A colleague of mine recently reached out to help figure out why the open rates on a clients email were lower than they had hoped for. They were able to share some analytics with me and I was able to help give some recommendations. I wrote a few months ago about 4 Ways to Increase Your Newsletter Open Rate and today I have 3 more ideas to share with you based on our conversation.
- Change the Day – This client is a retail location and they were sending on Thursday’s during the day. My exact suggestion was since it’s a retail location don’t send mid-day Thursday’s. People may be thinking about needing to shop at this store but probably won’t have time to really consider it till Thursday evening when they’re home and know they need to get it done this weekend (a great time to send) or even Sunday’s as they’re planning out their week.
- Review Your Reporting – MailChimp has a LOT of great reporting tools. Download your sent campaigns report and start to look for trends. With this client, Thursday’s had their worst open rates. I had a client who didn’t like her open rates (BTW they were ridiculous and I’d kill for them) but we looked and found Monday’s at 11:45 were the best open rate. We’ve moved back to that time (for now) and the numbers have increased again which is great.
- A/B Testing– How’s your subject line? Test it. Maybe it’s your delivery time (7 am? 5pm? Tuesday? Sunday?) Test it. MailChimp makes it easy to test a lot of different variables. I would suggest testing ONE thing at a time not three, but make sure you test to make sure you’re sending WHAT and WHEN your subscribers want it.
What do you do to up your newsletter open rate?
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