Ever since I started cold-emailing, I have read many articles and books about the art of cold emailing. Most, not all, recommend optimizing the response rate when it comes to email outreach. However, I found that optimizing for open rate works way better than optimizing for response rate.
For a very simple reason, if your leads aren’t opening your emails or marking those emails as spam, then you will not make a good impact with your email campaign.
In this article, I will go in-depth and help you with various methods to optimize your email campaign for open rates.
Why is the Open Rate More Important Than the Response Rate?
Optimizing for open rates works mainly because of human curiosity. When you optimize for open rates, a large portion of your audience will read your email, resulting in a higher response rate.
Not only this, if you have a lot of people opening and replying to you, then it will send a good signal to the email provider, like Gmail/Outlook, that emails from you are important and should not go to the junk folder.
How to Optimize Open Rates: Steps and Strategies
Subject Matters the Most
When it comes to cold email marketing, the email subject is the king. You can have not-so-great body text, but your email subject should stand out so that your leads can’t resist opening the email.
1. Write a Great Email Subject
The first thing you notice is the thumbnail when you browse YouTube. Similarly, when it comes to emails, the most important thing people pay attention to is the email subject.
Spend more time writing a subject line that sparks curiosity in the user to open your email. A simple example:
- Good – We Offer Affordable Design Services
- Great – The Secret to Effectively Outsourcing Your Next Design Project
This is just an example and smart use of the word “secret,” but there can be different words you can use. You can use 🤫 or other emojis to make it even more attractive.
2. Don’t Personalize It
Contrary to what other email marketers believe, I have a different take on this. Users are so smart that the moment they see their name on the subject line, they know it’s a cold email template.
Just like people have banner blindness when it comes to ads, there is cold-email blindness, so personalizing with a name won’t cut it anymore.
If you have to personalize, then embed your business name. Here is a quick example:
“Help Me Get Your First 100 Paying Customers for Atomic”
3. Test Different Subjects
Having one great subject line will get you so far, but to make it more effective you need to constantly test different email subjects.
Before bombarding all your email lists with the same subject, start by having a small pool of leads and test different subject copies to see which performs best among them.
Remove the poor-performing ones and replace those with newer subject copies. Drill down until you find the final winner that gets the highest open rate.
4. When to Send
Optimize when to send along with what to send. Sending the right email at the right time is important, just like posting at the right time on social media.
If I get an email from a hiring platform during my working hours, then I am going to ignore that, and once ignored, I am going to get more emails that will take priority in my head over the previous one.
But if I get an email for a tool that can boost my productivity during work, then I am going to open that right there and then and most likely explore it further.
For optimal engagement, send emails between 10:00 AM and 2:30 PM local time from Tuesday to Thursday. C-level executives tend to have higher open rates during the late evening, so aim to send emails during this golden hour window to maximize impact.
5. Innovate Frequently
While you can automate your cold-email marketing with tools, you can’t automate creativity.
Emails you send today may not work next week, as people tend to get bored or used to similar content. So you have to constantly put your creativity to work and find innovative email subjects.
6. Don’t Overuse AI
I see many new and veteran marketers making a big mistake by heavily relying on AI tools to generate email templates.
It’s going to save you time, but it will not be effective at all, as other marketers are using the same AI marketing tools to generate similar results.
The best way to use AI tools is to refine your ideas. I try to come up with creative ideas, then I feed those into AI tools to get more ideas. From there, I refine my ideas based on the response rather than outright using those.
Clean Your Email List
Now we can move on to other important parts as we have covered the most important things already.
Cleaning your email list is the best practice to reduce bounce rates and increase the open rate. It’s more impactful to send emails to the right people than to send it to everyone.
You can use various services to narrow down your email list by demographic, industry, job title, etc.
Choose Email “From” Name Correctly
The name emails come from is equally important as the email subject. Because people tend to see the name first, followed by the subject.
In most cases, it works best if the email has the person’s name rather than the brand name or a mix of both.
Because an email from “Xyz” company will be instantly recognized as a marketing email, on the other hand an email from “Adam” will make people wonder who this person is, resulting in a better open rate.
If your brand is prominent or you want to establish authority, you can blend the two like “Adam from Xyz”.
Less is More
There are two aspects to this: first, send emails to fewer people, and then send fewer emails to those people.
As you have cleaned the email list already, now you can spend some time identifying leads that may not be suitable for your services. Remove @gmail if you want to only reach businesses, or include @gmail if you have a suitable product that appeals to non-business users.
Spend time getting inbound leads rather than spending time and money scraping websites or buying cheap leads.
Secondly, sending fewer emails to potential clients could lead to better open rates. Receiving repeated emails could annoy them to mark your emails as spam or create filters to do that automatically, both of which could damage your email reputation.
What Is the Open Rate in Email Outreach?
There are various metrics used in email marketing, like bounce rate, open rate, link clicks, and response rate.
Open rate is the most important among them as it leads to a better response rate and reputation. Open rate is simply a measurement of how many emails are opened out of the emails that were sent.
For example, if you sent 1,000 emails and 50 of those were opened, then the email open rate would be 5% (opened/sent * 100).
How Is the Email Open Rate Tracked?
The email open rate is tracked by sending a programmed 1×1 image, often called pixel tracking.
When someone opens an email, the pixel is loaded and sends information to the server, which is then added to the database, in relation to the campaign, to be used in the dashboard to show opens and the open rate.
What Is the Response Rate in Email Outreach?
Response rate is another key metric, as success of an email marketing campaign measured based on how many responses you get followed by sales generated for the business.
Response rates were traditionally tracked manually, but with time, email outreach tools have integrated AI to help reduce manual work. AI tools are fed replies to email text using API, and the response from that is counted as a response.
Replies asking to unsubscribe, out of office replies, or other automated responses are filtered out with the help of AI to calculate a total response.
Then you can calculate the response rate by dividing responses by (responses/sent * 100).
Does Optimizing for Open Rate Work?
Different marketers may have varying results or opinions on this. However, in our testing, we found that optimizing for open rates leads to better response rates.”
But that doesn’t mean you can ignore the email body. It will make people open the email, and the copy you have written will further motivate your leads to reply. And leads will enquire about your services, schedule a call, learn more about your products/services, or purchase it.
Final Thoughts
Prioritizing open rates is a powerful way to strengthen your email outreach. By focusing on subject lines, timing, and list hygiene, you can improve engagement and build a positive sender reputation. Remember, though, that while open rates get your emails noticed, compelling content drives the real results. Keep refining both for a balanced, effective outreach strategy.