For small businesses trying to drive new business or build engagement with existing clients, it's essential to ramp up your email marketing game.

Sophisticated email marketing tools, including the Keap marketing automation platform, are now affordable to even microbusinesses, giving you rich insights into how leads and clients are engaging with your email content.

One of the key problems? Getting your list members to even open your emails. Average open rates vary by industry, but Econsultancy found that email open rates for small businesses typically range around 24 percent, with click-through rates around 3.4 percent. Chances are, less than one in four subscribers will open your carefully-crafted email, much less click on one of your links.

No matter how awesome your marketing email is, if it doesn't get opened, it won't do your small business a lick of good.

There are a lot of articles out there talking about how click-through rate is the most important metric of all. But I'm going to challenge that- because the fact is, the click-through can't happen unless your recipients are opening those emails.

If you are doing email marketing and people aren't opening your emails, you need to fix the problem ASAP. This article will help you increase your email open rates so you can start getting better results from your small-business email marketing.