Cold email course

Even though the open rate doesn’t indicate campaign’s success, it’s one of the factors that has a big impact on it. The more prospects open your email, the greater the chance they reply. Naturally, you want your campaigns to have as high an open rate as possible. 

So what things impact the open rate?

• subject line
• from line 
• preview text
• deliverability rate

Let’s talk about each factor in more detail now. 

The subject line should be the first thing to test if you want to increase the open rate. It’s like a key that opens your message - It encourages (or discourages...) a receiver to read it. 

Prospect-oriented subject lines get the highest open rate - those that refer to prospect’s business needs or challenges they may face (and to which your product is a solution). 

Also, personalized subject lines tend to get more opens - on average it’s 47% vs. 37% in case of non-personalized ones. Use snippets to personalize the subject line with prospect’s first name or their company name and track the results.

Let’s move to the “from line” and preview text. These are the two things people see right away when an email from you hits their inbox. You may test various forms of a “from line”, including only your first name, or full name with a job title, or full name with a company name, like I discussed in the second lesson. 

The preview text is a sneak peak of your message. It’s a sentence that your email begins with. That’s why it’s so important that your message intro should catch recipients’ attention and not be about you. 

If you don’t see much difference in the open rate after testing various subject lines, try experimenting with the “from line” and email preview to see if that changes something. 

And one last, but very important thing: If you notice a sudden drop in the open rate, it may be a sign that your emails go to SPAM. We’ll get back to this issue later on in a section on improving the deliverability rate.