Improving Low Email Open Rates: Tips for Effective Outreach

Chikaodili O. · 2025-04-15 10:17:49.944481+00

Hey everyone, I’d appreciate any advice I can get on this. We’ve been running targeted outreach campaigns, and we’ve noticed that our email open rates are pretty low. What’s strange is, we haven’t really changed much from what we were doing before. We’re still using a mix of email and LinkedIn, but emails in particular aren’t getting much traction. We’ve A/B tested different templates, switched things up, and even adjusted our send times (usually between 11am and 1pm), but open rates are still low. Do any of you have a different approach you’re using for cold outreach that’s working better? Or maybe some steps you take to write or refine your email templates that have helped? I’d really appreciate your input here. Thanks in advance!

Improving Low Email Open Rates: Tips for Effective Outreach | RevGenius

Mike C.
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Have you tested your deliverabilty/domain health?
Chikaodili O.
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Yes, I use Lemwarm and it’s pretty decent, 85-90%
Mike C.
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Good. That said, back to opens, opens are pretty much deprecated these days anyways - how's your reply rate? My suggestion would be to turn off open and click tracking (further 'ensuring' deliverability) then obsess over getting folks to respond.
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Chikaodili O.
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Got it, makes sense. Yeah, open tracking does feel less reliable these days. Our reply rates haven’t been great either, which is part of why I was digging into opens to see if we were even getting seen in the first place. I haven’t tried turning off tracking entirely yet, but that’s something I can experiment with. Do you typically rely just on responses to measure how things are landing? And when you’re optimizing for replies, are there certain tactics or structure you’ve found works best? Really appreciate the inputs, really helpful.
Mike C.
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Yes - and I think 99% of the experts out there would agree reply rate is most important (I'm also not one of those experts 🙂 ) Humanize everything. Test everything. Get creative. How's your LinkedIn outreach?
Chikaodili O.
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Lol, fair enough, I appreciate the non expert advice. And yes, LinkedIn’s been hit or miss for us too. We’ve tried a mix of nurturing and soft value-led outreach, then also tested more direct selling, and even engaged consistently with posts. Still feels tough to turn that into actual conversions. InMails have been pretty slow on our end as well. Maybe we’re approaching it wrong, but we try to stagger our touchpoints between email and LinkedIn so we’re not overwhelming anyone. We’ll get one or two responses here and there, but they usually drop off after the initial reply. Have you found any rhythm or sequence that’s actually worked for you on LinkedIn? Or is it just a volume and patience game?
Saad M.
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Another advice, use a tracking pixel on your website to verify the traffic instead of open rates, this way you can still more or less keep traffic of ' curious ' leads 🙂
Mike C.
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Yup! Not consistently be hard, but you need to keep at it. Especially LinkedIn. That's more of my area of expertise :) Are you referencing your LinkedIn message/connect request in your email (or vice versa)? Usually a pretty good tactic. Definitely no sequences in particular, but the rhythm I have found (and I've found it for dozens of clients) is thanks to just being as human as possible...and being casual, not professional and all buttoned up - skip the fluff. LOVE Saad's suggestion above, by the way. And if you're not using Web Visitor Trackers/Enrichment like syftdata.com, you're missing out - you should be using that to inform your messaging and targeting and go boutique with it!
Chikaodili O.
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Saad M. Okay, I like this idea. We do have tracking set up on our site, but I haven’t really thought of using it in that way to monitor cold traffic specifically. Definitely worth digging into to get a better read on who’s at least clicking through or checking us out, even if they’re not replying yet. Do you find certain types of pages give you the best signal, like case studies or pricing pages, or do you just track general site visits? What tools would you suggest?
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Chikaodili O.
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Mike C. I definitely see the value in being human and casual, and I’m going to make a more intentional effort to skip the fluff. It’s easy to get caught up in being too formal! We do sometimes reference LinkedIn in the emails, but we haven’t been consistent about it. I think tying the two more deliberately could help with the flow, definitely going to experiment with that. Also, love Saad’s suggestion, and I’m definitely going to check out Syftdata! Haven’t used it before, but sounds like it could be the help we need for refining our messaging and targeting. If you have any articles, examples, or specific advice on how to approach this combo of LinkedIn/email more effectively, I’d really appreciate it.
Mike C.
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Awesome! Yeah it's all trial n error and staying consistent :) Syft: Tagging Imran P. here (founder of Syft) who can you get you set up with a trial. You can definitely use it to help understand where folks are spending majority of their time and if you're attracting the right eyeballs.
Chikaodili O.
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Awesome, thank you! Really the tag and pointing me in the right direction. Excited to explore Syft and see how we can use it to better understand what’s working(or not). And yep, definitely embracing the trial-and-error phase. Just trying to be consistent and thoughtful with each iteration. Thanks again for all the guidance, it’s been super helpful!
Saad M.
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I wouldn't be able to tell you what works best as we ourselves are still trying what works best, one thing that for sure doesn't work is a clusstered unclear offer in the home page 🙂 therefor my 2 cents is a dedicated simple page with a clear offer and social proof should work best
Chikaodili O.
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Saad M. Totally fair, and appreciate you sharing that. I agree that a simple, focused page with one clear offer and some solid proof tends to work best too. Out of curiosity, are you experimenting with different types of offers or positioning right now?
Saad M.
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Yes, I am currently testing with 2 different offers we have in the company and trying to word each one of them differently and see which brings more results

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