Okay, but this is what we think.
Reaching the Primary or Updates tabs for Gmail will give you 20-25% more unique opens than when you reach Promotions. And that’s every single time you send a campaign.
Sure, you can say open rates matter less now with Apple’s update but do they? They are just less reliable as a metric. You still want more people to read your emails, don’t you?
How to increase email open rates?
The best way to increase your chances of reaching Primary or Updates is to get engagement. One of the best (if not the best) engagement is a reply on the very first email you send to someone.
In order to increase your reply rate, here are some tips:
- Ask for the reply. Seriously, ask people to reply. For some reason, most welcome emails don’t ask for a reply.
- Focus on the main goal. You will hear advice that the welcome email has the highest open rate so you should use this as an opportunity to tell your whole life story. You probably shouldn’t do that. Instead, focus on the goal of getting engagement – the reply.
- Offer something interesting in exchange for a reply. Have a unique report? A template? A valuable mini-course perhaps? Pitch it and tell readers to reply to get it.
- Don’t just copy other welcome emails. If you use the exact same text as everyone else, your welcome emails are more likely to be sent to the Promotions tab.
Optimizing our welcome email has been the biggest improvement for our deliverability.
You can read our full deliverability guide here, including the current welcome email we have.
