How to Improve 1-to-1 Email Response Rates

For one-to-one email communication, improving response rates can prove to be instrumental in securing new PR or a new client.

Of all the 269 billion emails sent daily, there are many factors involved in the response and click rates that need to be understood. These are the two main factors that affect the response rate of an email:

• Timing
• Format of the email

These are the most important elements of email communication. A lot of these factors are left to chance and circumstances of the recipient, however there are a few elements you can have an impact on.

Email tracking has long been regarded as one of the more advanced ways to affect the status of one-to-one email communication. Included are some recommendations for using this in the context of one-to-one emails.

How can you improve email response time?

Email Timings

• Time zones — Improving your client’s response might be a case of optimising for their time zone. A tool called Timezone.io could help. Track your client’s local time in real-time to help perfect email timings.

• Optimum timing — Check back at the respondent’s last email. What time did they reply? How long was the message? These will give indications into their daily routine. Email them again using that time.
• Scheduled emails — Scheduled emails improve response rates by a great deal. An advanced email tracking service will help you to land your email exactly at the optimum time, whether it’s morning or evenings.

“In an intro email, you’re giving essential information. You must get to the bottom line quickly” — Gretchen Hydo

• Tuesday open rates — Although most businesses and individuals will not work directly to this schedule, there are days of the week that work better for email responses. According to Experian, Tuesday is the best day in the week for open rates of emails with a 16% open rate.

• Time of the day — Another indication by Experian, showcases the improved response rate to an email in the evening, between the hours of 8:00pm — 12:00am. Who says we ever switch off?!

Style of the email

• Shorter emails — Proofread your email after preparing it. Be concise and remove words and sentences that don’t add value to your overall message. Try Guy Kawaski’s 5 sentence email approach for some tips.

• Email Keywords — According to Search Engine Journal, using terms like happy, piece and hope in your introduction, you’ll have a much stronger chance of response, up to a 20% higher chance, read the full piece here.

Sending shorter emails doesn’t always take less time, but it does stack the odds in your favour for whatever you aim to accomplish.

• Subject — Optimise your subject line to grab attention. Here are a few of the highest performing subject-lines for email marketing, but they can be incorporated into one-to-one email conversations to grab recipient’s attention for maximum impact.

• Personalised — Going a step further, personalised subjects have proven to be more effective. According to Salesforce, personalised subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. So get customising those cold emails introductions today.
• Plain-text emails — At Newton we ditched all our HTML email marketing efforts and opted for plain-text with our user communication. With this experiment we gained response rate increase of 156%.

Read the full story here in Really Good Emails.

All of these points should help support your efforts communicating via email. Remember the average office worker gets 121 emails every single day, you are one of those, how will you stand out?!

Why not combine your emailing efforts with Newton to optimise response rates? Features like Send Later, Undo Send, Email Tracking and Snooze will definitely help in this regard.