How to Increase Your Email Open Rate

Key Takeaways

[Music] junk folder [Music] promotions tab [Music] opt-out report for spam have you been having nightmares about your email open raid well fear not maizonfo tim from digital marketing agents the exposure ninja here to give you some help with how to increase your email open rate so let me guess you've been sending out your emails a few years ago you were getting like 30 40 open rate you started to notice that dropped to maybe 20 sometimes now when you send out emails you're getting like 10 15 open rate click throughs are through the floor try saying that five times with a mouthful of promotions tab and you're thinking what's going wrong what am i doing wrong why is no one reading my damn newsletters well fear not we're gonna talk about how to craft compelling emails and how to write killer subject lines which get your emails opened read and acted on let's go okay so email open rate is really important but if you're not getting your emails opened then they can't be read and if they're not being read they can't be acted on so the whole thing can feel a little bit pointless and i should also say that we're talking here about business emails so if you're sending emails to your friends and they're not opening them that's another problem actually it's not though because here's the thing when you send an email to your friend you write in personal language you write as if you're writing to an individual but often when we're writing a business broadcast email the tendency can be to go to broadcast email mode and you get things like welcome monthly subscribers to the monthly newsletter in this month's newsletter we're going to be talking about the latest news and offers from business corp and the new soil pipe installed in the warehouse and it's just totally boring so what we really need to do is reset our expectations about how our emails are being received but first a quick game now i've found that there's two types of people out there there are the inbox zero people like my wife who has to finish the day with no emails in her inbox and then you have the folk like me currently sitting on 716 336 unread emails who have achieved what i like to call notification numbness which one are you do you like to have a really clean empty inbox or are you just completely immune to it and your inbox is a little bit like a twitter feed now of course that was just a fun exercise i mean fun is subjective but really the point is to get into the mindset of our audience when we're creating our email it can be all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this is how people are reading our emails oh an email from exposure ninja let me get my laptop in my beautiful white kitchen let me just grab a cup of coffee and let me just sit down to give it my full undivided attention for as long as it needs said no one ever instead here's what's more likely happening your email recipients are on the toilet flicking through their phone in comes an email now in that moment they're asking themselves where's the good stuff and what can i safely ignore these people are in pure deletion mode if they're in box zero folk they're just gonna be deleting it or if they're the notification numbness people they're gonna be ignoring it but we've got to appreciate that people are only going to interact with your email if there is enough perceived reward in the subject line and the relationship that they have with the sender so first the email subject line here's a rubbish one this is from six restaurant which is at the top of trent bridge fantastic restaurant amazing place highly recommend it but the email's terrible here's the email so i can see that the sender is six restaurant and and then it's been truncated by gmail and then the subject line is we are award winners think about it i don't care that's good for you but what does that mean for me imagine the person on the toilet oh six restaurant have won an award giver now this is not just uh it's not great this is actually negative because most of us use email systems like gmail that have learning modes built into them and these learning modes are designed to help us be more efficient with our emails so for example if you stop responding to a particular email you might see it moving into the promotions tab and then eventually you will get a notification at the top of your email that says do you want to unsubscribe to six restaurant because you haven't opened their emails in a while so we've got to get out of this mindset not just because it's neutral but actually because it's potentially damaging this is the sort of purely promotional no benefit implied email that actually reduces our open rates significantly over time now just to contrast this approach i want to share some of the most effective email subject lines that we've used at exposure ninja over the years so what i did to compile this list was look through our broadcast emails and see which ones got the highest open rate so i'm going to share them with you now on the screen an idea asking for your advice regarding video if your site has lost ranking since august eat this my personal favorite please don't lie to my wife sitemaps may not be glamorous but you need one okay what do we notice about those email subject lines actually with the exception of the sitemaps one which maybe doesn't follow this rule too much but the others are all designed to arouse curiosity they're broad enough that you feel like you have to click on them or at least read the first couple of lines of the email to find out what they're about but they're also potentially personal and that makes them very difficult to delete if someone drops you a personal email saying hey i've got an idea for your business like what do you think of this do you ignore that or do you open that well you probably open it because that might have been a personal email from someone and you would appreciate their time and it would feel rude we are conditioned to reply to emails that are sent us on the whole now excuse me while i disappear into the world of direct response for just a minute now excuse me while i disappear into marketing history for just a minute there was a great guy called gary halbert well he was a great marketer called gary halbert and gary halbert was into direct response and in particular direct mail so he would send out a lot of mail for his clients now he had this concept of the a pile and the b pile and the story goes like this when someone receives some post they have two piles these might be literal piles or they might be metaphorical piles they have the first pile which has the personal communications the stuff they have to read and then they have the b pile which is everything else so it's the junk that can be safely ignored and the illustration goes that people are opening their mail over the bin right so they're opening it and they're deciding do i need to read this or is it b pile in which case it goes in the bin now gary's goal with his direct mail campaigns was always to get in the a pile so to make it look sufficiently personal that people felt they had to open it so i would encourage you to take this approach with your business now you might be thinking yeah but we're b2b this really wouldn't work for us hold on so is exposing ninja we are b2b we use exactly this approach remember that when you're writing an email to a business customer or business lead you're actually not there's no business that receives email the only entities that receive email are human beings and you are still writing to a human being when i send mcdonald's an email which i really don't do but let's say that i was to send mcdonald's an email there is not some big mcdonald's robot in the shape of two golden arches that's receiving these inboxes these emails and processing them in a business-like manner these emails are going to an individual so they are making exactly these same judgments a pile b-pile what do i read what can i safely ignore so remember the job of your email subject line is to get your email read that is it the email subject line is not there to sell people on the thing that you're promoting in the email the job of the subject line isn't to sell people on your business that's not it at all it is a headline designed to get your email read then the email copy is where you communicate the message so let's talk about email copy and in particular the first couple of lines of email copy and the formatting that you use in your emails because this is absolutely crucial let's say that you've just received an email from exposure ninja that says please don't lie to my wife okay you're like uh okay particularly if you're male you're like okay click on it then what happens well now we've got a switch to do right i've got to show you how that subject line was relevant to the message in the email otherwise it's just click bait and then i've got to switch and we've got to talk about the real topic of the email okay we're going to play a game second game of this video you're spoiled the goal of this game is to work out whether you can safely ignore these emails or whether they might be interesting and relevant to you are you ready contestant number one firstly trouble viewing this message click here what does that tell us and gmail promotions this is not a personally written email this can safely be ignored let's look at the intro hello tim is practicing right so they've just taken the first part of my email address they haven't even got my name the following items on your wish list are on sale okay so there's a sort of implied relevance there because i mean i guess these things are on my wish list what wish list that is i have no idea but this is a dreadful email okay very safe to ignore complete fail here's another one i love this one people like you are searching for so what are they saying here well they're basically saying you know you're a generic human unit with certain characteristics we've just typified you and put you in a blob with all these other morons just like you and based on your characteristics and behavior here's some stuff that you might like utter arta utter garbage here's another variation on that by the way you asked so we got this facebook and website chatbot back on a one-time deal for you it will be monthly very soon wait i did not ask you asked is a mass message to a huge broadcast of people don't treat your email subscribers like this big crowd when you're in a crowd at a gig you know that you're in a crowd when you're in a crowd getting emails you don't know you're in a crowd this is a personal communication method so don't talk to people as if they're some kind of big audience right people like you you asked lots of you have been asking garbage kill it rubbish absolute junk so when you're writing an email talk as if you're talking to one person be personal that's how email works that's why you have a higher open rate from your friends than you do when you're just broadcasting out into the world here's a great one hi tim doesn't it seem odd that we're already sitting comfortably into february when it only felt like new year's eve last week we certainly think so we have been busy these last few weeks and today wanted to highlight a few things to you okay let me stop you there who cares would you write it to a person would you write this to an individual absolutely not this is pure broadcast mode so if you wouldn't write it to one person don't write it to 50 000 fail what about this one hey tim on friday afternoon at 4pm i'm running a brand new and free online training where i'll be walking you through the simple three-step marketing campaign i recently used to get 1400 new leads 123 new customers 78k in sales all with zero ad spend this is pretty good it's personal it's short it's to the point we like what about this one have you seen this man tim chances are you have because he's been seen well over 3 million billion trillion 700 and squillion times and counting in just 18 months the one and only jay shetty it's reasonable it's a mass broadcast but there's enough personality and it feels real enough that actually you would read this we like now the other thing that you might notice about these personal emails is that they come through in what looks like plain text so they are written just as if you were writing to one of your friends now what you'll tend to find if you adopt this approach is that firstly your emails will be much more reliant on the message and the copy if you're writing in this way then what you're not going to be doing is just sending out a newsletter full of just stacks of images and links to blog posts that's not the sort of thing that people tend to engage with anyway so that's okay but the second thing that will happen is you'll notice that you find yourself less in the gmail promotions tab as soon as you start richly formatting your emails then it looks like a promotional email because your friend doesn't send you an email that says hey tim is practicing here are the items on your wish list that are on sale now obviously plain text emails aren't right for everyone we wouldn't expect an email from amazon to say hey tim it's jeff here i've got some recommendations for you because i was looking through our user stats and noticed that you bought a fantastic book called how to get to the top of google in 2021 that would just be weird so obviously there are restrictions to this and for many businesses for example e-commerce if they don't have a personality or a figurehead at the front of the business then taking an html route can make a lot of sense but if you want to increase your open rate and you want to maximize the chance of engagement with your emails then usually we've found taking a kind of plain text approach is the way to go all right so here's some more tips for writing your emails and remember if you can write your emails in a way that keeps people opening them that's going to improve your open rate and it's also going to give them more chance of landing in the primary inbox of your recipients so first up write in a personal style remember always write your mass broadcast as if you're writing to a single person you might need to choose a character in the business for example it's exposure ninja the character is tim so tim will write the kind of mass broadcast emails most of the time and it gives people a chance to build a relationship with an individual character in the business if you follow digital marketer then ryan dice was always the character at the front of that people know tesla people know elon musk right it's much easier for people to build a relationship and i don't mean like a close personal relationship but i mean a perceived close personal relationship with a person rather than just a company so if there is a character or if there is a central figurehead that you can use in the business it's a good idea to write from that so that you can build a bit more of a personal relationship so i hope that has helped i hope that's given you some ideas for your email subject line and also your email copy and the style of the emails that you're sending out i actually had a great question from someone this week where they said my email open rate has gone down it started at 20 it's now 10 and nobody is using the free voucher that i send out each week in my email i said okay well you're sending up the same voucher every week what else are you sending in this email well it's basically a list of all the stuff that we have in stock you know the obvious issue with that is nobody's going to open the same email that's sent every week and if there's no personality there's no greater reason they should open it this week than they did last week when they probably didn't open it which explains why the open rate is just continuing to go down so be personal consider trying to add as much value as you possibly can to your audience through your emails and i hope that helps we have other videos coming soon in this series about what sort of things to send to your email subscribers so that you can start building up that relationship and also turn some of those subscribers into leads and sale for your business as well so stay tuned for that now i also wanted to let you know that at exposure ninja we have an email marketing service where we do this stuff for our clients i.e we write and construct and plan and implement email marketing campaigns for our clients these emails that we write can take a few forms from being indoctrination sequences that run alongside and are designed to educate and inform your customers into doing business with you to helping automate some of your sales pipeline follow-up as well so if you're interested in working with exposure ninja we offer a free marketing plan which you can request from our website so just go to exposureninjet.com and you'll see the button to request your review and plan click on that fill in a bit of information about your business and if we think that we can help we'll let you know and by the way if you're not already then please consider subscribing and turning the little bell icon so you get notifications when we post the later videos in this series please also drop us a comment i'm curious to know what's a real turn off for you in email subject lines let us know in the comments and we can build up a bit of a database to help other people who are doing their email marketing