As you may have noticed in the past couple of years, open rates have declined, making it harder and harder to reach the inbox. This is due to the large anti-spam systems that ISPs have had to put in place to thwart spammers. Unfortunately, permission-based mail also gets treated as spam. So how do you improve your open rates?

Well first, let’s talk about what an open rate is. An open rate is the percentage of mail you have sent, divided by the number of unique people that have opened your message. So if you successfully sent an email to 100 people, and 50 of those people open your email, then you would receive a 50% open rate (that would be a nice figure huh?).

A lot of marketers feel the larger the list they have the better things will be, but this is simply not true. It’s all about the quality of a list, not quantity. Why would you want to continue to send emails to people who don’t care? People who don’t open your email (and we aren’t talking about plain text emails here), don’t care about your content. You need to get real with yourself and face the facts. The first thing you should do is go back over the last 10 campaigns you sent, and remove all of the people who have not opened your email.

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