Did that title grab your attention enough to want to read the rest of this article?
If you answered yes then I achieved my objective.
To convince you to read what I have to say here. Don’t worry, you’ll be glad you did!
Let’s say you’ve built your list to 10,000 or greater. You are starting to keep an eye on your open rates and clickthroughs.
Many people ask what a good open rate is.
Here’s the catch there is no such thing as a “good” open rate. All lists are different, some are cold, some warm others are hyper responsive. You’re not comparing apples to apples.
Ever.
Instead what you should focus on is IMPROVING your open rate. Let’s say you are tracking your it’s averaging 18%. What you want to do is focus on improving that. Let’s say to 20%.
The best way to do this is with email split testing. The best thing to split test in an email is the subject line. For example you might have one subject line that says “Hey, I found this for you” A split tested version of that would be “Hey [firstname] I found this for you” Using someone’s name catches their eye.
One of these subject lines will have a better open rate than the other. It’s up to you to test it on your list and see which one does better. Once you find out create another subject line variation and try that.
It’s all about improvement.
Here’s some handy tools you can use to track your email marketing. One we recommend is Delivery Monitor http://www.deliverymonitor.com/ a service of Aweber. Delivery Monitor will allow you to do a good job of tracking your email deliverability.
Aweber also has good open rate tracking in their system.
http://www.e-filtrate.com/ is a great service to check the “spamminess” of your emails. You put your email into their checking system and it will tell you how spammy the email providers will consider it. Using http://www.e-filtrate.com/ alone will help improve your deliverability and open rates.
One last piece of advice I have for you is be careful who you ask for advice. For example if you hadn’t read this post today and instead had asked inside an online forum what people thought a good open rate was you would get responses all over the map. You have no way of knowing if those people actually know what they are talking about. They could be leading you astray and you’d never even know.
A better solution is to get together with other people who actually know what they are talking about when it comes to an Online Business. The best place we know of is over at http://www.listformula.com. We have a very active positive forum full of knowledgeable people who know what they are talking about. You can even get a very cheap trial for an entire month to see if it’s really all that 
Victor Grosser aka Vic
Webmaster for Overcome Everything Inc.
@techvic on Twitter
