing email marketing is a way to test the results of different variations of an email.
Using a different version of an email will allow you to see how conversions increase or decrease.
In email marketing, open rates are measured by how many people receive an email after visiting a certain page with the campaign.
They tell you how many times someone opened your email compared to how many times they closed it whenever they received it in the inbox.
The higher your open rate, the more interest you generated from your campaign and the easier it was for people to decide whether or not they wanted to work with you.
6. Keep your email content short and sweet.
While some may believe that more is always better, it’s not always the case.
Yes, you can go overboard with your email content and end up with a bunch of unnecessary fluff, but you need to strike a balance.
Email content should be engaging, interesting, and well-written enough to be read without clicking through to something else.
Bottom line:
- Keep your email copy short and sweet.
- Make it easy to read.
- Don’t repeat yourself too much.
- Keep your list clean.
7. Encourage users to take an action.
The most common email marketing mistake is failing to include a call to action.
But this doesn’t mean your emails don’t have calls to action.
Of course, they do — but they’re hidden in the subject line and throughout the body of the email instead of in the subject line.
Calls to action aren’t just about getting people to take some kind of action like signing up for your newsletter or visiting your website.
They’re all about encouraging users to take an immediate, specific action that leads them closer to a conversion or goal.
You can create a call to action that encourages people to download an eBook, make a purchase, install an app, start a trial, and so on.
Read More: Top Reasons to build an Email List today
Good Email Open Rate: Conclusion

Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your existing and potential customers, and it’s also an excellent way to gain new clients and sales.
However, if you’ve been sending out emails without seeing any results or engagement, try some of the actionable email marketing tips above to improve your email open rates.
I hope that the tips outlined in this post were insightful and actionable.
If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message, and I’ll do my best to respond with a helpful answer.