Increase Your (Mobile!) Email Open Rates: How to Optimize the Only Three Lines That Matter

Increase Your (Mobile!) Email Open Rates: How to Optimize the Only Three Lines That Matter

There are a lot of guides out there to help you increase your email open rates. Why? Simple: unopened email is a dead email.

Doesn't matter if your visuals seduce, your copy persuades, or your CTA compels. Unread is dead.

But here's the thing: Almost none of those guides focuses on the one thing that matters most in getting your emails opened: mobile optimization.

Just how important is mobile optimization to your email strategy?

A whopping 65% of all emails are first opened on a mobile device, according to US Consumer Device Preference Report: Q4 2013.

Thankfully, a few email marketing providers are finally offering genuinely responsive design templates (unlike many of the old, one-size-fits-all approach). And yet, only 25% of marketers optimize their email for mobile, eConsultancy's Email Marketing 2013 Census discovered.

To dramatically increase your mobile email open rates, let's take a look at exactly how to optimize the only three lines that matter.

Here's a series of screenshots of major mobile default email displays:

Notice what they all have in common:

In each, only three lines display automatically: the subject line, the first line, and the From line.

That's it. Just three. And that's exactly why those three lines are the only lines that matter for getting your emails opened.

1. Subject Lines

On average, you'll have 20-30 characters available for your subject lines. Once you exceed that limit, your subject line gets cut off or wraps down to the next line, thus displacing the second "ONLY line that matters."

That means, in either case, less is more.

In fact, for maximizing email open rates, the optimum number of words in the subject line is 4-15, per MailerMailer, and 6-10, per Retention Science.

Of course, the next question becomes what words you should actually use in that limited real estate...

• Personal words. Use your recipient's first name. Use the words "you" and "I." Use slang, colloquialisms, emoticons, and unique punctuation. Above all, make it human. The more real it appears, the better the open rate becomes.
• Emotional words. As in all marketing, lead with desire, pleasure, or pain. Work at loading the one key benefit right into the subject line in the same way you would your value proposition.
• Pop words (as in, "popular culture"). "Subject lines referencing movies or songs were opened 26 percent of the time, while emails with more traditional subject lines were opened 16 percent of the time," Retention Science points out.

2. First Lines

The key here is personalization and conversation.

The first line of your automated emails should read as much like the first line of a real email as possible.