How can you get your email to capture the attention of recipients and entice them to pay attention? Business-to-business email open rates range from 10% into the 20% range, according to the Email Benchmark Guide of 2006.

Here at PWR New Media, we aim to beat that average. The email opening rates of our projects average approximately 22%. Here are a few things we suggest to improve the opening rate of your email.

1. Make it relevant. The best way to ensure recipients will open your email, and continue to do so over time, is to be sure the information you include is relevant and interesting. At PWR, some of our most effective projects have provided desired information, offered great deals or otherwise made recipients’ lives a bit easier.

2. Target well. The more highly targeted your email list is, the higher your open rate will be.  Choose recipients who will be genuinely interested in what you have to say. Tracking reports, opt-out links and forwarding capabilities can help you effectively segment, increase and control your list.  If you have questions about how to create or manage an effective list, try calling us.  Our resident list guru, Phoebe Pierson Carleton, will be happy to help.

3. Keep the subject line short and snappy. Make sure your subject line simply and succinctly states what you are offering and highlights the benefit.  Whether you’re just sharing new information, introducing your product to a new audience, or communicating with current customers you want to pique their interest.  Studies show that short subject lines are best—3 words test highest—and subject lines in the form of a question are also highly successful. Avoid caps, excessive punctuation and words that are likely to get spammed such as “free” and “no obligation.”

4. Choose the right time. Remember that most people read email at work and from top to bottom rather than in the order received. If you’re sending to numerous time zones, recipients on the West coast will receive an email sent at 8 a.m. EST at 5 a.m. their time; by they time they show up at the office your email will be off their screen. In our experience, late morning mid-week distributions test best. Test different times to see what works best with your audience.

5. Select the right From name. People are much more likely to open emails from well-known and trusted sources. Choose a From line that will be familiar to them. Personal names don’t generally do well unless all your recipients know who you are. If you are a broker, don’t use the name of your PR or marketing firm but rather the name of your client’s organization. 

6. Give them what they want. Think about what your recipients might need in order to respond to your call to action. It might be simply a link to a website where they can get more information or order your product. If you’re targeting journalists, add any information—such as images, logos, biographies, backgrounders—a journalist might need to write a story with minimum hassle.  And remember, video is one of the most effective ways to tell your story and can easily be incorporated into any email distribution.

7. Test, test and test again. Although there is no way to account for every possible browser setting, ISP configuration and firewall design, recipients can’t respond to your email if they don’t receive it.  It is essential to test your email prior to distribution to ensure there are no deliverability problems.  If you use PWR to distribute your email communications pieces, we test, test, test for you. If you use another source, make sure they spam and browser test every email prior to distribution and are willing to spend the time and energy troubleshooting any problems that arise to ensure your email shows up at the other end looking and working great. (It is also important to send every email in both an HTML and plain text version so that users who can’t receive HTML, such as users opening email on a PDA or cell phone, can still receive your email.)

Email communication has quickly become one of the most effective means of communicating with any audience and the ability to track who opened your email is one of the many advantages of HTML emails. Tracking works because each email includes a small pixel embedded in the code which transmits a message back to your email distributor when it’s opened so we can track open rates. That means that recipients who receive your email as plain text—because they are on a Blackberry, cell phone or just have images turned off in their email—may not be counted. Additionally, a small percentage of businesses now install software which blocks the web beacons.

Despite this, your open rate does give you a very good representation of who opened your email (not to mention, in some cases, their names, phone numbers and email addresses to assist in follow up).  In reality, your open rate is probably a bit higher than what is reported on your tracking report. We hope the tips above help you drive that number even higher. 

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