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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2252 4 Ways to Increase Your Email Open Rates in 2023 + Free Ride Friday
00:13:39
The best email campaign in the world won’t help your business if no one reads it. So how can you make sure people actually see what you’re saying (without misleading subject lines, that is)?
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Hey o welcome to the $100 RMBA show. Business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away our Automated webinar challenge, our 30 day course on how to build your automated lead and sales machine with automated webinars. It retails for $499 over@webinarninja.com AWC or you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won or we announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's lesson, you will learn four ways to improve your email open rates in 2023. Clickbaity Subject Lines and cute emojis just don't cut it anymore. People are wise to email marketing and this is why we gotta get real. We gotta do what works so we can get our email subscribers to open our emails, read them, take action, and can't wait for the next one. That's why I thought it was so important to share with you strategies that just flat out work. They work for our business and you should start implementing them right away in yours. There's a lot of hacks out there when it comes to email open rates, but these are tried and true. These are things that actually make sense and that's why I boiled them down to the top four that really are effective. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So I started today's episode talking about all the different gimmicky ways to get people to open your emails and I want to start with this, you can't trick people and then expect them to trust you. And like you, no one likes to be fooled. So bait and switch titles, preview texts, whatever it might be, is a bad idea. Don't listen to advice that, hey, the point of the subject line is to get involved with the email, so just do whatever you can. No, the tried and true lesson that our mothers have taught us, treat people as you want to be treated is just as applicable in business. So let's make sure we don't do that. Okay, so what do we do with our subject lines instead? Well, that leads us to our first strategy, our first way to get our open rates on our emails to go sky high. The most effective subject lines are the ones that don't look markety at all, the ones that look like a personal email subject line. So when you're sending out your news broadcast, your newsletters, your promotions to your list, think about if you sent this email to your sister, your brother, a friend, what would the subject line be? Would it be the craziest thing you'll ever see this year? No, it wouldn't be that. Okay, let's be real. Even if it was a promotion and it's your biggest promotion yet, what would that subject line be to your friend? It would be probably something simple, all in lowercase maybe, and something a little bit normal, like a great deal on piano lessons. If you sold a piano course, right, how to play the piano course, it wouldn't be some over the top thing. It should be straightforward. People like, oh, this is a good deal on something. Let me check it out. If you're sending out a newsletter and you interviewed a very successful entrepreneur, maybe a mentor of yours or hero of yours, a simple personal subject line is a whole lot more effective. Something like, I interviewed my hero, had to share. This is straight to the point. It gets me curious, gets me like, okay, I know what this is about and this looks interesting. And then when I read the email, I don't feel like I've been hoodwinked, right? Like it's aligned with the subject line and I immediately know what's in it for me. And by the way, if I'm not interested in an interview or I'm not interested in a promotion or a sale, and I don't open the email, that's fine. That's treating your email subscriber the way they want to be treated. And it's better for them to have subject lines that they can know what the email's about and, you know, be able to save Themselves time and be a happy subscriber and open emails that are relevant to them. So keep it personal, keep it simple. Remember, how would you write the subject line if this email was sent to a friend? Now, one of the easiest ways to get people to open your emails is to give them a reason to open. Okay. Or give them experience that shows that, hey, your emails are worth reading. And that leads me to strategy number two, the second way to get people to open your emails, and that is actual content of the email, what you write about in the email. Why do I say that? Well, when people sign up for your emails or sign up for your list, they're probably going to read your first few emails. And based on their experience of reading those emails, they're going to open future emails. If they didn't like that experience or the experience was forgettable, they probably won't read a lot of your emails in the future. So how do you make the content of your email compelling? Something that they want to read? And this is the easiest thing you can do, right? This is the easiest advice I can give you, and it's the most effective, and that is to share stories. Share your stories, right? Every email, you should share a story that happened in your life that's relevant to the subject of the email. Let's say you wrote a blog post article about overcoming imposter syndrome. This is a great opportunity before you say, hey, read my blog post. To share a story from your own life when you struggled with imposter syndrome and maybe a breakthrough, you had. People like reading stories. This is not rocket science here, okay? This is how we're built. This is how we're wired. We love stories as human beings. This is how we understand things, we relate to things. We connect with people. Think about the last dinner you had with your friends. Think about all the stories that were shared. And the reason why I highly recommend you start inserting stories in every email is because it makes things memorable, makes people remember your story, remember what your email is about, remember you, and remember it was good, right? So the next time they see an email from you, they're like, awesome, let me open this email. The last time I opened one and read it was good. So as an exercise, share a personal story about whatever the email is about every time you write an email, so that the next time they get an email from you, they know that it's going to be worth reading and they open the email, right? Third way to get people to open your emails. This is something that I didn't make up it's something that has been around forever and that's using cliffhangers. Why do we binge watch our favorite shows on our favorite streaming services? Because every episode ends with a cliffhanger. What's going to happen next? I want to know. But if there's resolution at the end of every episode, then you're really not looking forward or you don't really need to watch the next episode. You're not yearning for the next episode. That's called a sitcom when there's a resolution at the end and that's it. And it's kind of like brainless tv, but we want people to be gripped by our emails, to be like, wow, what is the next one about? Or how they're going to get out of this jam? Or I can't wait until they explain how they solved that problem. And this is why you should end every email with a cliffhanger. You can have a resolution, meaning a solution to what you're talking about, but then you can lead them to the next topic. Start the first arc of the story right, or the first act right? And then say at the end of the email, I'll share with you how it all ends up or what happens next or what I did after that in my next email. And then you close that loop in the next email and then you end the email with a new cliffhanger. Right? You get the point. You're rewarding people for reading your emails and making it fun and entertaining and enjoyable. People love it. That's why I highly encourage you add even subtle cliffhangers, even something as simple as next week I'll be sharing with you an interview that I did with so and so where they share xyz. At least they know what's coming up. That's like at the end of an episode of a drama series and they say on the next episode of so and so show, and they show you all these clips that are gonna happen, you're like, oh man, I can't wait to check that out. Cliffhangers are powerful, so use them in your emails. It's gonna get people wanna open the next one and the next one and the next one. Alright, we went through the first three strategies. One, personal subject lines that are honest. Number two, share your own personal stories in your emails. Number three, cliffhangers. We got one more strategy to get people to open your emails in 2023. Here's strategy number four. Ask them to reply. Once a quarter, I send a short and sweet email to my email subscribers asking them to reply to the email. And it's a very simple email. It's like two lines. It says, are you still interested in learning about xyz? And XYZ is my area of expertise, which is webinars, podcasting, whatever it might be. Are you still interested in learning about xyz? If so, hit reply and let me know. What is your biggest struggle these days? That's it. That's the email. The whole purpose of the email is to get them to reply. And that's why it's short and sweet for a reason. I want them to see. Hit reply. That's all I want them to see. And yes, you're going to get a ton of emails, but you're only going to do this once a quarter, every three months. And it's great. You're going to learn from your subscribers what they're struggling with so you can build products and services and content and videos and blog posts about those topics. Amazing, right? But most of all, why do we want them to reply? Well, number one, they're engaging with you, they're seeing you as a real person and they're actually quite shocked when you actually reply to them. But second of all, when you reply to an email, especially like a newsletter or an email from a company, you send a message. You send a signal to an email provider like Gmail, for example, that this is not spam, this is not marketing. This is actually a legitimate email that I care about. So it kind of whitelists your email address and makes sure that your email as much as possible is not in the marketing folder, it's in the primary folder because you reply to it. You don't reply to people that you don't want to hear from. This is why I highly recommend you ask your subscribers to reply to you early on while they're subscribers, so that all your emails in the future are in the inbox. In the primary inbox, I should say, and not in the spam folders or in the promotion folders or anything else. If you're wondering what you should say if they're brand new subscribers, say, hey, welcome to my email list. It's good to have you. Let me know what you're struggling with right now. Reply to this email and I will reply to you. Honest. It's that simple. This is a game changer because this really gets people to see your email and actually treat it seriously. Because it's not seen as promotion, it's seen as a correspondence. And this will automatically help your open rates across the board for all the emails you Send with your email address. There you have it. There's today's lesson. Four ways to increase your email open rates in 2023 Personal Simple Subject lines, sharing personal stories, using cliffhangers. And of course, get them to reply. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Creator Wizard. Creator wizard says seriously valuable. 5 stars. Omar's dedication to this podcast over the years is absolutely incredible. So much value packed into each episode. Huge fan. Thanks, Creator Wizard. Your mission is to email me@omar mba net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership through the automated Webinar challenge over@webinarninja.com AWC. It retails for $499. Or you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now, to see if you won. It's that simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this bonus tip. If you want to increase your open rates, you got to prune your email list regularly. Every six months, we like to prune our email list, meaning we'll send out an email to people that haven't opened our emails in a while and say, hey, are you still interested in the content that we provide? If so, click this link. I've shot you a video and it's a short training or even just some motivation, right? If they click on the link, we tag them in a certain way and if they don't click on the link, we know that they're not interested anymore. They don't want you opening your emails. We just remove them from the email list. And that way I only have people that actually care about the content we're sending, making my numbers actually more accurate and my open rates a true reflection of the audience I have. Hope you enjoyed that bonus tip and I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I'll check you on Monday's episode. A very special episode. The start of a four part series that I can't wait to share with you. A lot of work has been put into this. You're going to absolutely love it. Make sure you check it out on Monday. I'll see you then. Take care.