Stupid trick doubled my open rate

2 replies
Just tried yesterday and can't believe how simple it was to double the open rate on my mails. . .

I tested this on 4 different lists yesterday, with 4 different subject lines and more or less doubled my open rate across the board.

Here's what I did in a nutshell:

Sent HTML of my site.

I took the basic template of my sites in each of those 4 niches (nice looking minisite designs with graphical backgrounds, headers, etc.) and opened them up in my html editor (nvu).

I removed all of the content and typed in my mail within the body area of the page.

I copied and pasted everything more or less between the body tags and pasted it into the wsiwyg html editor in aweber and sent off the mails.

That's it.

My guess and the hunch that I was going on when I tried it was that a lot of people are using some mail client like outlook or live mail where you have the inbox/subject lines in the left pane and the message in the larger right hand pane, and that the heavy and nice looking graphic content got people to open the mail.

Pretty surprising to me.

It was only one test so I'm not preaching it as gospel and it might not even work again, but I tested across multiple lists in multiple niches with different subject lines and the results were nearly identical in that my open rate basically doubled.

Just thought it was something that other people might want to try out.
#doubled #open #rate #stupid #trick
  • Profile picture of the author KatyaSenina
    I don't doubt this works! They have some great free email templates here:
    30+ Free HTML email templates - Tried & Tested - Tips & Resources - Campaign Monitor

    While this is important, I believe great content and a nice headline is still the main factor for high open rates.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[1762405].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author ZhaoAnXin
    That's a nice resource.

    I guess the reason I was surprised is just because I don't see any of the guys with huge lists doing it, so I never really thought about it.

    It's likely that I'll do another test of it after I've sent out some more text emails and see how it goes, but it's something I definitely will play around with a bit more.

    Would love to hear others tips on increasing open rates as well. My CTR on opens is usually 100%+ but the open is one of the major sticking points for me so I've been trying to think of some out of the box ways (out of the "I apologize firstnamefix" type of subject line box too because I feel like that upsets people in the longrun)
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[1762774].message }}

Trending Topics