Do you want more people opening your cold sales emails?
I imagine that if you send out a bunch of cold emails
on a daily basis then the answer is,
empathetically, hell yes.
Well, thanks to some awesome data put out
by my good friends at Yesware,
we were able to increase our open rates
of our cold emails by 93%.
Seriously, these were emails that our team used
to get in front of CEOs and what we noticed
is that initially, from our first round of emails,
our open rate was at around 32%,
which was solid for a cold email.
After implementing some of the changes
that I'm going to share with you, our open rate when to 62%.
Really high and a really big growth rate,
given the audience that we were in front of.
So, what was cool is that these changes
are all really easy to implement.
This isn't like some of my other videos or content
where some of the stuff is harder to implement,
these are literally tactical ideas
that you can implement right away.
So in this video, I'm going to show you
the five cold email subject line tips
to increase your open rate by 93%.
Check it out.
Number one: keep it under five words.
This is so simple and so tactical,
but what we noticed and what the data has shown
is that as subject lines get longer and longer,
open rate goes down and down and down.
That doesn't mean to just have necessarily just one word
in your subject line, but you wanna keep it in that,
typically in that three to five words category.
Because that's where people are most likely
to be able to give it a quick look, a quick glance,
and decide are they going to open it or not.
And also, just remember,
if you use Gmail for your emails or even Outlook,
a lot of times, it gives a little preview
and if the subject line is too long,
then it starts to get cut off
and so we want to really keep
that subject line under five words.
Number two: avoid salesy language.
To some degree, it can seem obvious,
but you want to really put yourself
in the shoes of the prospect.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person
that is seeing all of the emails,
the sea of emails that they're getting
and think about what salesy language
looks like from their perspective.
Phrases like: can you chat?
That's pretty salesy, right?
It's saying, basically,
hey, can I take value from you?
Or, another example would be: Exclusive invitation.
It just sounds salesy, right?
You almost picture a guy with a sign in the street
being, like, exclusive invitation!
We want to avoid those phrases.
Any words like discount or pricing
or anything that really is going to be a tip-off
is going to cause your open rate to just depreciate,
I mean, it's just going to go way down, precipitously so.
Number three: watch out for SPAM filter words.
Now, this is one where we were actually,
we made a couple of changes,
not because we were using SPAM words,
because our subject lines were spamy,
but I'm in a space where I literally use words
like sales and opportunity pipeline
and in a different context, they come off as spamy
and so what we learned was
that we were actually unintentionally using
SPAM filter words that literally machine,
the SPAM filters are picking up
and are being, like, this is probably SPAM.
Which, in my case, it wasn't,
but we all have to be very cautious about words like:
cash or credit, act now or opportunity or sales.
These are words that, in another context,
are SPAM filter words.
And you can just Google a list of SPAM filter words
and make sure that none of the words in your subject line
or, quite frankly, in the body of your email,
have those SPAM filter words
because companies are spending more and more money
and resources on sorting out any emails
that are likely to be spam because the data shows
that when employees are getting lots of spam
and are sorting through, that is lost productivity
and it's causing them to, in some cases, miss certain emails
that could have actually been a good email
and they're missing it
because they've got so much junk in their inbox.
So companies are really spending a lot of time
using filters to make sure that spamy emails
don't get come through, so be very cautious of that.
Number four: reference a common contact.
And this isn't just common contacts in terms of people,
it could be companies, it could be something
that really familiarizes the prospect with yourself
and that's literally in the subject line.
So, if you do have some kind
of a common contact with this person,
then you wanna reference that right in the subject line
because that is going to get them,
your open rate is going to be way higher
as a result of that.
But even in some cases, it could be another organization
that maybe you both belong to,
or something that just is that common connection
that's going to dramatically increase your open rate.
When there is a common contact referenced
in the subject line, open rates sky rocket.
Now that's hard to do if you're doing canned emails,
of course, but what you can do
is personalize your emails to the point,
particularly if it's a really important
contact to get through,
your open rate will be much, much higher.
Number five: A/B split test subject lines.
This is somewhat blocking and tackling,
but I find that so many organizations don't do this.
And so an A/B split test literally means
that if you're sending out a lot of emails
over the course of a day, week, month, whatever it is,
and you're sending usually, mostly the same subject lines
there are now lots of programs like a Yesware,
there's a million plug-ins that you can use,
to understand what's the open rate of your emails
and then split test one subject line vs. another.
Because, at the end of the day,
we never know which subject lines
are going to be most effective until we actually test it.
In our organization, we have a lot of fun with this
because we'll come up with a list
of five different subject lines that we want to test
and we place bets on which ones that we think
are going to be the most effective.
And so often, it's the one that we all thought was junk,
that no one's, who would ever open this.
And that got the highest open rate
and the highest reply rate.
And so you just don't necessarily know.
Sometimes breaking the rules can help you.
Now, at the moment, I think what we just went through
is going to really work and is going to help you out,
but what I'd like to do is just take a little more time
to walk you through a couple of bonus tips
that I think are going to really
just absolutely blow up your open rates.
The first bonus is to send emails
at either 7:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m.
Now, this is a little outside of what people often do
because most people are sending emails
between nine and eleven or one and four.
And so this is when there's the most competition
for the people that you're sending emails to.
But you know what, most people are opening emails
as soon as they wake up in the morning
and most people wake up at around
six or seven o'clock in the morning,
so it's actually a really good time.
And the other side, which is 8:00 p.m.,
kids have just gone to bed, they've got a down moment,
maybe they've got a glass of wine in their hand
and they're like, yeah, I'm gonna check my email.
And suddenly they see it.
Open rate shoots way up.
7:00 a.m., 8:00 p.m.
Next bonus is test your email deliverability.
This is pretty technical,
I talked about this in one of my recent videos,
but there are ways to test the deliverability of your emails
to make sure that they're most likely to get through.
There's a website, it's a free thing, call MailTester.com
I'll make sure that that shows up right in front of you
that you go to that and you simply send them a test email
and it'll tell you, are there any issues
in terms of the deliverability of your email.
It would be devastating to spend all this time
sending out emails to find out
that your email deliverability is only at about 50%
when it could be at 90 or even 100%.
I mean, that's just devastating and very avoidable.
The last bonus is that there are no long term rules.
This is key.
Whatever is hot in cold email subject lines at the moment
is likely to not be hot in a couple of months
or in a year from now,
so you've got to constantly be testing lots of things.
Try lots of different ideas,
especially if you have the ability to split test
and to really measure the open rates of your emails,
then you really are going to be way ahead of the rules.
There are no long term rules.
So there are the five cold email subject line tips
to increase your open rate by 93%.
So I wanna hear from you,
which of these ideas did you find most useful?
Be sure to share below in the comments section
to get involved in the conversation.
And if you enjoyed this video, then I have an awesome,
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