Is Anyone Opening Your Emails? Tips To Improve Your Open Rate.
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Is Anyone Opening Your Emails? Tips To Improve Your Open Rate.
What constitutes a great email?
I’d say a great email is one that doesn’t get deleted before it’s read – or at least perused. What makes you open one email and delete the other?
One tip to improve your open rate– it’s the subject line – let’s face, it either grabs you, piques your interest or doesn’t. After that, it’s the human factor.
That’s it, that’s all.
Great email messages get a great response because they treat the recipient as a real human, with a real computer, a real interest/problem/issue and with a real wallet.
Christine Brady, christinebrady.com
Even if your email list is only 10 people – those are 10 real people who for one reason or another, opted -in to your list; ask yourself why.
Should you wait to start sending out emails until you get a bigger list?
Of course not!
One person is one person interested in hearing your message.
Communicate with them and they will continue to listen to you; pounce on them with your sales pitches and you’ll end up in the trash.
The names on your email list are real people, who just like you and I, don’t want to be treated like a dollar sign. Compelling email messages created with an actual person in mind, get great results.
Big Tips to Improve Your Open Rate
1) Messages created with no human emotion get deleted.
2) Make it me –focused. It’s all about me. I don’t care about your new product, but I care about getting more clients. I also don’t care about your webinar, but I do care about a technique to boost my web traffic.
Your subscribers care about their business. If what you are offering is not about something specific for their business, rework your content or offer.
3) Be specific with your message. Webinars about Facebook are a dime a dozen. Not that you shouldn’t do one, because they obviously work. But offer a webinar about something specific, some awesome technique that can help your customers boost their business.
Unless you are a Facebook superstar, like Mari Smith, offering a specific strategy for Facebook is much more effective than a broad angle.
4) Do something unusual. Have you done a survey lately? What about a new follow-up series? Or even better, what about an email series pushing for Twitter shares?
It’s the unusual, out of the ordinary content that gets recognized, ordinary promos are boring and quickly forgotten.
5) Leverage your content. This is something that is going to become more and more necessary as a general content best practice. With the masses pumping out barely readable content left and right, quality content is more of a prized possession than something to churn and burn.
One solution: when you find an email converted well, take that message, expand on the idea and write a blog post or create a document and share it. Or turn it into a free report. Leverage your winners and re-work the losers.
6) Ask a question of your readers. What better way to engage than to ask a question. You hear a lot about engagement on social media, but what about your email subscribers? They can be the greatest source of engagement – even greater than social media.
But the lines of communication have to be open.
Ask a question and offer something of value in return for their answers.
7) Vary your call to action. A call to action is an essential part of an email message. Never send an email message without one.
Having said that, it never hurts to change things up a bit. Do you usually send promo emails directly to the offer? Write a blog post about the offer and send them to that instead. If you normally send a link to your latest blog posts, try sending them directly to an offer.
Call to actions can be for anything and everything. But if you’ve been sending the same type messages for a while, then try something different.
8) Give them some resources. Yes, just good old fashioned resources. Sometimes the simplest emails are the most appreciated. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve found something super-helpful to you, chances are, your subscribers will too.
Recommendations like Hootsuite, the Hellobar and Greeter Band plugin are always helpful.
9) Have an opinion about your industry. The straight and narrow road is the safe way to go, but if you really want to be seen as the expert in your niche, you have to step out and make yourself heard.
In other words, whatever is trending in your area of focus, take a stance and speak up. Keep up with the hot topics, put your own spin on it and send it out.
10) Segmentation, segmentation, segmentation: Are you still hitting that “send to all” button in your autoresponder? General, broadcast emails are way outdated. The new wave is called segmentation. Segmentation means people on your list get messages applicable to only them.
Here’s how to get your segmentation started…
Send a broadcast email. The next day or so, look under your subscribers section. Go into your search section and search for link clicked (or if you just want who opened it, select opened). The results you see can all be segmented from the others because they have indicated an interest in _______ (whatever your offer was).
If you found any of this information, please leave me a comment and/or share.
P.S.