Improve Email Open Rates depends on sender reputation, subject line relevance, and list quality, and the Braze and Campaign Monitor guides both treat deliverability and segmentation as the foundation before any subject line test.
The exact-match query how to improve email open rates sits at the centre of a crowded topic. Six accessible competitor pages were analysed for this brief, and none of them used the exact phrase in a heading or title. That gap is the opening. The tactics below are drawn from what those pages actually cover: Braze's breakdown of open rate calculation and tracking limits, Campaign Monitor's nine-day sequence, Maropost's ecommerce deliverability checklist, and Business.com's calculation and retargeting advice.
One caution applies throughout. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and similar privacy changes mean an "open" is now an imperfect signal, because pixels can be pre-fetched before a human reads anything. Braze devotes a full section to tracking accuracy limits for this reason. Treat open rate as a directional metric, not a precise count of human attention.
How To Improve Email Open Rates. What Matters Before You Choose
Before testing subject lines, three conditions determine whether any tactic can work at all.
- Authentication and sender reputation. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records tell mailbox providers the sending domain is legitimate. Without them, messages can be filtered before a subject line is ever rendered.
- List hygiene. Hard bounces, spam complaints, and long-inactive addresses drag down sender reputation. Campaign Monitor recommends verifying older lists and monitoring both hard and soft bounces.
- Permission and expectations. Subscribers who opted in for one type of content and receive another are more likely to ignore or report the message. Campaign Monitor frames opt-in best practice and expectation-setting as prerequisites, not extras.
If any of those three is weak, subject line testing produces noise rather than signal. Fix the foundation first, then measure.
What Is Improve Email Open Rates?
Improve Email Open Rates is the practice of raising the share of delivered emails that recipients open, measured as opens divided by delivered messages. Braze notes that the metric measures a signal, not attention, because image loading and privacy features can register opens without a human reading the message.
That distinction matters for how the work is sequenced. A team chasing a higher percentage without fixing deliverability is optimising a number that may already be distorted. A team that fixes authentication, list hygiene, and relevance first is improving the conditions that make the percentage meaningful.
How open rate is calculated
Open rate equals unique opens divided by delivered emails, expressed as a percentage. Braze separates this from click-through rate and click-to-open rate, because each answers a different question. Open rate speaks to whether the message reached attention. Click-through rate speaks to whether the content earned action. Click-to-open rate isolates content performance among people who already opened.
Why benchmarks mislead
Braze warns that averages can mislead, and that B2B and B2C performance differ enough that a single industry benchmark is a weak comparison. A sender's own historical trend is a more useful reference than a published average, because it controls for list composition, send frequency, and audience expectations.
How Can I Improve My Email Open Rates? - Tips, Tricks & Best Practices - HubSpot Community
The HubSpot Community thread that ranks for this query could not be retrieved during research, so its specific advice is not reproduced here. The accessible competitor set still shows the tactics that recur across Braze, Campaign Monitor, Maropost, GetResponse, and Business.com.
Subject lines and preview text
Subject line testing is the most repeated tactic across the competitor set. Campaign Monitor describes two testing patterns: send a split test to a sample and roll the winner out to the rest of the list, or test against a segment and apply the insight to future sends. Maropost pairs subject line work with preheader text, because the preview line is visible in most inboxes and either reinforces or undermines the subject.
Business.com adds a restraint worth noting: emoji can help, but overuse works against the message. The same logic applies to spam-trigger words, which Maropost lists as a deliverability risk rather than a style preference.
Sender name and address
Braze lists sender name and address testing as a distinct tactic, and Maropost frames sender name as a trust signal. A recipient scanning an inbox decides in a fraction of a second whether the sender is familiar. Testing a person's name against a brand name is a low-cost experiment that does not require new content.
Send time and segmentation
Braze and Maropost both treat send-time optimisation and list segmentation as core levers. Segmentation raises relevance, and relevance raises opens, because a message about a topic the recipient chose is more likely to be opened than a general broadcast. Braze's Intelligent Timing product exists specifically to match send time to individual behaviour, which indicates how much variance send time can introduce.
Deliverability and list health
Maropost places spam folder avoidance and authentication in the same list as subject line work, which is the correct order of operations. Campaign Monitor recommends a re-engagement campaign for inactive subscribers and a win-back offer before removing them. Removing unengaged addresses reduces list size but improves the ratio that mailbox providers use to judge sender reputation.
Mobile design and personalisation
Braze and Maropost both list mobile-friendly design and personalisation as open rate levers. Mobile design matters because a subject line and preview text that truncate badly on a phone lose the recipient before the email is opened. Personalisation matters because dynamic content tied to prior behaviour raises relevance without changing the send schedule.
Practical Considerations for
Several constraints shape what is realistic.
Tracking accuracy. Braze devotes a section to the limits of open tracking, including privacy and policy changes. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection can pre-fetch pixels, which inflates opens for some audiences. A rising open rate after a privacy change may reflect measurement, not behaviour.
List size versus list quality. Campaign Monitor's cleansing advice trades reach for reputation. A smaller, engaged list often outperforms a larger, stale one, because mailbox providers weigh engagement when deciding inbox placement.
Testing discipline. Braze recommends continuous A/B testing, and Campaign Monitor describes applying test insights to future sends rather than only the current one. A single test result is weak evidence. Repeated tests across segments build a usable picture.
Metric context. Braze recommends tracking engagement beyond open rates. Open rate alone can rise while click-through rate falls, which would indicate the subject line overpromised relative to the content.
Making an Informed Choice About
The sequence that the competitor evidence supports runs from foundation to experiment. Authentication, list hygiene, and permission come first, because they determine whether messages reach inboxes. Sender name, subject line, and preview text come next, because they determine whether a delivered message earns attention. Segmentation, send-time optimisation, and personalisation come after that, because they raise relevance across the list. Testing and metric review run continuously alongside all of it.
Teams with a small, engaged list can move quickly to subject line and sender name testing. Teams with a large, older list should expect list cleansing to produce a short-term drop in total opens alongside a longer-term improvement in placement. Teams in regulated industries should confirm consent records before any re-engagement campaign, because a win-back message to someone who never opted in creates a compliance problem rather than an open.
The work is measurable, but the measurement has limits. Braze's own guidance treats open rate as one signal among several, and that framing is the most useful takeaway from the accessible competitor set.