Email Open Rate: How to Improve it?

What are the benchmarks for email open rates?

Regarding your prospecting emails, 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:

• Below 60%: is considered bad. You may have technical problems to fix
• 60%-80%: is considered average. You can improve it with copywriting adjustment
• Above 80%: is considered very. It’s almost impossible to reach a 100% open rate.

Not that email opens are tracked using a pixel left on the email. Whenever the email is opened, the pixel is loaded. Some apps prevent that pixel from loading, which may result in people opening (and even replying!) but LaGrowthMachine is not tracking the open.

This is also why it’s almost impossible to reach a 100% open rate!

What are the technical adjustments to improve my open rate?

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.

Warming up the email domain

If your email domain is new, you need to 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:

• Manual: during the next three weeks, use your professional email to exchange with other people outside of your organization. Also, sign up for newsletters so you may receive a lot of emails too.
• Automated: some services will do the above automatically. It will mutualize emails that are looking to be warmed up by sending emails to each other and automatically replying.
  
  You can use MailWarm, MailReach or Gmass’s warm-up service!

Setting up DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and MX records

Sounds complicated? It is not. All four elements allow for verifying the authenticity of each email sent. The more you’ve 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!

Disabled click tracking

To track if your clicks are being clicked, LaGrowthMachine generates an intermediary link that, when clicked, tracks the click, 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:

• Without a custom tracking domain, the link is tracked using a common domain that many email services identify as spam, which results in a low open rate.
• With a custom tracking domain, the tracking is done via your own domain, which, along with an SPF and DKIM authentication, avoids having your email identified as spam

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

Reduce the volume of emails sent per day

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 initiate a big push for a few days, you usually should avoid sending more than 300 emails per day to keep a good domain reputation.

We at LaGrowthMachine follow this rule religiously, we even integrated it as a parameter into every user’s outreach limits.

Don’t worry though, it is still an adjustable parameter, as you can see in this screenshot. The more emails you set it to send, the riskier it gets for your email domain

What are the copywriting adjustments to improve my open rate?

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

• The sender’s identity: this is basically your name
• The email’s title:
• The preview: people often forget but this is also a key component to improving your opening rate

Let’s look into them one by one

Adjustments to the identity

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 outreach 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 LaGrowthMachine”.

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

Adjustments to the title

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

• Intriguing but not too salesy
• Honest
• Friendly
• Avoid anything too generic and lengthy
• Write a compelling subject line that’s not clickbaity

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

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

Adjustment of the preview

This is too often forgotten, though a big part of the decision-making process is 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:

• Make sure that the preview will show elements that will incite curiosity.
• Will it flatter the reader or make them feel warmer inside?
• Is this person or group of people used to being talked to in a certain way?
• Will it shock them and make them dislike me right from the start?

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

• Create empathy & talk about them!
• Acknowledge their time is precious
• Acknowledge they’re important
• Acknowledge their pain point
• Explain why you are reaching out

How can I warm up my leads to improve my open rate using nudges on LinkedIn & Twitter?

Another way to improve your open rate is to boost your lead’s awareness of your name and your brand before sending an email. This is to eventually convert them from being an MQL to an SQL.

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:

• Soft warm-up: actions such as visiting its profile on LinkedIn or following the lead on Twitter
• Hard warm-up: sending a message before (or simultaneously) on another channel to build rapport

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

Warming up leads on LinkedIn with LaGrowthMachine

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 fast 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 guide your lead to look into your profile, and probably your company thereafter. You should therefore make sure to optimize your LinkedIn 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 their 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 they accepted your request or not. This will look even more human!

The Hard Warm-Up approach:

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

Warming up leads on Twitter with LaGrowthMachine

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

• Soft warm-up: using actions that will generate a notification. This includes following, liking, and retweeting content from your leads.
• Hard warm-up: using actions to interact directly with the lead. This includes tweeting at the lead and sending direct messages to them.

I know what you’re thinking: but I don’t have the Twitter of my leads. Fortunately, LaGrowthMachine 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 basically 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 Messages 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 your read:

• Our guide on how to optimize your Twitter account to build trust: just as with LinkedIn, the goal of warming up leads is for them to visit your account.
  
  If it’s not optimized to build trust and curiosity, it’s not worth the try…
• Our guide on how to use Twitter in your prospection: we’ve seen soft nudges, but Twitter is a channel of its own that can be great for outbound!
  
  If your audience is active there, you definitely should! The reply rate there is through the roof. But there are a few requirements to know before adding Twitter to your strategy mix.

How can I use advertising to warm up my leads and improve my open rate?

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 reaching out to them.

There are two ways to do so:

• Broad targeting using LinkedIn
• Precise targeting on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter using LaGrowthMachine retargeting feature

Broad targeting using LinkedIn

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 that know how to create Ad 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:

• You can’t individually target people via LinkedIn Ads – which means you’ll be paying to target leads you’re not interested in
• It’s tedious to organize by hand
• Only LinkedIn allows you to do such targeting based on job experiences
• LinkedIn is expensive and reach is low

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

Don’t forget, LaGrowthMachine automatically enriches not only professional emails but also personal emails. We will be using them both!

In the following example, you can see that we found the personal AND professional emails of around 65% of our lead list.

Micro-targeting on LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter using LaGrowthMachine

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

• Using demographic attributes: such as we’ve seen above on LinkedIn.
• Using emails: all three platforms allow you to import a list of emails addresses you wish to do advertising on, by uploading a customer list on Facebook, a customer list on LinkedIn, and a custom audience on Twitter
  
  It’s a great way to individually target each lead, but there’s a catch: it has to be the email they signed up with on the platform.
  
  And most of the time, it won’t be their professional email, but their personal email.
  
  The good news is that, once you’re connected with somebody on LinkedIn, 80% of leads will share their personal email with you, which LaGrowthMachine will automatically gather for you.
  
  The other good news is that you can fully automate that process using Webhook as seen below.

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

This way, you are printing ads to the leads you’re reaching via LaGrowthMachine, building better awareness before sending emails!

How can I improve my open rate using the spins?

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

What is a spin?

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 him 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 you started fundraising, congratulations!|Just want to congratulate you on 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:

• Hello John! What’s up? I was scrolling Linkedin and noticed your fundraising, congratulations!
• Hi John! What’s up? I was scrolling Linkedin and noticed your fundraising, congratulations!
• Hello John! What’s up? I was scrolling Linkedin and noticed your fundraising, congratulations!
• Hey John! What’s up? Your last fundraising is impressive, saw it on Linkedin, exciting news!
• Hey John! How have you been lately? I was scrolling Linkedin and noticed your fundraising, congratulations!
• Hi John! How have you been lately? Your last fundraising is impressive, saw it on Linkedin, exciting news
• And so on ….

Why should I use spins when my leads are using Outlook?

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.

How to create spins?

Two possibilities:

• You can do it manually, using a free spinning tool: prepare your sentences / make it spin/copy and paste for each email. It works but it takes time and it’s painful.
• Trust LaGrowthMachine to make your emails spin automatically.

Create your spins in your email template:

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

It’s up to you now!