(Tim snores)
(bells chiming)
- Junk folder.
(Tim snores)
(bells chiming)
Promotions tab.
Oh, (mumbles) report for spam.
Have you been having nightmares about your email open rate?
Well, fear not (mumbles).
Tim from digital marketing agency Exposure Ninja here
to give you some help
with how to increase your email open rate.
(dramatic music)
(logo whooshes)
So let me guess, you've been sending out your emails.
A few years ago you were getting like 30, 40% open rate,
and then you started to notice that drop to maybe 20%.
Sometimes now when you send out emails
you're getting like 10, 15% open rate.
Click-throughs are through the floor.
Try saying that five times
with a mouthful of promotions tab.
And you're thinking,
"What's going wrong?
"Or what am I doing wrong?
"Why is no one reading my damn newsletters?"
Well, fair enough.
We're gonna talk about how to craft compelling emails,
and how to write killer subject lines
which get your emails opened, read and acted on.
Let's go.
Okay, so email open rate is really important.
But if you're not getting your emails opened,
then they can't be read,
and if they're not being read they can't be acted on,
so the whole thing can feel a little bit pointless.
And I should also say
that we're talking here about business emails.
So if you're sending emails to your friends
and they're not opening them, that's another problem.
Actually, it's not though.
Because here's the thing.
When you send an email to your friend,
you write in personal language,
you write as if you're writing to an individual.
But often when we're writing a business broadcast email,
the tendency can be to go to broadcast email mode,
and you get things like,
"Welcome monthly subscribers to the monthly newsletter.
"In this month's newsletter we're gonna be talking about
"the latest news and offers from business court
"and the new soil pipe installed in the warehouse."
And it's just totally boring.
So what we really need to do is reset our expectations
about how our emails are being received.
But first, a quick game.
Now I've found that there's two types of people out there.
There are the inbox zero people like my wife,
who has to finish the day with no emails in her inbox.
And then you have the folk like me currently sitting on,
(Tim chuckles)
716,336
unread emails
who have achieved
what I like to call notification numbness.
Which one are you?
Do you like to have that really clean, empty inbox?
Or are you just completely immune to it
and your inbox is a little bit like a Twitter feed?
Now, of course, that was just a fun exercise.
I mean, fun is subjective.
But really the point is to get into the mindset
of our audience,
when we're creating our email.
It can be all too easy to fall into the trap
of thinking that this is how people are reading our emails.
"Oh, an email from Exposure Ninja.
"Let me get my laptop in my beautiful white kitchen.
"Let me just grab a cup of coffee
"and let me just sit down
"to give it my full undivided attention
"for as long as it needs.
"Said no, whenever."
Instead, here's what's more likely happening.
Your email recipients are on the toilet
flicking through their phone,
in comes an email.
Now in that moment they're asking themselves,
"Where's the good stuff and what can I safely ignore?"
These people are in pure deletion mode.
If they're inbox zero folk,
they're just gonna be deleting it.
Or if they're the notification numbness people,
they're gonna be ignoring it.
But we've got to appreciate
that people are only going to interact with your email,
if there is enough perceived reward in the subject line
and the relationship that they have with the sender.
So first the email subject line.
Here's a rubbish one.
This is from Six Restaurant
which is at the top of Trump Bridge.
Fantastic restaurant, amazing place, highly recommended,
but the email's terrible.
Here's the email.
So I can see that the sender is Six Restaurant and.
and then it's been truncated by Gmail.
And then the subject line is "We are award winners!"
Think about it.
I don't care.
That's good for you, but what does that mean for me?
Imagine the person on the toilet,
"Oh Six Restaurant have won an award."
Giver.
Now this is not just, "ah, it's not great."
This is actually negative.
Because most of us use email systems like Gmail
that have learning modes built into them.
And these learning modes are designed
to help us be more efficient with our emails.
So if for example,
if you stop responding to a particular email
you might see it moving into the Promotions tab.
And then eventually you will get a notification
at the top of your email that says,
"Do you want to unsubscribe to Six Restaurant?
"Because you haven't opened their emails in a while."
So, we've got to get out of this mindset,
not just because it's neutral,
but actually because it's potentially damaging.
This is a sort of purely promotional,
no benefit implied email
that actually reduces our open rates
significantly over time.
Now, just to contrast this approach,
I want to share
some of the most effective email subject lines that
we've used at Exposure Ninja over the years.
So what I did to compile this list,
was look through our broadcast emails
and see which ones got the highest open rate.
So I'm gonna share them with you now on the screen.
"An idea".
"Asking for your advice."
"Re: Video".
"If your site has lost ranking since August, EAT this".
My personal favourite,
"Please don't lie to my wife."
"Sitemaps May Not Be Glamorous BUT You Need one".
Okay, what do we notice about those emails subject lines?
Actually with the exception of the Sitemaps one,
which maybe doesn't follow this rule too much.
But the others, are all designed to arouse curiosity.
They're broad enough
that you feel like you have to click on them
or at least read the first couple of lines of the email
to find out what they're about.
But they're also potentially personal.
And that makes them very difficult to delete.
If someone drops you a personal email saying,
"Hey, I've got an idea for your business.
"Like, what do you think of this?"
Do you ignore that?
Or do you open that?
Well, you probably open it,
because that might have been a personal email from someone,
and you would appreciate their time,
and it would feel rude.
We are conditioned to reply to emails that are to sent us
on the hall.
Now, excuse me,
while I disappear into the world of direct response
for just a minute.
Now, excuse me while I disappear in some marketing history
for just a minute.
There's a great guy called Gary Halbert.
Well, he was a great marketer called Gary Halbert.
And Gary Halbert was into direct response,
and in particular direct mail.
So he would send out a lot of mail for his clients.
Now he had this concept of the A pile and the B pile.
And the story goes like this.
When someone receives some posts, they have two piles.
These might be literal piles
or they might be metaphorical piles.
They have the first pile,
which is the personal communications,
the stuff they have to read.
And then they have the B pile, which is everything else.
So it's the junk that can be safely ignored.
And the illustration goes
that people are opening their mail over the bin, right?
So they're opening it
and they're deciding, "Do I need to read this?
"Or is it B pile?"
In which case it goes in the bin.
Now Gary's goal with his direct mail campaigns
was always to get in the A pile.
So to make it look sufficiently personal
that people felt they had to open it.
So I would encourage you to take this approach
with your business.
Now you might be thinking, "Yeah, but we're B2B.
"This really wouldn't work for us."
(Tim claps) Hold on.
So is Exposure Ninja.
We are B2B. We use exactly this approach.
Remember that when you're writing an email
to a business customer or a business lead,
you're actually not.
There is no business that receives email.
The only entities that receive email are human beings
and you are still writing to a human being.
When I send McDonald's an email, which I really don't do,
but let's say that I was to send McDonald's an email,
there is not some big McDonald's robot
in the shape of two golden arches
That's receiving these emails
and processing them in a business-like manner.
These emails are going to an individual.
So they are making exactly these same judgements
A pile, B pile.
What do I read?
What can I safely ignore?
So remember, the job of your email subject line
is to get your email read.
That is it.
The email subject line is not there to sell people
on the thing that you're promoting in the email.
The job of the subject line
isn't to sell people on your business.
That's not it at all.
It is a headline designed to get your email read.
Then the email copy is where you communicate the message.
So let's talk about email copy.
And in particular, the first couple of lines of email copy
and the formatting that you use in your emails,
because this is absolutely crucial.
Let's say that you've just received an email
from Exposure Ninja that says,
"Please don't lie to my wife."
Okay, you're like, "Oh, okay."
Particularly if you're male, you're like, "Okay."
Click on it,
then what happens.
Well, now we've got a switch to do.
I've got to show you how that subject line
was relevant to the message in the email.
Otherwise it's just clickbait.
And then I've got to switch
and we've got to talk about the real topic of the email.
Okay, we're gonna play a game.
Second game of this video. Your spoil.
The goal of this game is to work out
whether you can safely ignore these emails
or whether they might be interesting and relevant to you.
Are you ready?
Contestant number one.
Firstly, trouble viewing this message? Click here.
What does that tell us?
And Gmail promotions.
This is not a personally written email.
This can safely be ignored.
Let's look at the intro.
"Hello, timispractising!"
So they've just taken the first part of my email address,
they haven't even got my name.
"The following items on your wishlist are on sale."
Okay, so there's a sort of implied relevance there
because I mean, I guess these things are on my wishlist.
What wishlist that is I have no idea,
but this is a dreadful email.
Very safe to ignore, complete fail.
Here's another one.
I love this one.
"People like you are searching for..."
So what are they saying here?
Well, they're basically saying,
"You're a generic human unit with certain characteristics.
"We've just typified you and put you in a blob
"with all these other morons, just like you.
"And based on your characteristics and behaviour
"here's some stuff that you might like."
Utter, utter, utter garbage.
Here's another variation on that, by the way.
"You asked...
"So we got this Facebook & website chatbot
"back on a "One Time" deal for you.
"It will be monthly very soon."
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
I did not ask,
"you asked" is a mass message to a huge broadcast of people.
Don't treat your email subscribers like this big crowd.
When you're in a crowd or a gig,
you know that you're in a crowd.
When you're in a crowd getting emails,
you don't know you're in a crowd.
This is a personal communication method.
So don't talk to people,
as if they're some kind of big audience.
"People like you".
"You asked"
"Lots of you have been asking..."
Garbage. Kill it, rubbish, absolute junk.
So, when you're writing an email,
talk as if you're talking to one person. Be personal.
That's how email works.
That's why you have a higher open rate from your friends,
than you do when you're just broadcasting out
into the world.
Here's a great one.
"Hi Tim.
"Doesn't it seem odd that we're already sitting comfortably
"into February,
"when it only felt like New Year's Eve last week?
"We certainly think so.
"We have been busy these last few weeks
"and today wanted to highlight a few things to you."
Okay, let me stop you there.
Who cares?
Would you write it to a person?
Would you write this to an individual?
Absolutely not.
This is pure broadcast mode.
So if you wouldn't write it to one person,
don't write it to 50,000.
Fail.
What about this one?
"Hey Tim.
"On Friday afternoon at 4:00 pm
"I'm running a brand new (and free) online training
"where I'll be walking you
"through the simple three-step marketing campaign,
"I recently used to get:
"1400 new leads, 123 new customers 78K in sales.
"All with zero ad spend!"
This is pretty good.
It's personal, it is short, it's to the point.
We like.
What about this one?
"Have you seen this man, Tim?
"Chances are you have
because he's been seen
"well over 3 million billion trillion 700 squillion times
"and counting, in just 18 months.
"The one and only Jay Shetty!"
It's reasonable.
It's a mass broadcast, but there's enough personality.
And it feels real enough that actually you would read this.
We like.
Now, the other thing that you might notice
about these personal emails,
is that they come through in what looks like plain text.
So they are written just as if you were writing
to one of your friends.
Now, what you'll tend to find
if you adopt this approach,
is that firstly, your emails will be much more reliant
on the message and the copy.
If you're writing in this way
then what you're not gonna be doing,
is just sending out a newsletter full of just stacks
of images and links to blog posts.
That's not the sort of thing
that people tend to engage with anyway.
So that's okay.
But the second thing that will happen,
is you'll notice that you find yourself,
less in the Gmail Promotions tab.
As soon as you start richly formatting your emails,
then it looks like a promotional email,
because your friend doesn't send you an email that says,
"Hey, Tim is practising .
"Here are the items on your wishlist that are on sale."
Now, obviously plain text emails aren't right for everyone.
We wouldn't expect an email from Amazon to say,
"Hey Tim, it's Jeff here.
"I've got some recommendations for you
"because I was looking through our user stats
"and I noticed that you bought a fantastic book called
"How To Get To The Top Of Google in 2021".
That would just be weird.
So obviously there are restrictions to this.
And for many businesses, for example, e-commerce
if they don't have a personality
or a figurehead at the front of the business,
then taking an HTML route can make a lot of sense.
But if you want to increase your open rate
and you want to maximise the chance of engagement
with your emails, then usually we've found,
taking a kind of plain text approach is the way to go.
All right.
So here's some more tips for writing your emails.
Now remember, if you can write your emails
in a way that keeps people opening them,
that's gonna improve your open rate,
and it's also gonna give them
more chance of landing in the primary inbox
of your recipients.
So, first up, write in a personal style.
Remember, always write your mass broadcast
as if you're writing to a single person.
You might need to choose a character in the business.
For example, at Exposure Ninja the character is Tim.
So, Tim will write the kind of mass broadcast emails
most of the time.
And it gives people a chance to build a relationship
with an individual character in the business.
If you follow a digital marketer then Ryan Deiss
was always the character at the front of that.
People know Tesla, people know Elon Musk.
It's much easier for people to build a relationship,
and I don't mean like a close personal relationship,
but I mean, a perceived close personal relationship,
with a person rather than just a company.
So if there is a character
or if there is a central figurehead
that you can use in the business,
it's a good idea to write from that,
so that you can build a bit more of a personal relationship.
So I hope that has helped.
I hope that's given you some ideas
for your email subject line and also your email copy
and the style of the emails that you're sending out.
I actually had a great question from someone this week
where they said my email open rate has gone down.
It started at 20%, it is now 10%.
And nobody is using the free voucher
that I send out each week in my email.
I said, "okay, well, you're sending out
"the same voucher every week.
"What else are you sending in this email?"
Well, it's basically a list of all the stuff
that we have in stock.
You know the obvious issue with that is,
nobody's gonna open the same email that's sent every week.
And if there's no personality,
there's no greater reason they should open it this week
than they did last week when they probably didn't open it
which explains why the open rate
is just continuing to go down.
So be personal, consider trying to add as much value
as you possibly can to your audience through your emails,
and I hope that helps.
We have other videos coming soon in this series,
about what sorts of things to send to your email subscribers
so that you can start building up that relationship
and also turn some of those subscribers
into leads and sales for your business as well.
So stay tuned for that.
Now, I also wanted to let you know that at Exposure Ninja,
we have an email marketing service
where we do this stuff for our clients i.e.
We write and construct and plan
and implement email marketing campaigns for our clients.
These emails that we write can take a few forms
from being indoctrination sequences that run alongside
and are designed to educate and inform your customers
into doing business with you,
to helping automate some of your sales pipeline follow-up
as well.
So if you're interested in working with Exposure Ninja,
we offer a free marketing plan
which you can request from our website.
So just go to exposureninja.com
and there you will see the buttons
Request your review and plan,
click on that,
fill in the bits of information about your business,
and if we think that we can help, we'll let you know.
And by the way, if you're not already,
then please consider subscribing
and turning the little bell icon so you get notifications,
when we post the later videos in this series.
Please also drop us a comment.
I'm curious to know what's a real turn off for you,
in email subject lines?
Let us know in the comments
and we can build up a bit of a database
to help other people who are doing their email marketing.
(dramatic music)
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