What is the average email open rate? In the UK it is just 10%.

The average email open rate is just 10%!?! And the average click-through-rate? 1% – one measly per cent.

To really hit this home let’s do some maths:

Let’s say you have an email list of 5,000 prospects, leads and customers.When you send an email about your latest offer here’s what happens:

5,000 people get sent the email. Only 10% open it.

So only 500 people see your email. Of the 500, only 1% actually click
on it. So only 5 people click the email and go to your sales page.

If we assume your sales page converts pretty well at 20% – you will make one sale. 5,000 emails = 1 sale

You can see why people think email is dying!

And here’s how most people react to this realisation…

….“Well we just need to grow our
email list! If we double the size
of our email list, we’ll double our
sales!”

And you know what, they’re right. Send 10,000 emails and 1,000 people will open it, 10 will click and 2 will buy.

You’ve effectively doubled your business.

BUT (and this is a particularly large but…) – doubling the size of your email list is HARD – and EXPENSIVE.

You could run Facebook Ads or other marketing, giving away lead magnets and more – but even if you only paid £2 per new email
address (which is waaaay less than most businesses will pay!) those extra 5,000 email addresses are going to set you back a cool
£10,000.

So what’s a poor business owner to do?

Well let’s go back to the maths and play with the numbers…

Let’s say we have the same size list – 5,000 people.

And let’s say we send them our offer email.

BUT this time, instead of a 10% open rate – we get a 20% open rate.

Now this is still a very low open rate. But it means that of the 5,000 emails sent – instead of 500 opens – we get 1,000.

If everything else stayed the same we’d take our 1,000 opens, get 1% to click and have 10 people visit our sales page which converts at 20%
giving us… 2 sales.

To double our sales we could double the size of our email list (HARD!)

Or…

We could just nudge our open rate from 10% to 20%.

There are really only FOUR things we can do to boost our open rate.

1. Use a better subject line
   Something more eye-catching, curiosity building works. Or a subject line that merges in the recipient’s first name is always a great idea…
2. Use a better SECOND subject line.
   This is your ‘preview text’ the fi rst line of the email that people can see and read in their inbox – if yours says “Email not displaying properly, click here to view it in your browser” you are SABOTAGING your open rates.
3. Change your ‘From Name’
   The ‘From Name’ is who your emails come from (e.g. most of our emails come from Nigel Botterill) – we get better results with people vs business names.
4. Change the TIME you send your email
   People go on an email killing spree when they first wake up. So send your emails after 10 am!

Tweaking all four of those factors can relatively easily
DOUBLE your open rates. And as we’ve seen, that
DOUBLES your sales!

BUT… there’s more.

Because, what if, as well as optimising our email for opens, we made a few subtle tweaks to try and get more clicks.

What if we took our abysmal click-through rate of 1% – and grew it to just 5%.

Five per cent is still a very low number – and VERY achievable.

But let’s run through the maths:

5,000 emails get sent.

20% get opened – so 1,000 emails are opened.

Of the 1,000 that are opened – 5% get clicked.
So we get… 50 clicks!

Our sales page converts at 20% and so we make 10 sales.

TEN SALES!

Suddenly we’ve gone from making one sale from our list of 5,000 to TEN – and all we’ve done is tweaked our email.

The easiest way to improve your click-through rate? Add more links to click!
Statistically, the more links in your email, the more clicks you’ll get.

It’s why we have the rhyme “at least four, probably more!”.

Because we aim to include at least four links in all of our marketing emails.

If you really want to up your click-through rate, add buttons, GIFs, images and video thumbnails to get people’s fingers twitching.

But let’s just recap:

So we’ve made a few simple tweaks to an email and we’ve gone from one sale, to ten.

We’ve 10X’d our business with the same amount of work – the same number of prospects – the same cost…

People say that email is dying.

But the truth is, it’s just getting harder. Harder to get people’s attention, to break through the noise – to get results.

But with a few simple tweaks, you can see how a dead marketing channel, can very quickly be completely reborn.

And that’s the power of email marketing and split testing.

So the next time you send an email out – try a new subject line. Add a few more links, and maybe you’ll 10X your business too!

What is the average email open rate photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash