Improve Your Email Open Rate (Part 2)

The open rate on our emails was low.

I was on a mission to improve it.

I started by trying to make more interesting content in the email.

But making better email content barely made a difference.

I was getting frustrated, so I decided to try something off the wall.

I made an email with the subject line "Bad Guys Love These Decals"

And in the email I explained various ways bad guys might use perforated decals while doing crimes.

This email was our first to break a 10% open rate.

I was on to something.

But then I immediately took it too far.

The next email we did had the subject line "PosterBurner Has a Crime Problem"

I went on to explain that it was a crime that people were paying more for posters at other companies.

This subject line worked really well.

It was our most opened email at the time.

But it was a click bait subject line and the content of the email didn't deliver.

So we ended up getting alot of angry responses and alot of optouts.

But in the course of one month, we had taken our open rate from 4% to 17% and we were starting to figure it out.

The subject line is the most important part of your email.

But the content of the email needs to deliver on the promise of the subject line.

For the next few months we slowly improved our open rates by creating more interesting subject lines and doing our best to deliver email content that matched.

In the next post, I'll write about how we took the next big jump by changing the way we thought about inboxes.

You can learn more about PostRabbit here, check our prices, or contact us with any questions.

Or continue to part 3.