Increase email open rate by 900%

What did I do? 

Initially the email was sent to the full database at the same time (~15000 receivers) which is ok to do but you must say YES to all of the following questions: 

• Are you constantly cleaning your database from subscribers who are not interacting with your emails? 

• Are you keeping your sending domain warm all the time by regularly sending high volume of emails to your subscribers? 

• Is your planned newsletter not exceeding 3x the email volume that you are sending usually?

If you answered NO to any of these the chances are high that your newsletter will end up either in promotions, spam or won't be delivered at all. 

There's a solution for this if you have some statistics on your previous newsletter performance. 

What I ended up doing is splitting the large segment into smaller sub-segments and then chaining sending to each email based on previous user activity.

The segments that I created were following: 

• clicked email within past 30 days; 

• opened email within past 30 days; 

• clicked email ever; 

• opened email ever; 

• logged in to platform ever; 

• high value customers; 

• low value customers; 

• everyone else. 

And this did the trick and the same email got opened 900% better than the initial newsletter

Why did it work? 

Gmail and other email service providers (ESPs) have clever algorithms to determine whether email is valuable to customers. The first emails that are sent are delivered to subscriber primary inboxes and when ESPs notice that the email received is a mass-newsletter (after reaching some recipient threshold), they start using email signals to determine where to put this newsletter in customers' inbox. By sending newsletter first to most active subscribers we have a higher chance of getting positive signals like opens and clicks and less negative signals like spam complaints and unsubscribes. 

When a newsletter is sent to all subscribers simultaneously you are leaving this to chance and risk of getting much worse email results.

Try it

You can try this hack on your own and implement in your business yourself or if you need some help with emails or other growth issues, feel free to contact me.