Did you know that B2B marketing emails see 23% higher open rates than B2C emails?

However, this doesn’t mean that you can sit back on your laurels and expect to see stellar email open rates as a B2B business.

The reality is that prospects’ inboxes are flooded with emails every day. According to statistics, the average office employee receives roughly 121 emails per day.

To stand out from the crowd, you need to make sure that your marketing emails are fine-tuned and engineered to trigger opens and click-throughs.

Fortunately, there are a number of simple steps you can take to make sure your marketing emails get opened and read.

Ready to find out what these are? Read on to discover the top strategies you can implement to ramp up your open rates.

Create Enticing Subject Lines

One of the most important tips for improving open rates on B2B marketing emails is creating enticing, click-worthy subject lines.

Good subject lines are essential, as they are your first “hook” for the reader. If your subject lines are boring, confusing, or don’t promise value, this will impact your open rates.

Therefore, invest extra time into coming up with eye-catching subject lines. Try to pique the recipient’s interest. Here are some tips for creating successful subject lines:

• Keep things short (this prevents your subject line from getting cut off)
• Use humor
• Don’t use all CAPS
• Place the most important words at the beginning
• Eradicate filler words
• Incorporate numbers (these stand out to the eye)
• Avoid spammy words like “buy”

Additionally, stay away from vague or generic title lines such as “a quick hello,” “check out our sale,” and “July’s Newsletter.

Besides these tips, you should also look at personalizing your subject lines. According to reports, personalized subject lines can increase open rates by 50%.

Optimize for Mobile

Another of the top tips for improving open rates on your marketing emails is to optimize for mobile. If you’re creating your email on a desktop, it’s easy to assume that your recipients are reading them in the same format you are.

However, this is not the case. According to reports, 62% of emails are opened from a mobile device or tablet. What’s more, stats also show that implementing a mobile-responsive email design can boost unique mobile clicks by 15%.

Here are a few pointers for optimizing your B2B marketing emails for mobile:

• Use a larger font
• Keep subject lines as short as possible
• Space out hyperlinks so that mobile users aren’t in danger of clicking the wrong one
• Use large CTA buttons
• Keep your formatting to a single column that is less than 600 pixels wide
• Make sure your content looks good even when images aren’t displayed (Android turns them off by default)

One of the easiest ways to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile is to use email marketing software that offers a responsive design template.

Here at Vertical Response, we know how important mobile optimization is for improving open and click-through rates. That is why all of our email templates are responsive, and you can even send out mobile-friendly surveys through our software.

Time Your Emails

If you’re looking to increase your B2B email open rates, you should also time your emails appropriately for receivers.

To start, weekends aren’t optimal days for marketing emails. According to data from Experian, weekdays are best for improving open rates.

Additionally, you also need to think about the weekly work cycle when sending B2B emails. Mondays typically aren’t great for open rates because employees are busy finding their feet in the workweek. Friday’s are even worse as most people are occupied with wrapping up weekly tasks and deadlines.

Lastly, when marketing to B2B clients, you also want to make sure that you’re sending out your emails during work hours. If you don’t, they’re likely to become buried under a new influx of mail by the time recipients open their inboxes in the morning.

Segment Your Email List

One of the hottest tips for improving open rates is to segment your email list. This has two main benefits.

Firstly, list segmentation allows you to divide your list into groups of people who you can target in different ways.

For instance, leads who signed up to your email list because you offered them a free ebook are likely interested in similar information to what was contained in the ebook. With segmentation, you can send them more related info and draw them back into your sales funnel.

You can also segment leads who have already purchased from you, as you may want to send them different marketing messages than leads who have not.

Another important way you can segment leads is for time zones. Remember what we said about the importance of sending emails within working hours? Well, what if you have recipients in multiple time zones?

In this case, you can simply segment your list and schedule emails to go out at optimal times for different zones.

Remove Inactive Subscribers

Research shows that email marketing databases degrade at a rate of 22.5% each year. This means that every 12 months, almost a quarter of your recipients are no longer active.

If you keep these inactive addresses on your list, two things will happen:

• You will waste money sending out emails to subscribers who definitely won’t open them
• Your open rate metric will drop

Instead of wasting good marketing budget dollars on inactive subscribers, send out alerts to them asking whether they still want to be on your list. If they reply in the affirmative you can keep them on. If they don’t respond or ask to be removed, do so.

Lastly, also look out for hard bounces. These are instances where an email permanently can’t be delivered. This usually happens when an email address doesn’t exist anymore, or if the recipient has permanently blocked delivery from your address.

Increate Your Open Rates With Vertical Response

Let’s be honest, email marketing requires quite a bit of work. The last thing you want is for your efforts to result in low open rates. Low open rates mean fewer click-throughs, fewer leads, and fewer sales.

Besides implementing the above tips for improving open rates, you should also look at investing in email marketing software. Not only will this help you improve open rates on your mails, but it will also save you time and hassle.

With Vertical Response, you can send professional marketing emails in minutes, conduct A/B testing, access insights, and more.

Ready to supercharge your B2B email marketing efforts? Sign up today for a free trial and experience the difference that good email marketing software can make.

© 2021, Chris Duncan. All rights reserved.