Gain Email Subscribers How To Triple Your Email Open Rate And Gain 500 Subscribers In 3 Months?

At Predica, we don’t just do IT. We try and learn new things too. For example, in marketing, we always look for better ways to engage with you, our readers and clients. And it’s always exciting to see something that works! Today, I’ll share details on some tools which helped us improve our newsletters and give us measurable results within months.

Why am I sharing this story?

There are two reasons why I’d like to share our findings with you.

First, when you sign up to our newsletter or download our resources, you trust us with your contact information. In return, we want to be transparent about what we do with it.

Second, we’ve learned some things the hard way. Now, you can use these lessons to benefit your business, hopefully without having to make the same mistakes!

Tough beginnings: What was our starting point?

Last year our email marketing, admittedly, wasn’t getting much attention. We were sending a monthly newsletter with recent blog posts and not much else.

It was quite an impersonal approach, and consequently, the engagement wasn’t great. Our open rate indicator ranged from 6% to 15%, and the CTR was about 1-2%.

We knew we could do better, so we decided to embark on the road to better communication.

Refocusing our efforts: How to gain new email subscribers?

It all started with a larger marketing strategy which included 2 key decisions:

1. To build a completely new company website
2. To focus on marketing automation processes (automating every possible process).

We calculated the cost of the necessary services and decided to focus less on tools but more on automation. Our goal was to gain more email subscribers and find ways to better engage with them.

Having reviewed and discussed the pros and cons of various solutions, we decided to use a marketing automation platform (user.com) and a platform for building custom landing pages (landingi.com).

The next stage was moving our data from the old platform to the new services. We exported our email base to user.com. Then, we integrated landingi.com with it using Google Tag Manager. This enabled us to gather new subscriptions from landing pages without a single line of code. How does it help?

Using events in Google Tag Manager, the information about clicks in emails or on landing pages is sent to user.com. Based on this data, we can adjust the messages displayed on our connected pages, so that visitors see content that’s relevant to them, and not e.g. repeated pop-ups.

Staying in touch: Email database cleanup

After migration, we had a lot of raw data but were missing key parameters. The crucial information which we needed was whether the email address was actually valid or not. This is something we haven’t checked regularly before.

We had to review our contact base and build it again. To do this, we created a couple of emails (newsletters) which we have sent out.

The first email had a very low open rate of about 10%. This was quite obviously caused by us having a lot of email addresses which were not correct or active.

How to identify and remove inactive email addresses?

To verify the list, we built an automation, which, once a user opened the email, added them to a new list. Those users were also assigned tags, so we could later create segments based on which content respondents engaged with (e.g. a newsletter, event registration etc.).

A week after that first email, we were able to allocate respondents into two groups. We’ve sent another message but split the contact base into people who opened the previous email, and those who didn’t.

The first group, as we expected, was highly engaged with our content, and they were reading our emails. The open rate for this group was almost at 30%!

The second segment allowed us to expand the first. How so? Among those respondents, there were some who opened our email, so we were able to add them to the first group. This way, not only did we manage to validate email addresses, but also increase our open rate.

We repeated this process 5 times in total, gradually cleaning our contact list as we went along. In the end, our contact list reached over 2,500 valid email addresses and our open rate increased to a stable 30%. Here are some statistics from user.com do demonstrate it:

Performance statistics for one of our recent newsletters

We’ve done well, let’s do better: Increasing the open rate

We have revamped our newsletter. It focuses more on current and relevant topics, featuring insights from none other than our CTO Tomasz Onyszko.

We send out new content twice a month, but at first, our open rate remained constant. We knew there was a way to get it higher than 30%, so we looked for some ideas.

Partial screenshot from one of our newsletters. You can sign up to see more!

The most effective solution was actually the simplest. We would release the newsletter under two different titles.

On the original send date, the first newsletter is sent to the entire list. Exactly a week later, we isolate the subscribers who didn’t open the previous email, and send it again, but with a new title.

The results were quite surprising. The first email achieves between 28-30% open rate. As for the follow-up email, it’s opened by approx. 16% of our subscribers (in terms of the total number). This means that both messages combined can reach up to 45% open rate. That is a good score!

If you’d like to check out the content for yourself, you can always sign up! 😉