Increase Your Open Rates

The information the recipient got was the sender, the title, and possibly the beginning of the message. With this information they will decide whether to open your e-mail or not and possibly even mark it as spam, ensuring they will never see your messages in their inbox again.

For the Sender Name, make sure that you enter something that is immediately recognizable by your subscribers and be consistent. Generally you want this to be the name of your organization.

On the Subject: line, consistency is key as most people quickly scan their e-mail and unless a message is immediately recognizable they will pass it over. To start with, it is best to put the name of your publication. This should be followed by a hook, or something to grab your readers attention. When encouraging someone to open your message, it is important to remember that you are building a trust relationship with them. You may create a great hook but if you don't follow through on the promise of the hook, your reader will think twice about opening your message again. What if you have a few ideas and want to know what works on your audience. Here is where the real fun begins. With thedatabank, you can try out multiple Subject lines and see which one worked better.

On the Results page you can easily find out what your message open rate was for each batch or for the whole campaign. To get started with multiple batches and try out different styles of Subjects, try sending one Subject to A-M on your list, say "Blueberries: The Canary in the Coal Mine", and another Subject to N-Z, "The Blueberry Needs You". You would then be able to see which of your subjects was more successful.

You can also use multiple batches to segment your message for different groups. If you think that a group would respond better to a certain Subject line, thedatabank makes it easy to create and analyze those results.