We’ve all been there. You’ve spent hours crafting the perfect email campaign to promote your products, services, or blog post content on Shopify. But it doesn’t seem to get the traction you were hoping for when sending it out. A low Shopify email open rate can be frustrating, primarily if you’ve invested much time and effort into your email campaign.
But don’t despair! You can employ several simple yet effective email marketing campaign strategies to improve the open rates of emails for your Shopify store. In this article, we will explore 17 practical strategies to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.
What is Shopify Email Open Rate?
Before diving into the strategies, defining the Shopify email open rate is essential. It’s the percentage of recipients who open your email. This metric indicates how well your email subject line and email content resonate with your target audience and how successful your email marketing campaigns are.
It’s a crucial metric to monitor, as a high open rate means your emails are being seen and potentially engaged with, while a low open rate means they’re being overlooked or ignored.
To calculate your email open rate, divide the number of opened emails by the total number of emails sent and then multiply the result by 100.
Email open rate = (Number of emails opened / total number of emails sent) x 100
For example, if you sent 100 emails and 20 of them were opened, your open rate would be 20%.
Knowing your email open rate is crucial because it can help you measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns and make data-driven decisions to improve them.
By tracking your Shopify email open rate, you can also identify which types of emails perform best with your audience. For example, you may find that your promotional emails have a higher open rate than your newsletters or abandoned cart emails.
This information can help you tailor your email marketing campaign strategy better to meet the needs and preferences of your customers.
Average Shopify Email Open Rate
The average welcome email and open rate for Shopify stores vary depending on the quality of the welcome email, list, and industry. According to a study by Oberlo, welcome emails have an average open rate of 68.6%, while the average open rate across all industries is 20.94%.
It’s important to note that the open rate can vary depending on several factors, such as the quality of the email list, industry, subject line, and timing. Therefore, it is essential to focus on improving the open rates through effective and targeted email marketing campaigns using personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing strategies.
17 Simple Strategies to Improve Shopify Email Open Rates
To improve email open rates, try personalizing the sender’s name, craft a compelling email subject line that piques curiosity and delivers value, and keep creative email subject lines concise and focused. Your email could be the treasure chest they’ve been waiting for.
1. Personalize the Sender’s Name
Email personalization is critical to engaging with your audience and improving email open rates. One easy way to do this is by personalizing the sender’s name in your email campaigns. Instead of sending your emails from a generic sender name or company email address, use the sender name with a personal name or the name of a relevant team member.
Another benefit of adding the sender’s name is avoiding sending your emails to spam. Sender’s name is the first thing users while before opening any email, and without it, people are likely to mark the email as spam.
For that, you’ll need an email marketing tool that’ll help you to personalize your emails and segment your audience so that you can send the right message to the right people.
This is how you can personalize your email subject line with Sender.net:
And this is how you can segment your audience using advanced filters:
Having these great tools makes your work easier and more effective. Good news: you can do all that with Free Forever plan!
2. Use Subject Lines that Generate Curiosity
Your subject line is the second thing recipients see when they receive your email. Creating catchy subject lines that generate curiosity and encourage recipients to open your email is crucial. Your subject line should not be misleading, it should explain what the email is about otherwise, recipients will mark your Shopify emails as spam.
Use questions, numbers, and action-oriented language to create compelling subject lines that stand out in crowded inboxes.
3. Improve The Preview Text
The preview text, also known as email preheader text is the snippet of text that appears beneath the subject line in most email clients. It’s an often-overlooked area that can significantly impact your email open rates.
Use this space to provide a teaser or summary of the content within your email to entice recipients to open and read on.
4. Maintain Your Shopify Subscriber List
It’s important to maintain your Shopify subscriber list regularly. Remove inactive or unengaged subscribers, as these can negatively impact user engagement, email deliverability, and open rates.
This provides you with an organized database for customer segmentation, allowing you to develop compelling, targeted email marketing campaigns. In addition, maintaining a clean database increases email delivery, retains your reputation, and saves time and money.
You can also encourage subscribers to update their preferences, ensuring they receive the most relevant content from you.
5. List Segmentation
The low email open rates might demoralize you, causing you to pay less attention to your e-commerce email marketing strategy. The solution? Scrub your subscriber list. This means you need to comb through the list, removing dead addresses regularly. You should also remove the address belonging to inactive email subscribers. An inactive subscriber could be someone that hasn’t engaged with your emails for at least 6 months.
Segmenting your subscriber list can help improve email open rates by ensuring that recipients receive content relevant to their interests and needs. Use data such as past purchases, browsing behavior, and demographics to create targeted and personalized email advertising campaigns that resonate with specific segments of your audience.
6. Use Relevant Content
Creating relevant content is critical to engaging your audience and improving your email open rates. Use data and insights from your Shopify store and audience to create personalized content that resonates with their interests, pain points, and needs.
For instance, you can send personalized recommendations and product suggestions based on their past purchases or browsing history. By using personalization to create relevant content, you can establish a deeper connection with your audience and improve your chances of engaging them with your emails.
Also read: What is Email Content? Definition, Types & Examples
7. Use Double Opt-In for Subscribers
Using a double opt-in process ensures that your subscribers have actively chosen to receive your emails, which can lead to higher open rates. It also helps to ensure that your emails are not being sent to fake or inactive subscribers’ email addresses.
8. Perfect Your Timing
Timing is everything, and when it comes to email marketing campaigns, it’s no different. To maximize the open rates of your Shopify email campaigns, it’s important to time them perfectly. You don’t want to send emails too early in the day or too late at night when people are less likely to check their inboxes.
The ideal time to send your email campaigns is during business hours, preferably early to mid-morning and mid to late afternoon. These are the times when most people check their emails and are more likely to open and engage with your content.
9. Keep Customers in the Loop with Automated Email Marketing
Automated email marketing can be an incredibly effective way to keep your customers in the loop and engaged with your brand. By setting up automated emails for different stages of the customer journey, you can ensure that your subscribers receive the same email deliverability right message at the right time.
Some examples of automated emails you can set up for your Shopify store include welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, order confirmation emails, and post-purchase follow-up emails. These emails help you stay connected with your customers and keep them engaged with your brand.
You can use Shopify apps like Sender Email Marketing and SMS to automate your email workflow. With this app, you can send abandoned cart emails, welcome emails, win-back emails, thank you emails, upsell and cross-sell emails, and more.
10. A/B Test Everything
A/B testing is a great way to optimize email campaigns and improve open rates. By testing different elements of your emails, such as the subject line perfect by lines, sender names, and content, you can determine what works best for your audience and adjust your strategy accordingly.
When conducting A/B tests, test only one element at a time to measure each change’s impact accurately. Also, test your emails with a representative sample of your subscriber list to get accurate results.
Keep an eye out for spam filters. Spam filters are one of the biggest open-rate killers. It’s not uncommon for strict spam filters to send your email straight to the junk folder even though its recipient signed up for the content on your website. Spam filters can be tricky to understand, but you can use several spam checkers to simplify the process.
11. Write to Just One Person
One of the best ways to improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns is to write as if you are speaking to multiple subject lines, multiple devices, or just one person. This helps make your emails more personal and engaging, making your subscribers feel like you are speaking directly to them.
When writing your Shopify emails, use a conversational tone, and write in the second person, using words like “you” and “your.” This helps to create a sense of connection with your subscribers and makes your emails more relatable.
12. Inject Some Humor
Using humor in your campaigns can be a great way to connect with your audience and make your brand more approachable. Humorous emails are more likely to be opened and shared, and they help to create a positive image of your brand in the minds of your subscribers.
When using humor in your Shopify emails, keep it appropriate and relevant to your audience. Also, be careful not to overdo it, as too much humor can detract from your message.
13. Relevance to Your Target Audience
To improve your Shopify email open rates, ensuring your emails are relevant to your target audience is crucial. This means that your content should be both relevant campaigns tailored to the interests and needs of your subscribers and provide value to them.
When crafting your email campaigns, segment your subscriber list based on location, age, interests, past purchase amount, and buying history. This will allow you to create targeted campaigns that speak directly to the needs and interests of each website email list segmentation.
14. Don’t Wear Your Subscribers Out
While staying connected with your subscribers and keeping them engaged with your brand is essential, it’s also important not to wear them out with too many emails. Sending too many emails can lead to email fatigue, where your subscribers start to tune out your messages.
To avoid losing your subscribers, limit the frequency of your emails and only send emails when you have something valuable to share. Also, give your subscribers the option to unsubscribe or adjust their email preferences.
Make it simple to unsubscribe, don’t hide the unsubscribe button if you don’t want your emails to be labeled spam and end up in the spam folder. This will affect your bounce rate, email deliverability, click-through rate, and reputation.
15. Resend Unopened Emails
Resending emails to subscribers who did not open them the first time can increase your open rates. This involves waiting a few days after the initial email was sent and then sending a follow-up email to all subscriber’s inboxes who did not open the first email.
16. Always Keep Your Emails Short
Keeping your emails short and to the point can increase their chances of being opened and read. Long, rambling emails are less likely to be read and can cause subscribers to lose interest.
17. Use Statistics
Using statistics in your email subject line, lines, or preview text can pique the interest of your subscribers. Statistics can be used to support the content of your email and provide evidence to support your claims.
Key Takeaways
In conclusion, improving email open rates is essential for the success of any email marketing campaign and for driving sales to your Shopify store. To achieve this, several strategies can be implemented, including optimizing email subject lines, targeting inactive subscribers, and personalizing email advertising. Here are some key takeaways from our discussion:
- The subject line is one of the most critical factors in email open rates, so it’s essential to craft creative, engaging subject lines that entice recipients to open the email.
- Targeted email marketing campaigns are an effective way to increase open rates, as they allow you to tailor your messages to specific segments of your audience.
- Inactive subscribers can be re-engaged through strategic email marketing efforts, such as offering incentives or providing personalized content.
- Double opt-in confirmation links and pages can help ensure that only interested customers are subscribed to your email list, improving the deliverability of your emails and reducing the likelihood of them being labeled as spam.
- Sender name and domain reputation, as well as the use of spam trigger words, can impact the success of email marketing campaigns.
- Keeping a well-organized subscriber database, optimizing checkout forms, and sending relevant emails to the target audience are essential factors in improving email deliverability and open rates.
By implementing these strategies, email marketers can increase the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns, improve their email open rates, and ultimately achieve their email marketing journey objectives.
Remember, though, that improving email open rates is only a starting point for future campaigns, and it’s crucial to continually analyze and adjust your email marketing strategy to ensure ongoing success.
Also read:
- 7 Best Email Marketing App for Shopify in 2023 (Free & Paid)
- How to Create Shopify Email Templates: Types, Examples
- What is Ecommerce Email Marketing? Definition, Tips
Author Bio
Sparsh Sadhu is a full-time content marketer at LogBase.io. He has been crafting blogs for over 5 years. He’s got a keen eye for detail, a deep understanding of what makes content tick, and the drive to keep pushing himself to be better. Besides his daily job, he studies UX design, reads tech updates, and explores mountains.
