The open rate of your email is a leading indicator of your email performance. Anything below 60% is considered bad and will affect your performance rate negatively

Want to learn how to improve your email open rate? Read-on

Table of contents :

Given you’re using direct emails and not marketing domains, your average opening rate should reach at least 60%. Anything below is considered bad and might be explained by a technical setup that is wrong or bad copywriting.

Benchmark :

If you have an open rate below 60%, there is a high probability that it is because you haven’t set up your email account right.

If your email domain is new, you must build some activity for other email servers to trust your domain. A new email domain that suddenly sends lots of emails is suspicious!

You have two approaches possible :

Sounds complicated? It is not. All four elements allow for verifying the authenticity of each email sent. The more you’re set-up, the better another server will trust you, enhancing your deliverability.

It’s a must-do before starting any email campaign. Read our guidelines on how to set up my Gsuite email domain properly!

To track if your links are being clicked, La Growth Machine generates an intermediary link that, when clicked, tracks the click, and then automatically redirects it to the original page.

It’s a great way, but also it’s easily identified by email service without a custom tracking domain. :

To prevent it, you need to set up a custom tracking domain.

If you’re sending too many emails per day, your activity may look suspicious. In the long run, you may end up in spam. While you can have a push for a few days, in general, you should avoid sending more than 300 emails to keep a good domain reputation.

If all technical adjustments have been made, but you’re still having bad open rates, then it’s probably your copywriting that’s wrong.

Let’s deep dive into the three elements that people see when they receive the email before opening

Let’s look into them one by one

The identity is the first thing people see is your name.

If they know you, it’s easy. But most of the time while prospecting, you won’t know each other. In that case, you can warm them up, by either having soft touches on LinkedIn or Emails. Or use email as a follow-up to reaching out via LinkedIn/Twitter before.

Do you have a great band? Try showcasing it in the identity!

A great brand can open many doors. If you can’t warm them up or are using Email as the first channel to contact, you may choose to send your email with an identity such as “{{Firstname}} from {{companyName}}”, which, in our case, would look like “Brice from La Growth Machine”.

However, this will look a lot like a marketing email and may be treated as such (deleted…). Use with caution!

The title should be the reason you’re contacting them, it should be :

On a technical note, keep it short. Whatever device, the preview is limited:

For email title suggestions, have a look at our blog post-Anatomy Of The Perfect Email Introduction

This is too often forgotten, though a big part of the decision-making process to open or ignore the email. As you can see, it's 70% of what you’ll see, whether on desktop or mobile.

Here are a few rules and questions to keep in mind :

You must try to create a strong connection right from the start :

For email preview suggestions, have a look at our blog post-Anatomy Of The Perfect Email Introduction

Another way to improve your open rate is to boost your lead’s awareness about your name and your brand before sending an email.

Remember, identity is one of the first elements a lead will read while receiving the email. If it comes from a familiar name or brand, they’ll be more inclined to open it.

This is what warming up leads is all about building a trusted name/brand.

When warming up leads, there are two different approaches you can use :

Let’s deep-dive into how you can warm up leads via LinkedIn & Twitter within La Growth Machine to build awareness!

The soft-touch approach

Let’s build awareness using two actions :

1) Visiting its profile to generate a notification that you visited its profile.

The fastest way is to visit a day or two before sending the first email. And each time you send an email

Do note that it will lead your lead to look into your profile, and probably your company thereafter. You should therefore make sure to optimize your profile and company page, by following our guide here!

If you have time, you can slowly build up awareness by visiting several times before starting the outbound.

2) Adding somebody on LinkedIn, without a note, to create a stronger impression than just visiting his profile.

While a profile visit may sometimes go unnoticed, it’s hard to miss a connection request. Though it’s a one-time opportunity and this means you won’t be able to use it as a pitch opportunity later in the sequence

If you time it right, do pay attention to adapting your message whether he accepted your request or not. This will look even more human!

Using LinkedIn as a first point of outreach, and email as a fallback. The goal here is to build a soft relationship on LinkedIn (they may yield a reply) before pitching via email.

This approach works great for more traditional audiences (Senior & big corporates).

Should you want to implement it, we suggest reading our guidelines on how to best use LinkedIn and then Email sequences

Just like we’ve seen with LinkedIn, Twitter has two different approaches :

I know what you’re thinking: but I don’t have the Twitter of my leads. Fortunately, La Growth Machine will automatically find your lead’s Twitter account. No need for additional work on your side.

To warm up your leads, you’ll want to use each approach depending on whether you’re using your personal Twitter or a branded Twitter account

What’s the difference between a personal and a branded account?

A branded account is your company's Twitter account. It’s great for awareness, but terrible for outbound.

If you’re looking to warm up leads by printing out your brand and building awareness around it, then you should use your branded account.

If you’re looking to use Twitter as an outreach channel, using Direct Message or Tweets, you should use your personal account. People like talking to people, not faceless brands.

The soft-touch approach

The main goal of using your branded Twitter account is to build awareness about your brand before pitching using soft notifications. The best approach is to follow the lead's accounts, but also make sure to regularly unfollow them. Otherwise, you’ll end up accumulating followings, which will betray automation...

If you’re using Twitter, we recommend you to read :

Warming up a lead is all about building awareness of your name, or brand, before the actual outbound. We’ve seen methods involving individual touches, but to build awareness, nothing is better than advertising.

The goal will be to print Ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter on our leads before and while we’re outreaching to them.

There are two ways to do so :

Just as you build a list of leads using Sales Navigator, you can choose to pre-target advertising on that same audience via the LinkedIn Ads platform

This is dedicated to more advanced growth people who know how to create Ads sets and targets.

Just translate your Sales Navigator Search into the LinkedIn Ads Target, set a 10€/day budget and you’re good to go

Well, it’s not that easy :

But if you’re using La Growth Machine, you can do retargeting on leads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter simultaneously, using custom audiences and emails we get.

Don’t forget, that La Growth Machine automatically enriches professional email but also personal emails. We will be using them both!

On each advertising platform, you have two ways of identifying leads :

You can then push it automatically to Facebook or LinkedIn custom audiences using Webhook + Zapier!

This way, you are printing ads to leads you’re outreaching to via La Growth Machine, building better awareness before sending emails!

If you’re targeting big companies/corporations, they’re probably using Outlook to handle their emails. In that case, you’ll want to use spins!

Spins will allow you to randomly generate different sentences in the same email keeping the meaning of the message.

For instance, you want to send a message to John to say hi and congratulate them on his last fundraising. The message could be: Hello John, hope you’re doing well. I’ve discovered your fundraising in the news, congratulations!

If you want this sentence to spin, you need to think about different ways to say it and make sure they work together :

{Hello|Hi|Hey} John! {Hope you’re doing good.|What’s up?|How have you been lately?} {I was scrolling Linkedin and noticed your fundraising, congratulations!|Just want to congratulate you for your series C! I saw you in the news.|Your last fundraising is impressive, saw it on Linkedin, exciting news !}

If you make this sentence spin, you’ll generate a hundred different patterns :

Text spinning is valuable when you have an ABM strategy and you’re targeting several leads in the same company.

Corporate groups usually use Outlook as an email provider. Outlook servers can identify when a third party sends the same email to several employees in the same company.

The goal is to avoid the company’s employees being spammed. If the server spots you, your emails will be considered spam and your open rate will drop, and so will your conversion rate.

Using spins will allow your email to trick the server so it does not end up in spam but in your lead's inbox.

Two possibilities :

Create your spins in your email template :

Then continue building your sequence and when ready, launch your campaign without worrying about spinning: La Growth Machine is going to spin your template to generate a hundred different combinations of emails!

It’s up to you now!

We’ve shared with you the basics and very advanced techniques. Get creative, work on your segmentation and copywriting, and get more leads!

We’ve shared with you the basics and very advanced techniques. Get creative, work on your segmentation and copywriting, and get more leads!