How do you deal with declining email open rates?

The fact that customers decided to open your first email shows that they are interested in you, more or less. Now, if you keep using the same format for the next email, they might not be equally interested. 1. Evidently, the rate has dropped significantly. So, I would suggest reviewing your first email content (subject, design, text, images etc), preferably by someone outside your company. 2. Experiment with different contents. You can start with something as simple as the subject of emails. Do an A/B test with different subjects and audiences. Compare their open rates. (e.g. run a campaign with "Get your 10% today!" and "Spend less, enjoy more!" side by side and see how each of them perform, of course with different halves of the audience) 3. If you are not willing to do split tests, run linear ones with tweaking some content (subject, design, text, images, etc). Document your experiment and their perfomances somewhere. In this era of synchronous marketing platforms, email marketing is quite a challenge. But, if done correctly this can be a powerful tool I believe. You just have to keep patience and be eager to learn and test.

A few things I've done in the past that have worked: - A/B test subject lines: you can quickly test with a few users which headlines drive higher open rates before sending it to your entire subscriber base. You can test your subject line with a question, emojis, 'How-to's, and/or a teaser of your email content. What works best usually varies by industry, based on your audience profile. - Clean out your email subscriber list: always worth reviewing your email list, as it probably has some 'dead weight' (email addresses that are no longer valid/with typos/bouncing and/or unengaged users. This way, you are left with a list of emails that are active and receptive. - Segment your email list by audience behavior and send them targeted content. - Write 'personally': craft out your email as if you were writing to a friend, with natural and casual language that helps build a more personal relationship with your customer. - Optimize your emails for mobile web! Hope this helps you get started :)

That steep decline indicates your first email content did'nt go down well with the customers. They've mostly perceived it as spam I guess. Try to put yourself in their shoes, if you were to read that mail would you be interested in it. There's a lot of creative content out there, try to bring that into your content. I understand that the first one was a welcome email. Now unless I can relate to your product I won't be interested in it. Try making it relatable in some form. - Don't forget an impressive subject, something that would tempt people to open . - Try sending different types of mails to different set of users and find out what worked well. Remember, the world works on WIIM 'Whats in it for me?'

what is 1st email about? maybe the problem is that users don't like it or it was uninformative for them and they will ignore all the next emails from you. You need to check all of the details because the difference in open rates is huge

There are lots of factors that affect open rate. I believe the most would be the email title. Study what you did right in the first email. In your case, two things could have caused it. First, you provided no value in the first email. Which made your subscribers assume subsequent emails will be just like the first. This is less likely to be the case though considering it went from 80% to 15%. I don't think 65% would process the "this isn't value" so fast, just after the first email. Second, it could mean that you need to work on your tactics and study ways to crafts non-misleading email titles to get them to click. ditData.com

Some ideas: 1. Review your email content. Might just be that your audience is more responsive to the information from your first letter. It might have had more value to them. 2. Analyze your audience a bit deeper. Might be that your target audience was chosen without considering the geography factor - time zones of your audience matters, as well as their online activity hours. Those stats are easy to get from your analytics. 3. Try to rewrite your email title and preview. Maybe make it less "ad-like" and more personal, start a dialogue with your customers. Communicate your unique proposal through the title of your email. 4. See if your emails database is relevant enough to your niche. Maybe some of that will be helpful to you:)

First and foremost, you have to foster your relationships with customers, if the customer likes you/your employees as people, and enjoys dealing with them, then the customer is likely to open and read the email. You want a dialogue, or at least want to induce the feeling the there could be a dialogue if the customer were to want one. When you start spreading your emails with a shotgun approach or yelling through a megaphone, you might not lose customers, but you definitely can't expect to win over their hearts.

First and foremost, even a 15% open rate is great. Most companies are looking at 3% or less. Rule 1: The max you should be sending emails out is once per week Rule 2: Only send out emails when you have something of true value to your customers. People only care about stuff that makes their lives better, not yours. Rule 3: Short and sweet. No one wants to read anything anymore. Cut to the chase in as few words as possible with engaging visuals. Rule 4: Have a good CTA (Call to Action). Let them know what you want them to do. "Learn More," "Shop Now," "Download the White Paper,"... Of course, I don't know your product or service so I can speak to your particulars, but these are the general rules I use with my clients. Cheers

Have you checked if your customers blocked your initial email? It's very possible that they opened the 1st email, they didn't like the content and decided to put it in the spam folder or decided to unsubscribe? Additionally, measuring "open rate" is a vanity metric and doesn't tell you much. I suggest you look for click rates or measure incoming traffic to your website (from email links) via Analytics. Happy to help further - if you can share more info about your product.