Email marketing is a powerful way to increase sales.  We’ve seen clients increase sales anywhere from 30% to more by doing email marketing right but how do you get people to open your emails?  Because if they don’t open your emails, then you don’t get past that first step.  So let’s break down seven tips on how to do that.  

1. Segment your list
You’re going to want to make sure that your list is very targeted.  So if there’s any possible way you can break your list into more targeted lists,  this is going to be more effective.  So let’s talk about examples of this.  So if you’re an eCommerce store and you’re selling clothing let’s say,  you can potentially break your list up into the type of clothing that you sell.  So maybe men’s clothing, women’s clothing and kids clothing, for an example.  Those are going to be more targeted lists that you’re going to allow you to email those particular user groups content relevant to what they’re interested in.  Let’s talk about maybe travel.  If you send travel information,  you wouldn’t want to send somebody travel information that’s not interested in going to Mexico for let’s say.  So you’d want to segment your list out into areas of interest, places people would like to go so that you can email content to them relevant to them.  Or maybe it’s a local business, it’s a chiropractic office that does acupuncture, massage and chiropractic.  If you could break your list into those three buckets and send it to those people who are interested in those things,  it’s going to obviously be more targeted,  it’s going to result in higher open rates.  So it’s so easy to take the easy way out,  just export a huge list out of your CRM  or just set up email marketing within your CRM  and just email everybody the same thing.  That’s super easy to do and it saves time but it is not effective.  So if you can break down and target the lists more accurately and then build content that supports those user groups,  you’re going to see a significant increase in open rates.  

2. Optimize your subject line
So once you have your list develop and you have the content that you’d like to send to this group,  really think hard about some powerful subject lines that are going to motivate somebody to open the email.  And the recommendation here is to break your list into very small test buckets,  AB tests two possibly three different subject lines that you think will be effective and send it to a smaller group on the list.  Then look at the data and the one that has the highest open rate would be the subject line you’ll want to use for the remainder and the majority of the list, to get the highest open rate possible. A good example of a subject line, if you’re in the dropshipping niche would be: “Is dropshipping dead in 2020?” or another good one is: “Is dropshipping legal?“.
A couple of power tips with subject lines,  keep them short, send yourself a test on your mobile phone and make sure the subject line actually fits on your mobile phone and you can read it.  And talk to some people in your team,  maybe even some customers to gain some understanding and some ideas on what would be motivating to them to open the email so ultimately, your test of two or three subject lines that you start with is pretty good right out of the gate and then look at the data to optimize to the best subject to the rest of the list based on the results that you see.  

3. Use an email that can be easily recognised
Make sure that you’re sending your email from someone that the prospect would recognize, whether it’s an individual person’s name or your company name and your company domain name,  it should be something that they recognize or are familiar with so they know what this content is about, who it’s coming from.  If they don’t, then chances are they didn’t opt into your list.  Maybe you just uploaded a list or you just blind emailing people.  Because of a lack of trust, even if your subject  line is good, they may be hesitant to open it.  Even if they do, they’re likely to hit spam and if you have a high spam rate, you potentially could get blacklisted meaning you can’t send any emails to anyone at all – that’s a nightmare.  You want to make sure that you build your list organically,  people actually opt-in.  A smaller list to people who know who you are much better than a much larger list where nobody knows who you are.  So it’s better to send to a targeted group that’s ready for your information than just blast people on the internet.  

4. Make sure that your domain is verified
With most email marketing platforms, basically all of them,  you have the opportunity to verify your domain name.  What this is going to do is going to get to people’s inbox more frequently  at a higher rate basically.  If your domain isn’t verified  your email is likely to go directly to spam.  So people aren’t even going to see it and if they can’t even see it,  how are they going to open it?  

5. Use the prospects name in the subject line
Think about doing that or any kind of dynamic content relevant to them.  Dynamically pull that into the subject line,  these email platforms these days allow for this  so that every receiver could have maybe their name in the subject line.  So for example, if I was standing and looking outside at my house and I said something like  “wow, it’s really windy today”  to the dog, the dog probably wouldn’t react.  But if I said – my dog is name Sydney  “Wow Sydney, it’s really windy today”  I guarantee that she will look at me,  stand up and probably jog over, right?  It’s because we’re built this way to respond to our name, email subject lines is no different.  So if people are scanning through it and they see their name and it catches their eye which could potentially lead to an open. This is particularly important if you’re going to use a rather bland subject like, such as “how to make money on Shopify?“, which isn’t recommended.

6. Send your emails at the best time
Think about your audience and when are they in their inbox?  When are they sending time in their inbox?  And you want to send your email probably right before that time is.  So for example, we send most of our emails to small business owners and so for us, we send the email probably on Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe even Thursday if we had to.  Monday they’re super busy, right?  So they’re swamped, probably not going to dig into it.  But by Tuesday, they’re pretty caught up and Wednesday, they’re pretty caught up,  Thursday they’re starting to get busy again.  So really Tuesday and Wednesday are best for us.  And the best time to send it is right before they get to work.  So we try to send the emails early in the morning just before these business owners get to work so that our email is sitting in their inbox at the top of the list.  So hopefully they have time,  they haven’t been interrupted yet and they  will click it to open it.  So think about your audience, what is the best time to send the email and when are they in their inbox?  And send it just before they jump in their inbox,  you’ll see a higher open rate.  

7. Have valuable content
The email subject line and all these other tips  I talked about are really powerful to get those open started, get people opening the email.  But if the content is valuable, they will continue opening your email into the future because they know there is value there.  If a subject line is unbelievably good and enticing but they’ve seen a lot of your emails and the content has been weak, they probably aren’t going to open it.  So it really comes down to delivering valuable and powerful content on an ongoing basis so people look forward to your email almost like a goodie in their inbox, right?  It’s like your inbox is a stocking on Christmas and it’s being stuffed once a week.  This is the mindset you want to build because you’re driving so much value,  they want to open their emails and when you get to that point you’re going to see huge open rates,  huge results and increase your sales.