Exactly How To Increase Your Ecom Brand’s Email Open Rates

0:00Most e-commerce brands trying to fix the open rates are working on the wrong problem. So, they think it's a subject line issue. So, they go and test a bunch of subject lines, add some emojis, try different send times, and the needle barely moves. Or, they think it's an email deliverability issue. So, they only send emails to a super tight segment, limiting their revenue potential. Now, here's the truth. Both of these things matter, but neither of them is the root cause of most open rate problems that I see. The root cause is that brands have trained their audience to simply ignore them. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly

0:38what it means, why it happens, and the specific things you need to fix to get your open rates up and keep them up. So, let's get into it. My name is Emil, and I run Magically, an email and SMS agency for e-commerce brands. We've been doing this for over 7 years. We've worked with more than 120 e-commerce brands, and we generated over $300 million in attributed revenue for them. Plus, we also have more than 35-star reviews on our Trustpilot page. And one of the first things that we fix when we take on a new client is their open rate. Because if your emails aren't getting opened,

1:12nothing else in your email program really matters. So, let's start with what a good open rate actually looks like, because there is some debate over this in the email marketing space. Before you can fix your open rates, you need to know what you're actually aiming for. And the benchmark has changed. If you're sending campaigns to a properly segmented engaged list, you should be targeting 45% or above as your minimum in 2026. 50% plus is where you want to be, and if you're consistently hitting

1:4260%, you're in a really strong position. If you're looking at your overall account open rate in Klaviyo, and it looks low, that number is almost always dragged down by unengaged contacts sitting in your Klaviyo account. So, that's not the real number. Your real number is your open rate on engaged segments only. That's the metric that tells you how healthy your email program actually is. Now, here's what most e-com brands don't realize about open rates in 2026 because it's not just about

2:13avoiding the spam folder anymore. There's a second problem that's quietly killing revenue and that's the promotion step because Gmail's AI system has gotten significantly more aggressive about filtering brand emails into the promotions tab. And promotions is not the same as the primary inbox. Your email is technically landing in the inbox, but the visibility is just dropping. Your revenue will be dropping, your click rates will drop, and people just check the promotions tab far less than the primary inbox. So, the goal in 2026 is not just staying out of the spam folder, it's maximizing the primary inbox placement. And the way you do that is by making your emails feel like less

2:57marketing and more like something a real person sent to another real person. So, ask yourself this before you write any email. Would a friend send this subject line to another friend? And if the answer is no, then Gmail's AI sees it as promotional. It's that simple. And here's something that doesn't get talked about enough. Open rates are not just a deliverability metric. They're simply a content metric. So, every time that you you send an email, your email subscriber makes a split-second decision about whether to open your email or not. And that decision is based largely on their past experiences with your emails. So, let's say your last 10 emails they got

3:38from you were all discount blasts and product promotions, they've learned that your emails are only worth opening when they are in the mood to buy something, which means that every other email you send to them gets ignored by default. So, that's the training problem. And it's also why some e-com brands can fix their technical setup perfectly, they can clean their list, do everything right on the deliverability side, and still have mediocre open rates. Simply because their email subscribers have low expectations on what's coming in your emails. So, the fix is to change what you're actually sending. And we covered this in depth in our email campaign

4:16strategy video, so definitely check out that video on our channel. I'll put a link in the description below. But, the short version of it is this. Your campaign calendar should pull from seven different content categories, and promotions are just one of them. The other six are product highlights, social proof, value-based content, brand content, holiday and occasion emails, and engagement emails. When you have real variety in what you send, your email subscribers stop being able to predict what's coming next. And that unpredictability is one of the most

4:52powerful drivers of open rates there is. If every email is a discount, there's no curiosity. But, if sometimes they get a myth-busting email, sometimes a behind-the-scenes look at the brand, and sometimes a founder story, and sometimes a customer review, then they start opening more because they generally don't know what's inside your emails. And it's the one most e-com brands never play. So, before we go to the next point, I just want to quickly mention that I have a free email marketing course on my website that goes deeper into all of this. It's completely free, no fluff, just practical strategy. So, the link is in the description below, so

5:31definitely check it out. Now, let's continue with the video. Okay, so we've talked about content. Now, let's talk about who you're actually sending to. Because this is probably the single most impactful change most e-com brands can make immediately. Most e-com brands, they blast every email campaign to their entire list. And this is one of the most costly mistakes you can make in email marketing for two reasons. First, inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook, they track engagement signals. So, things like your open rates, click rates, reply rates, spam complaint rates. So, when you send to your full list and a large chunk of it doesn't engage with you,

6:10Gmail and Yahoo see that and they use that signal to decide where your emails land. Not just for the unengaged people, but for everyone, including your best customers. So, by sending to your whole email list, you're actively teaching inbox providers to deprioritize your emails. Second, there is a 20/26 angle I mentioned earlier. So, Gmail's AI is now summarizing emails, grouping messages, and deciding which one deserves attention. So, if your engagement signals are weak, AI treats your emails like noise. It might collapse them into a summary or group them with other promotional content. The only way to

6:48fight that is with strong engagement. And the only way to get strong engagement is to send to people who actually want to hear from you. So, the fix is to send campaigns to engaged subscribers only. In Klaviyo, that means building a segment of people who have opened or clicked an email from you within the last 30, 60, or 90 days, [music] depending on your list size and current deliverability situation. So, here's the exact segmentation framework we use. First of all, you build out four engaged segments: 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. For each one, you want to include anyone who has opened or

7:26clicked an email, been active on your site, or placed an order within that window. If your open rates are currently below the 30%, you want to start by sending to your 14-day engaged segment only. You want to send three campaigns a week for 2 weeks. After that, you check your open rates after those six cents. If you're hitting 50% or above, you can now expand to your 30-day segment. And you keep expanding gradually as long as your open rates stay strong. So, every 2 weeks you analyze the previous results and based on that you can determine if you're going to expand the segment until you reach your 90-days engaged segment,

8:03which should be your bread and butter. And this process works because you're essentially retraining inbox providers to see your emails as wanted content. And when a high percentage of recipients are opening and clicking, Gmail's algorithm starts rewarding you with better inbox placement. And while we're talking about segmentation, we need to talk about list cleaning as well. Because a lot of e-com brands are paying for a huge Klaviyo list and getting a revenue from maybe 10 or 15% of it. So, before you start sending to engage segments, you want to suppress the people who are clearly never going to engage with you anymore. So, here's specifically who to remove. First of

8:42all, anyone who hasn't opened, clicked, or been active on your site in the last 180 days and has received at least five to 10 emails from you during that period. They are not coming back, I can promise you. Second, anyone who has added to your list at least a year ago but has never received a single email from you. Also, anyone who has ever marked your email as spam, and this one is especially important because spam complaints are one of the heaviest signals email providers use to damage your sender reputation. Next up, anyone with a hard bounce, and a hard bounce means the email address doesn't exist or

9:18permanently rejected your email. So, there's like literally no reason to keep these contacts. And also soft bounces that have happened four times or more, these should also be suppressed. And I know this all sounds scary, especially if this means that your email list goes from 50,000 subscribers to 20,000 subscribers. But trust me, a smaller, cleaner list that engages is always going to outperform a large, bloated list that doesn't. And you'll save money on your Klaviyo bill at the same time as

9:47well. Next up is your technical setup. Now, this won't fix low open rates, but you do need to have it correct because if it isn't correct, everything else you do will be less effective. So, there are three things that need to be in place. First of all, you need a branded sending domain. And this is a non-negotiable rule nowadays. So, if you're sending from Klaviyo's shared infrastructure, you're basically sharing a sender reputation with thousands of other e-com

10:13brands. And that's not what you want. So, you can set up your own branded sending domain in Klaviyo. It's super straightforward, and Klaviyo has a full step-by-step guide in their help center. So, definitely check it out right now. Second, you also want to make sure that your default sender email address comes from that branded domain. So, if your domain is your brand.com, your emails should be sent from something like hello@yourbrand.com or founder@yourbrand.com,

10:40and not just some generic address. Third, set up a DMARC record. And this is one of the things that most e-com brands are missing. DMARC stands for domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance. And without getting too technical, it basically tells inbox providers that your emails are legitimate and haven't been tampered with. So, if you want to know how to set this up, check out our full email

11:04deliverability tutorial on my channel. It'll show you exactly what steps to follow, and I'll put a link in the description below. Now, let's talk about something that most e-com brands don't know about yet. Gmail's AI, Gemini, is now actively reading and interpreting your emails. And if your email is mostly images with very little live text, Gemini has very little to work with because it cannot read what's inside the images. It cannot understand what the email is about and when I can't understand your email, it's more likely to deprioritize it, which will lead to low open rates. So, here are the specific changes you have to make to

11:43your emails right now. First of all, you have to write proper alt text for every single image inside your email. So, the alt text should clearly describe what the image shows because this will give Gemini the context even if it can't read the actual visual. Next up is to use Klaviyo's built-in product blocks instead of designing product sections as images. Live product blocks are readable and image-based product sections are not. Next up, use live text for your top

12:10bar offers instead of a designed image. So, if you have a banner that says free shipping over $75, that should be live text, not a graphic. Next up, same, include live text in your foot area. So, product category links, support information, loyalty program details, all of this gives Gemini something to read and it helps understand that your email is relevant and useful. The next big tip is to include plain text emails regularly. So, one to three times a month you want to send a plain text email because this basically shows Gemini that you're showing a real one-to-one email that it can fully understand. It's fully deliverability-friendly and it often

12:48performs really well because it stands out from everything else in the overcrowded inbox. [music] So, I'm definitely a big fan of including plain text emails in your campaign strategy and also in your flows. Now, finally, we can talk about subject lines. Not as the primary fix, but as the finishing layer on top of everything else that we already discussed. And the most important thing I can tell you about subject lines in 2026 is this. If your subject line sounds like marketing, Gmail will treat it like marketing, which means it goes to the promotions tab. So, the shift you need to make is toward conversational, natural-sounding subject lines that look like they could

13:26have come from a real person. So, things like lowercase, no excessive punctuation, no screaming about sales and discounts. So, simply ask yourself, would a friend send this subject line to another friend? And if the answer is no, you simply want to rewrite it. And beyond that, the way to improve your subject lines is through AB testing. And the right way to run subject line test is to test meaningfully different angles against each other and not just minor variations. So, for example, you want to test curiosity-based versus direct. You want to test a question versus a statement. Test short versus long. Test personalization with a first name versus

14:05no personalization. Run the test, let it collect enough data to be statistically meaningful, and record what wins. And over time, you'll build up a real picture of what your specific audience responds to. And one thing worth mentioning, the preview text that shows up next to your subject line in the inbox is essentially a second subject line. And most brands, they still ignore it or leave it as the default first line of the email, which is almost always something like, "Hey, view this email in your browser." So, that's a wasted opportunity. So, write your preview text intentionally to complement the subject line and give people a second reason to

14:42open your email. So, to [music] recap, low open rates are usually caused by three things working against each other at the same time. So, content that trains subscribers to have low expectations, sending to unengaged people who drag your deliverability down, and a technical or design setup that makes it easy for Gmail to treat your emails as promotional noise. Fix all three of those together, and you

15:06will see open rates move meaningfully. Cuz if you just fix one of them, you'll see some improvement, but not the full picture. Now, here's something to keep in mind. Even if you get your open rates to 55% or 60%, it only works as long as you have a healthy, growing email list to send to, because every email list shrinks over time, simply because people unsubscribe, disengage, and just move on with their life. So, if you are not bringing in high-quality new email subscribers consistently, your results will slowly decline, no matter how well everything else is working. So, if you want my team to build and manage the

15:42full email and SMS system for your e-com brand, the things like flows, campaigns, segmentation, list growth, deliverability, all of it, check out the link in the description and book a free call with me. During that call, we will look at what you currently have, we'll find the biggest gaps and opportunities, and we'll show you what's realistically possible in your case. And right after this, go watch my next video where I show you how to build a high-converting signup form in 2026 using a layout, because once your operate are solid, fastest way to compound your results is to keep feeding your email list with new subscribers who actually want to hear

16:18from you. So, I'll see you in that video.