← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
The One Question That Increased His Open Rate by 10% (Justin Welsh)
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Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. Today we are back with another teaser episode from the 30 Days of Growth that is going on right now. We are only halfway through, so if you are missing out on these every day, I highly suggest you go to 30daysofgrowth co to sign up. And if you refer just one person to that newsletter, you will get access to the full private podcast feed. You've now listened to about three of these episodes, but we have all all 30 coming at you in that private podcast feed and I would love to see you over there. I hope you enjoyed this one. Today we are talking about the one question that increased Justin Walsh's open rate by a whopping 10%. Spoiler alert. That ended up with him getting more than 17,000 extra people opening his email. Can you imagine what an extra 10% of people opening your emails could do? All right, hope you enjoy this one. Welcome Back to the 30 days of growth. Today is day 14, the one question that increases open rate by 10%. How? One question leads to hundreds of replies in a content calendar that practically writes itself. As your list grows, sometimes engagement metrics steadily decline. Justin Welsh saw that same thing happening. His open rate was stuck around 51%, which is honestly still better than most. But he knew something was off. So he tried something super simple but wildly effective. At the bottom of every Saturday essay that he wrote, he started asking readers one open ended question. Something conversational tied to whatever he had just written about what's holding you back from X? Or what would you add to this? The kind of thing you can answer in two sentences without thinking too hard. It sounds simple, right? But I couldn't believe the results. Every week he started getting 300 to 500 replies. His open rate climbed from 51% to 61% over the next few months and his referrals to the newsletter jumped by more than 20%. Here's how Justin did it. Every week he asks one question. It sits at the very end of the essay, right where you'd normally put the sign off. The question is always open ended and always tied to the topic of the essay. Here is a recent one he said. So here's my question for you this week. Where in your life are you rushing because you feel behind? And what would you change if you stopped comparing your timeline to someone else's? We have a screen capture of this if you click over to the link in the description, but that is essentially what he was asking. Number two, he wants freeform text replies. Justin is going after specific language, also known as Voice of Customer Research. He wants to see how his readers are actually describing their problems in their own words, with all the weird phrases, Hedges, half rants, the stuff you can't get from a multiple choice question. He then has Claude, an AI tool, help him bucket the responses into themes. Reading 300 to 500 replies by hand every week is basically a part time job, and I don't know any creator with that kind of time. So Justin has asked Claude to help him curate those recurring themes and pulls out certain questions his audience keeps asking. What used to be unscalable is now maybe an hour on a Saturday afternoon. Fourth, he writes the next essay straight from the themes. This is the part I love. His editorial calendar is basically whatever his readers told them they're stuck on. This week his audience is writing the newsletter with him. They just don't know it. Or maybe they do now. Why it works well, relevance is everything in email. When a reader sees your subject line and feels like, ooh, this is for me, they're going to open, they're going to engage, and they're going to answer your question. Email feedback loops can be slow. You send something, stare at the open rate two days later and guess why it may have gone up or down, and you kind of create a story in your mind about what happened. But Justin's loop is way tighter. He asks questions, people answer, he then writes about those things and then they open. It compounds weekly and the metrics move with it. Which is probably where the 20% referral bump is coming from too. Because engaged readers share insanely valuable content. The AI piece is what helps this hold. At scale, you can probably read 20 replies a week, categorize them in your head and come up with some ideas for content. But if you got 500 replies to your inbox, that would probably break you. Justin's AI set up scales with his list instead of buckling underneath it. So he's able to take these large amount of replies and do something valuable with them instead of just reading a few and hoping that he's getting the best content from them. The results, as we mentioned, open rate climbed 10%, up from 51% to 61%, which at 175,000 subscribers, which is where he's at, I did the math, that's an extra 17,500 people opening his emails. 17,500 people opening his emails. That's crazy. I had to repeat it. His referrals are up more than 20% and he's getting 300 to 500 examples of freeform Replies from his actual readers every week. That is a content input that is just steady and it has downstream effects of helping with deliverability and open rates and people replying. That all helps make the open rate go up. So how can you implement it? Well after sending this one I got some replies that people said this is too simple, this is a classic thing. And I'm like cool because I only see very few people actually doing this. So yes, it's the power is in the simplicity. So don't discount this one. But how you can implement it? Simply ask an open ended question after the next edition of your newsletter. Keep it conversational and tied to the topic that you just wrote about. You're going for a reply, not survey data. I think this is important. So many of us are trying to scale this and just ask very simple things. I think that works well in a welcome email. I think in a newsletter you want those heavy, hefty replies from people so you can understand how you can help them. Step two Put the question somewhere visible. The last paragraph of the body of the text not buried somewhere in the footer. Step 3 Read as many of the replies as possible. Yes, AI can help pull out themes, but you are still human and you are still superior. So listen for language and emotion and themes that you're finding from these phrases people keep repeating. They might jog some content ideas for you. Next, keep a running doc of those themes. If the same topic shows up from three different people or more, that's probably a good sign that you can create content around that. Step 5 if the volume becomes unmanageable, you can use Claude or ChatGPT to help you resurface those themes Again. I still think there should be a human here somewhere in this and pulling out themes that you're seeing that maybe AI is missing. And then number six just write your next essay from some of those replies. See if you can answer questions from people of where they're stuck or what they need help with. Include exact quotes of what they had replied to you with and you're going to essentially make them feel like you wrote that for them, which you did. Tools for this one super simple. Your inbox Claude if you really want to pull themes at scale and then just a simple notion page or Google Doc to keep track of those. Writing about what your readers want sounds super obvious. The hard part is knowing what they actually want in their own words. Every week Justin broke that problem down to one question. When your writing lines up with what your audience cares about, open rates go up. Referrals go up and growth stops. Feeling like you're pushing a boulder uphill? You can follow Justin Welsh over on LinkedIn or subscribe to the Saturday Solopreneur newsletter at JustinWelsh Me. I'll see you tomorrow.