Need to Improve Your Email Open Rates? Try These 8 Tips

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

Today I’m going to show you how to improve your email open rate.

I’ve used these exact tactics to get a 37%+ open rate on a list of 170k.

And an open rate of 40% on another list that has about 65k subscribers.

With that, here are 8 effective ways to increase your email open rate.

1. Use Short Subject Lines

There’s no doubt about it:

Short subject lines = more opens.

In the early days of my email newsletter, I would use SUPER long subject lines.

I thought that stuffing a bunch of info into my subject line would make people want to open my email.

But I was wrong.

That’s when I decided to test super-short subject lines.

And my open rate went from 30% to over 45%.

So: why does this work?

  1. Get through spam filters: Short email subject lines help you get through email spam filters (especially Gmail).

  2. Look good on mobile: Most mobile email apps cut subject lines off at around 30-40 characters.

  3. Element of mystery: A long subject line tells your reader everything they need to know, while short subject lines create curiosity.

2. Send Plain-Text Emails

One of the simplest ways to increase your open rate is:

Start sending plain-text emails.

This can help your open rate because:

  1. Avoids promotions tab: Fancy HTML emails tend to end up in Gmail’s promotion tab.

  2. Engagement: People engage more with simple emails.

3. Clean Up Your Email List

I had a serious issue:

My email open rates were dropping from 30%… to 10-20%.

I removed about 20k inactive subscribers, and it worked REALLY well.

4. Use Double Opt-in

Double opt-in can help improve your open rate.

This means asking new subscribers to confirm their email address:

5. Test Emails For Gmail’s Promotion Tab

Gmail decides where to place your messages based on sender reputation and engagement rates.

You can use The Litmus “Which Gmail Tab?” testing tool to see which tab your emails end up in.

6. Send at a Consistent Time and Day

Sending your emails at the same time can help increase your open rates.

I started to send the Exploding Topics newsletter at 9am Eastern every Tuesday like clockwork.

7. Segment Your Subscribers

According to Mailchimp, segmented email campaigns have a 14% higher open rate.

8. Use a Recognizable Sender Name

Your “From” name is often what decides whether your email gets opened.

Bonus #1: Send a Welcome Email

Your first email is important for optimizing open rates.

Bonus #2: Send Emails at The Right Time

Data from GetResponse suggests that the best time to send an email for maximum open rate is between 10am and 1pm.

Wrapping Up

Email open rate isn’t one magic trick; it’s a bunch of small trust signals stacking up.

Here’s a simple “do this next” plan: